SIG Meeting with Dr. Kevin Kester

When: October 9, 2026, noon Pacific Time, 3:00 pm Eastern Time, USA

Venue: Zoom

Talk Title: Toward a Postcritical Peace Education? Theory and Practice

Abstract: Peace education stands at a critical juncture. Profound geopolitical, economic, ecological, and technological transformations are reshaping the conditions of violence, insecurity, and peacebuilding, while decolonial, Indigenous, and posthumanist perspectives are challenging many of the longstanding assumptions underpinning the field. These shifts demand renewed attention to fundamental questions: What justifies peace education today? Whose knowledge should guide efforts toward peace and global justice? How might educators confront their own entanglement in structures of inequality and violence? And what approaches are adequate for crises that increasingly cross social, ecological, and planetary boundaries? This talk will engage these questions through critical, affective, decolonial, and posthumanist perspectives, in the process generating a postcritical approach to peace education. Rather than presenting peace education as a settled field with established theories and methods, it approaches it as an evolving intellectual and political project whose foundation must remain open to scrutiny. Acknowledging its important contributions to conflict transformation, social justice, democratic citizenship, and intercultural understanding, the talk invites peace educators to rethink the possibilities and limitations of the field in a rapidly changing world.

Question for group discussion: How might peace education respond to emerging critiques that question its universalist aspirations and Enlightenment foundations?

Book Launch

         Book Launch!

Hosted by American Educational Research Association, Critical Peace Education Special Interest Group  

Building Peace: Reflections of Eminent Educators, from Personal to Political

Dr. Syed Sikander Mehdi and Dr. Matt Meyer, Editors

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-11104-3

Date: 14 August 2026

Time: Noon 12:00 pm Pacific Standard Time

Venue: Zoom

This book fulfills a long-standing gap in the global literature on educating for peace. In documenting the reflections of the world’s leading teachers of peace, including some of the field’s founders, the book sheds light on both the process and the products that have brought the study of peace to its fifty-year mark. The examination of the dynamic connections between peacemaking, education, individual development, and widespread social change is chronicled through examples from the USA, Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Germany, Argentina, Colombia, Trinidad, New Zealand, Mexico and more, and charts the words and work of scholar-activists including the late Betty Reardon and the granddaughter of Mohandas Gandhi, South Africa’s Ela Gandhi. Together, the essays represent, in the words (from the Foreword) of United Nations University for Peace Rector Francisco Rojas Aravena, “a colossal instrument to reaffirm dialogue over force.”

Palgrave Macmillan, Get 20% off with this code: PALAUT