At the 2017 International Institute for Peace Education I had the wonderful opportunity to facilitate a Workshop on the topic of John Paul Lederach’s Moral Imagination, a book that is very dear to my heart and central to my reserach, along with my dear colleague Alejandra Barrera, who taught me quite a lot about the art of Haiku writing.

We facilitated this workshop as an interactive theoretical engagement with John Paul Lederach’s concept of “The Moral Imagination”. We first addressed the theoretical perspectives as outlined by Lederach, on very short text excerpts and then reflected together about their relevance for the fields of Aesthetic Peaces and Education. In the second part, we worked with two tools that Lederach applies for conflict transformation: changing images of perceived conflicts by enquiring for alternative potentials for peace building through painting and writing haikus or poetic prose. Moving beyond mere reflection, we also recognized our bodies as potential resources for expressing truths and identifying new course of action in conflict.