Members of the Social Reconciliation, Just Peace, and Development Research Group
Membership is open to all professors, doctoral students, and alumni of Saint Paul University’s Conflict Studies program who have an ongoing interest in the mission of the Research Group. Collaborators and partners of research projects associated with the Research Group may also become members.
Vern Neufeld Redekop, Director
Vern Neufeld Redekop is a Full Professor in the School of Conflict Studies at Saint Paul University, Ottawa. His involvement in training and program development has taken him to Indigenous communities in Canada as well as to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sudan, Taiwan and other countries. His theoretical and practical insights found expression in his book From Violence to Blessing: How an Understanding of Deep-Rooted Conflict Can Open Paths to Reconciliation, which included two chapters devoted to mimetic theory and scapegoating respectively and was organized around the concepts of mimetic structures of violence and mimetic structures of blessing. Subsequent research has focused on protest crowds and police, resulting in (with Shirley Paré) Beyond Control: A Mutual Respect Approach to Protest Crowd–Police Relations. Oxford University Press has published Introduction to Conflict Studies: Empirical, Theoretical, and Ethical Dimensions, which he co-authored with Jean-François Rioux. He edited (with Thomas Ryba) René Girard and Creative Mimesis and René Girard and Creative Reconciliation. Current research focuses on Spirituality, Emergent Creativity, and Reconciliation and Community Dialogue processes on Social Reconciliation and Economic Development.
Gloria Neufeld Redekop, Coordinator
Gloria Neufeld Redekop, Coordinator of the Social Reconciliation, Just Peace, and Development Research Group, received an MA in Early Christianity and a PhD in Women and Religion from the University of Ottawa. She has taught as a sessional lecturer at both Carleton University and Saint Paul University. Her publications include The Work of Their Hands: Mennonite Women’s Societies in Canada and Bad Girls and Boys Go to Hell (or not): Engaging Fundamentalist Evangelicalism. Her current research focuses on the topic of spirituality, specifically how individuals define spirituality, what it means to them to be spiritual, and the relationship between spirituality and religion.
Geneviève Parent
Geneviève Parent joined Saint Paul University in 2010 as an Assistant Professor in the Conflict Studies Program. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Laurentian University in Sudbury. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Criminology from the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on “intimate genocides” such as the atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, traumatism, transitional justice, healing and reconciliation. Her publications include “Managing Life in Afghanistan: Canadian Tales of Peace, Security and Development” (co-authored with Bruno Charbonneau) in B. Charbonneau and W. Cox (eds.), Locating Global Order: American Power and Canadian Security after 9/11 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). She is presently working on a book on peacebuilding and psychologies of peace, based upon the comparative analyses of conflict victims.
Peter Pandimakil
Peter G. Pandimakil is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Saint Paul University who teaches in the Conflict Studies and Pastoral Ministry programs. He taught for more than five years in Tanzania, has offered courses in the post-graduate program specializing in India at the University of Valladolid, Spain, and is part of the faculty at Estudio Agustiniano in Valladolid, Spain. His current research focuses on religious-cultural diversity, pluralism and human rights.
Aliaa Dakroury
Dr. Dakroury taught at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Communication from 2008 to 2012; at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication from 2005 to 2010; and Departments of Sociology and Anthropology and Law from 2008 to 2011. She is the managing editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. She is the author of Communication and Human Rights (2009), editor of The Right to Communicate: Historical Hopes, Global Debates, and Future Premises (2009), editor of The Right to Communicate, a special issue of Global Media Journal – American Edition (Fall 2008), and co-editor of Introduction to Communication and Media Studies (2008). She is the winner of the Canadian Communication Association’s 2005 Van Horne Award and has been nominated as an honorary expert by the Islamic Resource Bank (IRB), a joint project of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Her publications appear in various journals, including Journal of International Communication, Media Development: Journal of the World Association for Christian Communication, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, Journal of InterGroup Relations, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Global Media Journal – American Edition, and Journal of Culture, Language, and Representation.
Alexandra Pleshoyano
Christian Bellehumeur
Louis Guay
Lora Thacker
Marc De Kesel
Richard McGuigan
Philothee Kigeme
Nasim Abdillahi
Emilie Fort
Lauren Michelle Levesque
Sylvie Lemieux
Constance Morley
Priya Saibel
Mark Slatter
Naresh Singh
Bonnie Weppler
Luke Moyer
Pawel Mazucek
Arianna Laboccetta
Emily O’Brien
Lillian Okumu
Adli Alkhaledi
Angela Kiraly
Vlad Stamate
George Justin B. Achor
Oscar Gasana
Gharam Mahfouz
Elly Vandenberg
Robynn Collins