2024 Awardees

Annual Award Winners

Organizing for Peace and Justice Award: Stitch Buffalo

• Stitch Buffalo is a textile art center committed to empowering refugee and immigrant women through the sale of their handcrafted goods, inspiring creativity and inclusion through community education, and stewarding the environment through the re-use of textile supplies.

  We believe that our Buffalo community is richer for its diversity, full of unique possibilities, and worth celebrating.  Our future depends on how we treat one another today. We share our abundant talents and creativity as we pursue happiness, safety, and belonging.

  Among their programs is Refugee Women’s Workshop – a thriving community of women artists from Bhutan, Burma, Nepal, Thailand, Egypt, Afghanistan, and beyond who sew handcrafted goods for sale in the community. Through the creation of handcrafted textiles, each artist nurtures her artistic heritage while affirming her self-worth as a woman and a human being.

Social Courage Award: Geraldine Pointer

• On the night of July 14, 1967, Geraldine Pointer (then Robinson) was helping Martin Sostre close the Afro-Asian Bookshop on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. In the early morning of July 15th, plainclothes police and FBI agents raided the store and arrested the two, scapegoating Sostre as the cause of the city’s recent uprising.

  ​Geraldine Robinson became one of the first Black women political prisoners of the Black Power era, yet her struggle remains virtually unknown today. Any dedication to the excavation and dissemination of Martin Sostre’s legacy must also acknowledge the importance of Geraldine’s struggle and the enduring impact of state repression – a direct result of the illegal FBI COINTELPRO program – on her and her family.

  Martin Sostre and Geraldine (Robinson) Pointer’s names should have been cleared after they were framed.  Sostre, who the FBI and Buffalo Police targeted for his revolutionary ideas and radical activism, and Pointer, who was guilty by association, were wrongfully arrested and imprisoned in 1967, during the height of the Black Power movement in Buffalo. Pointer continues to fight to have her conviction vacated and to clear her name from falsified and uncorroborated arrests.

Undergraduate Thesis Award

• Nora Sweeney, Swarthmore College, “From Social Justice to Social Conflict: Reframing Abortion Access in the United States”
  • It matters how we think and talk about our lives. Our construction of social factors influences our perceptions of them and subsequent action. Hostility and hatred across the United States is often discussed using the language of “social justice issues.” This liberal framing of “social justice” tends to relegate systemic issues into individual injustices, creating a model of individual solutions with limited avenues for large-scale change. Many of these social justice issues are encompassed within Peace & Conflict Studies definitions of social conflicts. While “social justice” and “social conflict” need not be mutually exclusive, making the distinction between the frames can offer new and different possibilities for resolution. Using reproductive justice in the United States as a case study, my thesis argues for reframing “social justice” as “social conflict.” Changing how we think about conflict can change how we move through conflict.

Graduate Thesis Award

• Helal Khan, University of Notre Dame, “The Role of Regimes of Cooperation in the Well‑being of Rohingya Refugees in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Fort Wayne”
  • This dissertation examines agency, cooperation, and well-being in the context of refugee resettlement. Past studies of refugee resettlement have explored fractures, fissions, and conflicts in the complex geopolitics and economics that govern it, often citing mistrust and lack of hope among participants. Yet, millions of refugees have resettled worldwide over the past decades, becoming citizens and legal residents in their new homes. How do refugees survive, adapt and even thrive against the odds portrayed by multiple studies on refugee resettlement? This intriguing question guides my study, looking into dynamic processes and institutions underlying the growth of Rohingya refugee micro-communities in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Fort Wayne. My principal finding is that refugees pursue cooperation and hope as the primary mechanism to attain well-being in a new country, mediated by institutions such as cultural centers and faith-based organizations through place- and space-making practices. I develop two novel theoretical concepts – “the abling refugee” and “regimes of cooperation” – through this study. The abling refugee speaks to refugees’ progressive interactions with people, processes, and institutions in their resettlement locations, guided by the sense of hope undiminished through their journeys. Regimes of cooperation is a spatial behavioral concept encompassing everyday dynamics of cooperation, wherein refugee-led institutions create spaces for interaction between diverse refugees and other actors of resettlement, making cooperation an iterative, ongoing process rather than a formal or policy based exercise. Refugees cooperate to achieve well-being related to education, housing, healthcare, citizenship, and spirituality, closely supported by people and institutions that act as brokers within the larger support networks that connect related providers to their recipients. This approach to studying cooperation invites attention to the importance of everyday peace and well-being and calls for exploring their physical dimensions. It entails observing how refugees become active makers of their new geographical landscapes by accessing various spaces and eventually managing, sustaining, and developing them. The study ties cooperation, hope, and well-being as observable phenomena that people actively engage with and cultivate while seeking to move beyond the traumas of violent displacement and perils of finding homes in far-off lands.

Mini-Grants Award Winners

• Helin Unal, Clark University
  • “How Different Beliefs about Collective Victimization Relate to Support for Various Resistance Strategies,” This research project explores the relationship between beliefs about collective victimization and support for different resistance strategies. (Helin is finalizing a survey and IRB through her university)

• Dr. Kelly Macias, Independent Scholar
  • “Loungin’: Black Women’s Joy as Freedom Technology,” I had originally envisioned that the photo-elicitation part of my story circles with Black women would come from personal and historical photos I identified. But as I talked with women about the project, they volunteered to share their family photos with me. So, I now have some photos of Black women evoking joy that have been shared with me and some I have gathered through searching (the searching has also been an exciting and iterative process as I’ve discovered a number of photos in flea markets). I have upcoming virtual story circles planned for next month and I continue to have one-on-one conversations which generate learning and insights.

• Rachel Stewart, Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA)
  • “Murky Waters: Contextualizing Mercury Contamination in Oak Ridge’s Environmental History,” is still in the data collection phase but I am excited about the prospects of displaying it at the Museum of East TN History. I have taken photographs at East Fork Poplar Creek (EFPC) in Oak Ridge as well as collected historical photographs from OREPA’s archives at Wilmington College’s Peace Resource Center; collected water and soil samples from EFPC; and started recruiting interviewees. My vision is to curate a multi-media museum exhibit that tells the story of mercury contamination due to nuclear weapons production by highlighting the soil and water pollution and the stories of Oak Ridge’s who worked during the height of the Cold War.

For more information on the awardees’ projects, visit the Mini-Grants Award page.

Dear colleagues,

The time has arrived to submit your nominations for the best graduate and undergraduate student papers! Each year PJSA recognizes one outstanding undergraduate thesis and one outstanding graduate thesis/dissertation completed during the academic year (2023-2024) in the fields of peace and conflict or justice studies with the following awards:

• Best Dissertation/Graduate Thesis of the Year Award
• Best Undergraduate Thesis of the Year Award

Awardees will be honored at PJSA’s annual conference (October 24-27, 2024) and receive a $300 travel stipend to attend the conference in Niagra, New York, a waived registration fee, and a 2-year membership to PJSA!

Nomination Instructions:

• Faculty: now that the academic year is nearing its end, do you have a student whose graduate dissertation/thesis or undergraduate thesis (or senior capstone or honors paper required for graduation) was particularly outstanding and deserves recognition?
• Students:  self-nominations are accepted and encouraged!

To submit a nomination, please send the following to Pushpa Iyer, PJSA Student Awards Chair (pushpaiyer@centerforconflictstudies.org) by August 1, 2024, at 5 pm ET:

1. Student name, current email, and phone number
2. Student university affiliation, academic program, and date of completion (month and year)
3. The title of the thesis/dissertation and an abstract
4. A complete copy of the thesis/dissertation in Word or PDF
5. Your name, email address, and university affiliation (as the nominator)

Only nominations with a complete application will be considered.

We look forward to receiving your nominations!

Pushpa Iyer
Student Awards Chair, PJSA Board
pushpaiyer@centerforconflictstudies.org