Abstract

For this lunchtime seminar I will speak about my research on formal education and peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a post-conflict, post-socialist, ethnically-divided, and politically unstable society. Each of these characteristics have implications for the design and implementation of education research. My presentation will map some of the challenges involved and highlight the conceptual and methodological choices I have made to adapt to and explore the influence of these layered complexities on formal education policy and practice in the context of state-wide peacebuilding. Issues that I will discuss include: overcoming geopolitical constraints on data collection, deciphering the misleading nature of ‘posts’, accounting for complex participant identities in data analysis, challenging the hegemony of ‘deficit’ narratives, and ethical dimensions of researching in post-violence contexts.