Workshops and Symposiums

Colloquium on Violence, Agency, and Innovation

Held in the Fall of 2015, and co-organized by Catherine Panter-Brick and Louisa Lombard, the Colloquium on Violence, Agency, and Innovation was sponsored by a Kempf award, and also part-funded by the Women’s Faculty Forum.  We hosted a series of talks, allowing Yale students and faculty to meet key academics whose ethnographic research is at the forefront of studies on conflict. 

For example, Séverine Autesserre (Columbia University) and Patience Kabamba (Utah Valley University) - two of the most prominent scholars critiquing international intervention and the dynamics of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – led a session on ‘The Failures of Peacebuilding.’  The session was moderated by Jason Lyall (Yale). 

Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, gave a high-profile address about combating violence against women and promoting gender equity.  She shared the stage with Dr. Gary Barker, Founder of Promundo, an international NGO which works globally to engage men in achieving gender equality and ending violence against women.  The high-profile event, entitled Gender and Violence: Time for Coordinated Global Action, was recorded for the MacMillan Center.

Other speakers included Henrik Vigh (University of Copenhagen) and Mike McGovern (University of Michigan), for a session on ‘Bodies and Commodities’ moderated by Maria Inhorn (Anthropology).

Violence and Health Student Working Group

The group meets around six times each semester, we discuss current research being conducted by group members, recent publications of interest and project proposals. Each meeting we invite several faculty members from across the campus to share their research and join our discussion. We welcome any students, faculty, staff with an interest in the intersections between violence and health.

A “Conflict, Resilience, and Health” international workshop was held in October 2012 at the Yale MacMillan Center.  It was led by Professors Catherine Panter-Brick and Kaveh Khoshnood, and funded by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, with support from the MacMillan Council on African Studies and Council on Middle East Studies.

International participants included Drs. Jeannie Annan (IRC), Alastair Ager (Columbia, NY), Brian Barber (Center for the Study of Youth and Political Conflict, Tenessee), Theresa Betancourt (Harvard School of Public Health), Stevan Hobfoll (Rush University Medical Center), Rita Giacaman (Birzeit University), James Leckman (Yale), Wietse Tol (John Hokpins), Michael Ungar (The Resilience Research Center, Canada), and Mike Wessells (Columbia, NY).

The “Health and Conflict in the Middle East” Symposium was held at the American University of Beirut in March 2009.  It was organized in partnership with the American University of Beirut and with support from the Yale Council on Middle East Studies.