Not longer after the Israel-Hamas war started in the Middle East, a student in one of Allyson Larkin's courses at Western University put up her hand.
The professor was in the middle of a lecture on qualitative research methods, when the student said, "can we please stop, the world is falling apart."
"Why are we not talking about this? What does this have anything to do with my family in Gaza?" the student asked.
A student next to her said she was Jewish, and her family knew people who were taken hostage by Hamas. She said she was dying inside.
Larkin, a guest speaker on Friday with Darlene Bartha at Conflict: A Women’s Perspective, the Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) Stratford's International Women's Day event, said more students started raising their hand to offer their thoughts.
"One from Algeria, two from Afghanistan, two from Palestine, one from Lebanon. All women in my class that arrived in Canada as refugees or as immigrants with their families. Each had a story. I had no idea. No idea these were the people in my classroom and what they had gone through."
Larkin is chair of the department of social justice and peace studies at the university.
Also a researcher, Larkin worked in Guatamala for 12 years after a civil war there. She worked for many years in Tanzania and completed Doctoral research there working with women's groups, working with women suffering with HIV/AIDS.
The professor also spent time in Uganda through a global affairs grant to establish a network of libraries, in communities working through civil war and dictatorship. It was through storytelling that women believed they could best serve their communities, she discovered.
Larkin has a front row seat to the issues that are erupting on post-secondary school campuses. Although most of her research is focused on conflicts outside of Canada, increasingly and especially since COVID, she has seen the need for peace building and conflict transformation locally. Classes are diversified and universities are changing rapidly, she said.
"Since COVID, students are suffering from anxiety, a sense of disconnection, the roadmap that they believed their life would be travelling has changed."
Storytelling entered her life relatively recently as a researcher.
Larkin spent time at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, where youth were brought together from around the world living in areas that are historically engaged in violence or ethnic conflict with one another. They live there for two years with the idea that they are going to work together to understand their enemy through collaborative storytelling.
Larkin said it is a long and complex process including hearing about your enemy's own suffering, hearing about a sense of loss and fear, and learning to tell a story together, however painful, difficult and time consuming that may be.
She was captivated by the whole idea.
Bartha, Manager of Donor Relations and Major Gifts for the Mennonite Centre Committee, (MCC) Ontario, has travelled extensively and brings "stories of hope from projects around the world."
The impact of conflict on women is widely recognized, she noted, and can include ethnic, religious, and political conflict.
"It's not getting better, conflict is on the rise...but women write another story. Women actively resolve conflicts...they bring a life-giving and empathetic perspective."
As Bartha noted, UN research has shown that peace accords are 35 per cent more likely to succeed and be sustainable over 15 years when women are at the table for peace processes.
"Women need to be a voice at the table for peace and security because they have security for all in mind."
MCC has worked in Afghanistan for many years but had to hibernate programs after the Taliban regained control of the country, Bartha said. They are not permitting girls to attend secondary school and university, and have abolished the Ministry of Women's Affairs, a key body promoting women's rights, she noted.
But there is hope: a literacy program has started up again, which sees teenage girls taking part in learning circles using participatory dialogue education so they can learn basic literacy, child protection, disease protection, and family conflict skills.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, conflict has long existed. A local group of female peacebuilders known as the Women's Situation Room was able to de-escalate a village conflict, Bartha said. Villages were unable to work together or share land or clean water. A lack of resources led to hunger and the spread of Cholera.
"So Women's Situation Rooms were organized in each of the villages and they were trained to de-escalate the crisis, mediate, resolve conflicts and prevent violence."
Ultimately they found one thing they could agree on - the well-being of the villagers. They discussed how people could share clean water from one village while the other village would share land to grow crops.
"When women are involved in negotiation between armed groups they can help halt the escalation of conflict and reduce intercommunal tensions."
As Larkin noted, there were a lot of tears in that class at Western on that day, and three hours of raw, very real storytelling.
There continues to be a spike in hate crimes, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of racism on campuses, she said.
"I don't think it's overstating it to see, in my life I have never encountered an issue like Israel and Palestine that is so incredibly difficult to talk about. But we have for the last several months committed to meeting as a class..and to continue talking as the conflict continues."
Her students from diverse backgrounds are talking about difficult topics, which is peace building and conflict transformation, she said.
"We need new ways to tell our stories together. We need to find ways to come together in times of conflict."
Larkin said it almost feels like "we have opened Pandora's Box."
In Greek mythology, Pandora's box was a gift from the gods to Pandora, the first woman on Earth. CFUW Stratford member Kathy Vassilakos told the audience that when Pandora opened her box it released all of the furies of the world. But there was something else in there, Vassilakos pointed out.
The box also contained hope.
