[psych-hr] Bio information on 4 discussion group members

[**** MESSAGE FROM YOUR FRIENDLY MODERATOR: 

Greetings! This is Marcy Bernbaum. This is my first time sending a
message, as moderator, through the list serve. Let's see if the training I
received week before last from Frank worked..... 

This message:

(1) Provides you, as a "sneak preview", with four of the bios that have
come in from discussion groups members thus far.

(2) Asks that you get back to me by Friday, May 14 on whether you want to
(a) receive future inputs on discussion group members in batches of 3 or 4
as they come in (as I have done in this e-mail), or (b) whether you would
prefer to wait until the WEB site is up and running at the end of May and
then see all the inputs at once on the WEB site. I will, as moderator, go
with how the "majority" vote as of May 14.

Several "administrative comments:

a. I will use [psych-hr] at the beginning the subject line of all
communications from myself as moderator or directly from any of you. This
is to help you, as you scroll through your e-mails, identify which come from
this discussion group.

b. Please send "formal communications" (e.g. input on bios, contributions
to the discussions) to the List Serve e-mail address:
psychology-humanrights-l@hrea.org.
(there is an "l" as in "lady"" before
@hrea.org and not a "1" as in "number 1"). Feel free to communicate
with
me informally as I will with you through my personal e-mail address:
mbern362@aol.com.

c. Please forgive me if there are formating problems with this e-mail.
I'm on a new e-mail provider,as moderator, and still working out the glitches.

d. This is an inordinately long e-mail and I apologize for it, but I wanted
to start getting some of the bios out as they are indeed quite interesting!

Listed below are 4 of the 7 the inputs I have received thus far (in the
order of their arrival) from:

-- Anne Anderson
-- Elizabeth Lira
-- Brinton Lykes
-- Dan Christie

You should all have received Joanie Connors' input as she sent it to
everyone by e-mail.

As you see, each person has chosen a slightly different style.

ANNE ANDERSON

1. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON ANNE

I have been National Coordinator of Psychologists for Social
Responsibility (PsySR) since 1984. I am a social worker by training and,
in addition to working with PsySR, I have been practicing as a counselor and
therapist since 1972. My practice is based with the Washington Therapy
Guild, a group practice of 8 members, 5 of us who have been practicing
together since 1974. My specialties in my practice include women's issues,
families and couples, and seriously emotionally distrubed children.

I was born in Venezuela, lived in Bogota, Colombia until I was 7 (we left
after the "Bogotaso"), lived in Dallas, Texas until I was 17, and then
moved to Guatemala during my senior year of high school. I went to
undergraduate school at Grinnell College, Iowa, and did my graduate work at
Catholic University, Washington, D.C.since I was a teenager in the '50s,
working on civil rights issues and women's rights in the US. 

2. WHY ANNE DECIDED TO BE A FOUNDER OF THIS GROUP

As PsySR's Coordinator, I am delighted to be involved with dedicated
psychologists and other mental health professionals from all over who are
focusing their psychological skills and knowledge in the service of peace.
Since I have not worked on human rights issues in other countries, I expect
to learn many things about specific differences and similarities across our
collective experiences. I also hope that we will have many suggestions for
human rights activists, both on the policy and practicelevel of work. 
I am looking forward to seeing what we can do together to help protect
human rights.

3. ANNE's COORDINATES

Anne Anderson
National Coordinator
Psychologists for Social Responsibility
2607 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20008
(202) 745-7084
(202) 745-0051 fax

ELIZABETH LIRA

1. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT ELIZABETH

I am a Chilean Psychologist living in Chile. My main activity from 1977
has been in the field of Mental health and Human Rights in clinical
services, psychosocial research and national and international advocacy. I
was working during ten years in a NGO of Human Rigths during the
Dictatorship as a clinical psychologist working with victims of human
rights violations. Then, with other colleagues we founded ILAS * Latin
American Institute for Mental Health and Human Rights*. (1987-1997). have
been working in ILAS with other colleagues developing training programs
for psychologists working in Human Rights issues in Chile (1988-1996); El
Salvador, (1993-1995); Peru, (1992-1995); Ecuador, (1996); Turkey, (1996).

I am currently professor in the Alberto Hurtado University-Department of
Social Sciences- Latin American Institute of Social Studies (ILADES) since
1997. I am working now on research on political reconciliation in Chile with
Brian Loveman, a professor from San Diego State University- Center for Latin
American Studies: Las suaves cenizas del Olvido: la vía chilena de
reconciliación 1814-1932. Coauthor with Brian Loveman. Santiago, 1999 Lom
Ediciones y DIBAM. (Soft ashes of forgetting: the Chilean Road to
reconciliation 1814-1932) We are working now in the second volume. This
research is a kind of continuation of my work during the dictatorship
trying to understand the trends of the current Chilean Political Conflict.
I have left my clinical work for a while and I hope to contribute
expliciting some political and subjetctive dilemmas linked to memory and
forgetting the recent past.

It is not easy for me to summarize the transformation of my political
interest. My main objetive is to heighlight the weight of impunity from a
psychosocial and historical perspective in a political context activated by
the detention of Pinochet.

2. WHY ELIZABETH IS INTERESTED IN THIS GROUP

I am interested in the developings of Psychology and Human rights beyond
the clinical perspective. I consider it important to have dialogue coming from
different experiences and perspectives 

3. ELIZABETH's COORDINATES

Elizabeth Lira
Universidad Alberto Hurtado
Almirante Barroso 6
phone: (562) 5241815
FAX: (562) 522-7953

BRINTON LIKES

1. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT BRINTON:

I am a professor of Community/Social Psychology in the School 
of Education at Boston College and an activist scholar and teacher. I 
have lived and worked among women and child survivors of 
state-sponsored violence and war in rural Guatemala since 1987 and, 
more recently, in the North of Ireland and urban Boston. My research 
explores the interstices of indigenous cultural beliefs and practices 
and those of Western psychology, towards creating community-based 
responses to the effects of war and state-sponsored violence. I am 
increasingly interested in issues of voice and representation in 
cross-cultural work that seeks to tell stories about war, violence and 
its effects at the grassroots, and about the ethics surrounding voice 
and silence. This work will take me to South Africa for a two year 
period beginning in September 1999.

I teach courses in culture and psychology, participatory 
action research, social and community psychology, and psychology of 
women and gender. I have published about my research in books and 
journals, most recently in the American Psychologist and the Journal of 
Social Issues. I am also a co-editor of three books, Myths about the 
Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities (Temple University Press, 
1996), Gender and Personality (Duke University Press, 1985), and Your 
daughters shall prophesy: Feminist alternatives in theological 
education (Pilgrim Press, 1980). 

A little less synthetically, I'd say that the roots of my 
intellectual thinking and practice are in liberation psychology and the 
social movements of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Raised in the South during 
the Civil Rights movement, I spent 1968 in Paris, reading philosophy - 
including Marxism - and discussing/supporting revolutionary practice 
with students and workers in the Latin Quarter, then eastern Europe and 
the former Soviet Union when they invaded Czechoslovakia. I then 
completed a Masters of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, during 
which time James Cone published Black Theology, Mary Daly completed 
Beyond God the Father (and led a group of feminists out of Memorial 
Church at Harvard University) and Gustavo Gutierrez, Juan Luis Segundo, 
and Dom Helder Camera - all liberation theologians - visited Harvard 
University. After four years coordinating a women's studies program 
at Harvard and deepening my exposure to feminist theory and practice, I 
completed a Ph.D. with Bill Ryan (Blaming the Victim) and Ramsay Liem 
in the BC psych dept and Abigail Stewart from BU and Radcliffe. At that 
time the program was called Psychology and Social Structure and I took 
sociological theory with Sy Levantman and also Peter Berger, who was 
visiting for several semesters during that era. I was probably most 
challenged by - and still am - how one theorizes psychological 
processes-in-context such that context is not only micro-level 
interpersonal relations but broader/deeper, sociohistorical phenomena 
such as social class, race, gender. I was deeply critical of 
individualist assumptions underlying psychological theorizing, 
particularly of the self, and completed a dissertation in that area. 
>From there I took a cultural turn - in part as a strategy for trying to 
integrate my intellectual and political concerns - and worked with Maya 
refugees in Mexico seeking to better understand their constructions of 
self within a deeply communitarian society that had also been ruptured 
by war, displacement, sexism, etc. I have also been influenced by 
critical theory and cultural studies as they have been engaged within 
university communities in the 1990s. I have very much enjoyed being in 
a school of education in part because it has afforded me an opportunity 
to become more familiar with the work of critical pedagogues, having 
been influenced by the work of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton in the 
early 1970s.

My research experiences in Mexico took me to Guatemala where I 
discovered the developing work of Latin American liberation 
psychologists that was being "birthed" through practice in zones of 
armed conflict and war. I hooked up with a local group of community 
health workers and was able to draw on my community psychology as well 
as a developing cultural sensitivity to indigenous beliefs and 
practices and their contributions to psychological practice. I trained 
in psychoanalytic psychodrama after discovering the work of Edouardo 
Pavolovsky and Marie Langer in Argentina. This complemented my 
interests in people's stories of their own experiences, and their 
enacted versions of survival when there were no words to communicate 
and/or when speaking directly/giving testimony was too dangerous. I 
began to think culturally about my own work and to hone participatory 
research skills in a four country collaboration with children and youth 
in zones of armed conflict and state-repression. I have longstanding 
commitments to social justice and change and was increasingly drawn to 
social scientific strategies for knowledge construction and 
re-construction and as resources for personal and 
institutional/community change.

The past several years of my work with rural communities in 
Guatemala have challenged my developing understanding of collaborative 
research and led me to new contradictions about co-constructed knowing 
and doing. I have always maintained a deep connection to Marxist 
theories and materialist perspectives, despite my interest in 
postmodern critiques and more interpretive models of knowing. Perhaps 
my involvement with Truth Commissions and our attempts to document some 
of the many atrocities of counterinsurgent war and state-sponsored 
violence has kept me grounded in a different way than if I had not been 
so engaged. I continue to be in awe at the capacity of local 
communities to move forward with extraordinarily limited material 
resources and having been deeply fractured by violence. I am 
increasingly convinced that despite profound differences in power and 
resources and continuing structural oppression we can cross borders and 
little by little create more egalitarian and just social systems. 
Drawing on nearly 20 years of experiences of working in situations of 
war and violence - mostly in Guatemala but more recently in the North 
of Ireland and in urban Boston - I am suspicious of theories which 
locate psychological phenomena - for example, trauma and/or resilience 
- within a single person or group. Rather I see them as 
experiences/processes that are visible/take flesh at different moments 
in time and space, sometimes within single individuals and sometimes 
within groups and/or communities. As Guatemala and the North of 
Ireland enter new phases in the war/peace dialectic I am impressed by 
new opportunities available for rethreading stories, rebuilding 
communities despite ongoing impunity and threats of renewed violence. 
I am currently excited and cautiously optimistic about the potential of 
the arts, broadly construed, and creativity as resources whereby 
multiple voices from people of varying educational backgrounds and 
resources can be heard. The moral and ethical dimensions of 
collaborations across power differences and storytelling continue to 
challenge me.

2. WHY BRINTON JOINED THIS GROUP

I am always looking for networking opportunities and for "how to"
make it work. With colleagues in Central America
(Martin-Baro) and South (including E. Lira of this group) America we 
sought to develop a network which would redress the flow of 
information, trying to share psychological work in zones of armed 
conflict and with survivors of war and state-violence from the South 
with folks in USA and Europe ... language difficulties were significant 
as were sub-disciplinary difference ... and technology 10 years ago was 
not what it is today ... but then there is the challenge of time ... so 
I was glad to see this effort and thought I'd try again - and am happy 
not to be responsible for coordinating the administrative end of it! 
What I hope to get out of it - see how it works, as well as see to what 
extent experiences in one zone of war/armed conflict can inform work in 
another, in a context of cultural sensitivities ... hear how others 
deal with being the "other," and exchange ideas about program 
development as I will be working to develop partnerships between 
community groups and the university as well as develop further a 
community psych MA program in South Africa and more ideas are always 
welcome.

3. COORDINATES FOR BRINTON UNTIL THE END OF AUGUST, 1999:

M. Brinton Lykes, PhD
Boston College
Campion Hall - School of Education
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Tel: (617)552-0670
FAX: (617)552-1981
email: lykes@bc.edu

DAN CHRISTIE

1. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT DAN

I'm a psychology professor at a regional campus of Ohio State
University. I became committed to research and writing on peace and
social justice in the early 1980s when my research on fear in children
was indicating that they were most concerned and worried about the
threat of nuclear war. About seven years later, the Division of Peace
Psychology of the American Psychological Association was established and
provided me with a professional home and identity that would shape the
rest of my career in psychology. As a practitioner, most of my efforts
have been given to development work, teaching, and writing. From 1986
to 1988, I participated in the Malaysian Cooperative Program, a
collaborative development program designed to enhance the educational
preparation and economic opportunties of Malays, the indigenous ethnic
group in Malaysia. In the US, during the 1980s and 90s, I developed and
taught a number of University courses related to peace psychology such
as The Nuclear Threat, Psychology of International Relations, Conflict
Management and Reconciliation, and Psychology of Peace, Conflict, and
Violence. At present, I am completing an edited volume with two other
colleagues (Dick Wagner and Deborah Winter) entitled "Peace, Conflict,
and Violence: Peace Psychology for the 21st Century." About 40 peace
psychologists from 12 different countries have contributed to the
volume. My research is community based and incorporates elements of
action research because it is problem driven and co-constructed with
area service providers who share an interest in the prevention of
delinquency and violence, and the improvement of intercultural awareness
and sensitivity. 

2. WHY THE GROUP IS OF INTEREST OF TO DAN: 

I teach international studies courses on peace education and I am
particularly interested in human rights education. Moreover, at some
point I would like to write culturally sensitive curricula that
contribute to nonviolent social transformation in a variety of
cultural contexts.

3. DAN's COORDINATES:

Dan Christie
Department of Psychology
Ohio State University
Marion, Ohio 43302 USA
PH: 614-292-9133
FAX: 614-292-5817