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Narrative Roundtable: From Narratives of Violence to Narratives of Peace:
The Renunciation of Violence as a Discursive Phenomenon
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2-4pm
The Metropolitan Building
3434 N. Washington Blvd
5th Floor, Room: 5183
Refreshments will be served
Much work has been done on the prevention of violence, but less focus has been granted towards encouraging individuals already affiliated with violent organizations to leave. One reason may be the inherent difficulty of getting people who have already formed an identity around violence to change. However, such change does occur among some individuals, and this roundtable will explore how we can understand—and encourage—this transformation through the lens of narrative dynamics.
During this roundtable we will explore the complex process of how individuals who have renounced violence make sense of their transformation by framing their change as a process of narrative identity transformation. The presentation will be grounded in dissertation research that applied a morphological analysis of the narratives of former gang members, right-wing extremists, and terrorists. The findings will be explored to highlight possible ways this process of renunciation can be facilitated through the presence of specific discourses around transformation.
BIO:
Agatha Glowacki is currently a PhD Candidate at George Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (SCAR). She has worked for various US government agencies on issues pertaining to terrorist radicalization, including extremist propaganda and programs to prevent violent extremism. Her work on terrorist disengagement inspired her dissertation research, which has focused on the narrative processes of renouncing violence. Agatha earned her Master's degree in European Studies from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where she was also a U.S. Fulbright Scholar. She received her BA in Government from Harvard.