The Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs recently hosted a colloquium titled “Building Peace Across Generations,” where Lina Qtaishat, projects manager at WLR, represented the We Love Reading program at the colloquium, which brought together international scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners to discuss and identify key issues, case studies, and lessons learned related to intergenerational peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts.
Lina’s contribution to the colloquium was as a technical consultant for multiple teams from Yale University (USA), Queen’s University Belfast (UK), UPEACE (Costa Rica), and UNDP, in mapping everyday peace factors and drivers and localizing the knowledge using the Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) methodology.
Both students and practitioners engaged in participatory sessions, where they built their own maps around the concept of peace. These maps were then analyzed and presented by the team’s facilitators using graph theory indices and focus group discussions.
It is noteworthy that recent research published by the We Love Reading program utilized Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping to decolonize concepts of empowerment and life satisfaction as perceived by Jordanian and Syrian women.