A volume in Peace Education
Series Editors Jing Lin, University of Maryland, Edward Brantmeier, James Madison University, and Ian
Harris, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Understanding Peace Cultures is exceptionally practical as well as theoretically grounded. As Elise Boulding
tells us, culture consists of the shared values, ideas, practices, and artifacts of a group united by a common
history. Rebecca Oxford explains thatpeace cultures are cultures, large or small, which foster any of the
dimensions of peace - inner, interpersonal, intergroup, international, intercultural, or ecological - and thus
help transform the world. As in her earlier book, The Language of Peace: Communicating to Create Har-mony, Oxford contends herethat peace is a serious and desirable option.
Excellent educators help build peace cultures. In this book, Shelley Wong and Rachel Grant reveal how highly diverse public school classrooms serve
as peace cultures, using activities and themes founded on womanistand critical race theories. Yingji Wang portrays a peace culture in a university
classroom. Rui Ma's model reaches out interculturally to Abraham's children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim youth, who share an ancient heritage.
Children's literature (Rebecca Oxford et al.) and students' own writing (Tina Wei) spread cultures of peace.
Deep traditions, such as African performance art, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Islam, give rise to peace cultures, as shown here by John
Grayzel, Sister Jewel (a colleague of Thich Nhat Hanh), Yingji Wang et al., and Dian Marissa et al. Peace cultures also emerge in completely unex-pected venues, such as gangsta rap, unveiled by Charles Blake etal., and a prison where inmates learn Lois Liggett's "spiritual semantics." Finally, the
book includes perspectives from Jerusalem (by Lawrence Berlin) and North Korea and South Korea (by Carol Griffiths) to help us envision - and hope
for - new, transformative peace cultures where now there is strife.