Helena Meyer-Knapp

DISCORDANT APOLOGIES

2018 — A project that took over from the “public diplomacy” project, after a couple of grant applications in that area failed to get traction. I still think public diplomacy is an interesting avenue of work, but not mine.

Discordant Apologies explores what happens inside nation states and across international boundaries when truly massive problems arise: Fukushima, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the “Comfort Women” struggle between South Korea and Japan, the ” was the Hiroshima bomb legal?” struggle between the USA and Japan. Is “apology” even a truly international truly or is its social function very culture bound?    Discordant Apologies — Feb. 2018

POPULAR CULTURE AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

2013 — The first public presentation of plans for the project on popular culture and public diplomacy too place at the annual meeting of the Society for Values in Higher Education. I was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1986. This was a “works in progress” presentation so the only materials available from that session are slides.  Popular culture and public diplomacy

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP

This topic is a bridge between autobiographical writing and scholarship. I am one among a number of colleagues, mostly members of the Asia Pacific Network on Moral Education, who are contributors to a book about Global Citizenship, a phenomenon the book characterizes using our individual stories. My chapter centers on coming to see a kind of coherence among the many realities of the world by becoming engaged in the gardens and sense of nature. The work compares USA, South Korea, Japan and England, my original homeland. The book will appear in print in 2014 and a link to the chapter will be available in the “published work” section of this website.

2011 One reason I use the web enthusiastically is that it is more hospitable than print to images. I made a “work in progress” presentation “Cultivating the Moral Self: Comparing Japanese, US, English and South Korean approaches to the practice of making a garden” at the international meeting of the Association for Moral Education (Nanjing). Cultivating a Global Citizen Nanjing

HISTORY BECOMES HERITAGE

2012  History becomes Heritage  and the History becomes heritage presentation slides

I gave this paper at the Association of Asian Studies conference in Toronto. It served as the culminating presentation for the History Becomes Heritage project. Throughout the research period I was giving papers in a “work in progress” mode:

2010: “Museums Teaching the Histories of War and Peace: Victims and nationalists in an interdependent world.” Asia Pacific Network on Moral Education (Nagasaki)
2009: “Heritage or History? School study tours at World War II Sites in Japan, Korea and the United States,” Asian Studies Conference Japan, (Tokyo), and Fulbright Forum, (Seoul)
“The development of historical consciousness: an interdisciplinary and inter-cultural study of World War II in education today” Asia Pacific Network on Moral Education (Seoul),
2008: “The ‘Good War:’ US and Japanese schools transmit national heritage and national history.” Association for Moral Education (Indiana)

2011:  MUSEUMS IN DIALOGUE

As the history/heritage project was coming to an end, I began to reflect on how these museums presenting such different views of the world might begin to allow more integration of their perspectives. The idea was to capitalize on the reality that many museums were already creating digital pathways through their displays. People interested in contemplating the differences, say, between the bombing of Hiroshima seen from Japan and Hiroshima seen from the USA would, when touring the US National Air and Space Museum be guided using a  Mobile App shared among the museums to a digital version of the equivalent displays in Hiroshima.

The notion matured into a proposal to the US Institute of Peace. They did not fund it but the proposal lays out the rationale and design. Museums in Dialogue

The same year as I made the proposal I gave a presentation about the idea in Japan “Museums in Dialogue, Korea and Japan, Korea and the United States.” Asia Pacific Peace Research Association (Kyoto) A New Agenda for Peace  Museums and APPRA slides, a development of an earlier presentation in South Korea at Yeongwol-Yonsei Forum on Museums (Yeongwol).

MERCY AND AMNESTY

This project is on hiatus at the moment. I assume and hope I will return to it.

It began in 2001, the synergistic result of an immersion in the images all over Japan of the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy, Kannon, with my work on the UN War Crimes Trials as an element of wars ending in Bosnia and Rwanda, which led me to the Politics of the International Criminal Court 2001 as my contribution to a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar on Global Ethics, and then to analysis of amnesty and justice as the last chapter of my book DangerousPeacemakingText. The work for the book made it clear that the mercy project was larger than I had thought, and this larger project remains incomplete. Here additional elements beyond the chapter in the book.

(1) a series of images put together for several talks on the topic, mostly representative of religious icons representing mercy. These talks were mostly the result of invitations from spiritual communities so the pictures are overwhelmingly of religious representations of mercy.

I also gave a number of academic presentation on the issue. These included

2004: “Peace-Making: Iraq” Plenary Session.  Society for Values in Higher Education (Colorado).

2003: “South Africa’s Amnesty: A model pathway to peace?” Peace and Justice Studies Association (Washington).

2002: “Mercy, Justice and Peace-Making” International Society for Political Psychology, (Berlin).

(3) Parts of a grant proposal to the Generosity Project linking mercy to the human instinct for generosity. I proposed that Mercy and Amnesty might be considered state sponsored generosity. Mercy, Justice and Generous Peace

MILITARY STRATEGY AND NON-VIOLENCE

1999 king-gandhi — the essense of non-violence

International Society for Political Psychology — Berlin

Working from the assumption that the campaigns waged in support of Indian Independence and African American Civil Rights exhibited some of the characteristics of military campaigns, the thesis examined in the paper was that their non-violence rested not on the campaigners’ resistance to their own suffering, but rather on their refusal to engage in revenge.

COLD WAR — but how it began not how it ended.

2008 A Hot Button in the Cold War

International Society for Political Psychology — Paris

This is my most recent piece of writing about the Cold War. That war and ways it might end, was the topic of my dissertation: Nuclear Siege to Nuclear Ceasefire. In the dissertation I argued that the Cold War became intensely more aggressive in the late 1950s partly as a result of the new missile technologies. The events described in this paper, which took place during August 1958, were another indicator of the increase in active commitment to confrontation on the US side.