Guest Lecture: Everyday Peace Indicators: Informing Social Policy through Everyday Lived Experiences.

Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) conducts participatory research and evaluation in partnership with communities affected by conflict and builds bridges between diverse actors working on peace and conflict issues to inform practice, policy, and scholarship. EPI works with communities worldwide to generate their own indicators of complex ideas and concepts related to peace. Communities work with us to identify indicators that are important to them, building meaning from the bottom up. We work as locally as possible, partnering with villages and neighborhoods experiencing or emerging from conflict around the world, in places as diverse as Oakland, California, Kandy, Sri Lanka or Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in order to produce participatory statistics by involving everyday people in the development of the tools we use to measure them.  We envision a world where decision-makers and community members work together to transform violent conflicts and build peaceful, equitable and just societies informed by the everyday lived experiences of people and communities.

For more, see: https://www.everydaypeaceindicators.org/

Bio

Pamina Firchow is Associate Professor of Coexistence and Conflict at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, as well as a Senior Jennings Randolph Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in 2016. Her main research interests surround the study of the international accompaniment of communities affected by mass violence and the localization of international development and peacebuilding aid. She has published widely on participatory approaches to design, measurement and evaluation of transitional justice, reconciliation and peacebuilding interventions.

Dr. Firchow’s work engages participatory approaches to mixed methods measurement through an inclusive and participatory methodology called the Everyday Peace Indicators. This participatory measurement approach is used to make claims about the effectiveness of local level interventions after war in Firchow’s award winning book, Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is also the author of numerous high-impact, peer reviewed articles and the co-editor of Practical Approaches to Peacebuilding: Putting Theory to Work (Lynne Rienner, 2016). Firchow also frequently publishes about her research in online blogs such as Political Violence at a Glance, Duck of Minerva, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and Foreign Policy magazine.

Prof. Firchow has received several millions of dollars in support for her research from the United States Institute of Peace, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Science Foundation, the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development, Humanity United, among others. She serves as a consultant to various international organizations, including USAID and the United Nations, and in 2018, she co-founded the Everyday Peace Indicators NGO (501c3) to assist organizations in integrating participatory forms of measurement into their design, monitoring and evaluation systems.

Firchow earned her PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. She has been working in the peacebuilding sector as a scholar-practitioner for non-governmental organizations and universities since 1999.

You can read more about her work and interests at paminafirchow.org