Psychosocial Perspectives on Peacebuilding by Brandon Hamber & Elizabeth Gallagher

Author:Brandon Hamber & Elizabeth Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Measures

Project One workshops in Chajul were conducted in Spanish whereas those in the villages were conducted in Ixil with translation provided by a co-facilitator who was a participant in the Chajul workshop. The workshops with participants from Project Two were conducted in Spanish, with the assistance of interpreters for the three language groups represented. Although all participants understand Spanish, many are more comfortable speaking in their indigenous language. The role of these interpreters has been critical to all phases of the work described here. They are both local survivors as well as key intermediaries, shuttling between both worlds, and central to ensuring that non-Mayan Spanish speakers are able to access and understand women participants’ stories, as well as their interpretations of their experiences. While an in-depth analysis of the role played by interpreters is beyond the scope of this chapter, the authors acknowledge the centrality of this role and experiences, and are taking up this analysis within the broader research project on gender and reparation.

While each workshop included specificities required by the number of participants, the context, or language considerations, a general format was designed that allowed the authors to tease out similarities and differences, connections and disconnections, across the two projects in terms of how they situate the use of creative resources—and, more importantly, how the participants in these workshops experienced them and their effects, that is, individual transformations and seeds and/or actions towards social transformation .

The format of the workshops included an initial space for an opening ritual, ceremony or prayer, inviting participants to choose which tradition they sought to invoke. This was followed by a brief introduction of this project and the purpose of the gathering, an explanation of issues of confidentiality, a request for permission to take pictures and record the workshops and then an introduction of the facilitators. In most workshops this introduction was followed by some “warming up” exercises that engaged the body and play. A central activity in all the workshops was to ask the women to do individual or collective drawings of how they see themselves today, after their years of working together, in comparison to how they saw themselves prior to participating in Project One or Two. After making their drawings, participants posted them at the front of the room and the rest of the workshop participants were asked to say what they saw in the drawings, with the artists then clarifying what they themselves had envisioned. The discussion of the drawings included descriptions as well as elaborations, that is, the drawing became an elicitation prompt, and women described more details about themselves and women’s organising today and themselves in their communities during the war (this exercise is analysed in more detail below). The workshops also included brainstorming activities about the different creative resources in which they remembered having participated during earlier workshops, followed by small group dramatisations of favourite techniques and discussion about why they might be performed and with what effects. The methods of each workshop differed slightly (for

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