#corona connections

Corona Connections: Learning for a Renewed World

The coronavirus, now enveloping the world in an unprecedented health crisis, undermines economies, exacerbates all other global problems, and adds suffering to the vulnerable throughout the world. COVID-19 is likely the first of repeated pandemics to be experienced in an already frighteningly uncertain future. As peace educators, we know that we cannot deny or retreat from the fear, but take hope and action to engage in the learning we believe to be the best and most effective response to the full range of threats to our planet. This crisis is an opportunity to formulate questions that lead us into authentically new, fresh forms of learning, unprecedented inquiries, truly distinct, but still derived from those we have for some time employed in our attempts to elicit visions of and plans for a preferred world. It is time, as well, for a truly new vision. Toward the conceptualization of that vision, the GCPE is posting this series, “Corona Connections: Learning for a Renewed World.”

Human Connections Forged in Human Suffering

An overlooked element in the COVID experience is how it can lead us into reflections on the human connections that carry us through the suffering, giving us an actual physical sense of being members of one human family, capable of caring for each other, as we must if the family is to survive. This post is a vivid instance of such an experience.

Compounding Crises: Corona in Conflict Zones

Previous articles in our Corona Connections series have focused mainly on the injustices and dysfunction of global structures that have been made undeniably evident by the pandemic. In this article, we call the attention of peace educators to the fact COVID has made many of those injustices more severe.

The Alps-Adriatic Manifesto: New Politics for a Post COVID World

This Corona Connection introduces the Alps-Adriatic Manifesto, a declaration of regional trans-border collaboration and civic intention.  This Manifesto establishes “goals and processes of transcending separations and alienations that corrupt the peace possibilities in present international structures.”  We share this Manifesto as a potential learning framework suitable to a cosmopolitan vision of peace and global citizenship education.

COVID-19 The New Normal: Militarization and Women’s New Agenda in India

In this Corona Connection, Asha Hans reflects on the militarist response to COVID-19 in India, illustrating the interrelationships among the multiple “normal” injustices this pandemic has laid bare, showing how they are manifestations of a highly militarized security system. She also invites educators to begin the pedagogic imagining and structuring of a preferred future.

White Privilege: Pervasive and Perverse

In this Corona Connection, we explore how racism is deeply rooted in American culture and psyche, allowing for multiple harms inflicted through white privilege. Unless and until white Americans honestly confront and acknowledge the advantages conferred by nothing more than being born into white skin, and accept the personal and social challenge of eliminating that privilege, there can be no authentic reconciliation and social cooperation among all Americans.

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