Abstract
Popoki is a cat, and is the main figure in the Popoki Peace Project. Among Popoki’s human friends is one named Betty Reardon. She knew him as a live cat, but perhaps grew closer to him in his work with the Popoki Peace Project, a grass roots group begun by this author in 2006. The Project uses creative and critical skills to work for peace.
Ronni Alexander, Professor in the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan; Email: alexroni@kobe-u.ac.jp.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Today, not only is peace education in school less widespread in Japan than it was in the eighties when this incident occurred, but the content is increasingly skewed toward promoting nationalistic emotions and denying/erasing anything that puts Japan in a poor light. For example, references to the so-called Comfort Women and Japanese war atrocities are being taken out of history books. This trend is leaving students poorly educated, e.g. unaware of and misinformed about many important and controversial issues.
- 3.
Popoki’s friends are encouraged to not only to think about stories, but also to think with them. Thinking with stories requires thinking relationally, a process that exceeds the boundaries of the way stories are generally used in Western approaches that focus on thinking about stories (Clandinin 2016, pp. 29–30).
- 4.
While educators and activists emphasize ‘raising our voices,’ sometimes that is not possible or desirable. Silence can be a form of resistance or communication, as in the case of some forms of empathy and active listening. (See Parpart/Parashar 2019).
- 5.
Feminist scholars provide multiple understandings of bodies as, for example, discursively reproduced (Butler 1993), as inscribing (Vaittinen 2017), and as gendered and tied to a two-gender binary (Repo 2016) and differentially grievable (Butler 2004). Significant to this is that “the human body can be simultaneously all this, and much more” (Vaittinen 2019, p. 246, italics in the original).
- 6.
Both emotion and affect are difficult terms to define. Åhäll (2015) and Ahmed (2014) discuss emotion in terms of the extent to which it can be understood as socially and culturally constructed; a place where bodily sensation, emotion and thought interact. Affect, on the other hand, is often used to denote what happens inside and therefore is very much related to embodiment, and seen as something that happens before emotion (Åhäll 2015, p. 5).
- 7.
Guåhan is the indigenous Chamoru name for the island generally known as “Guam”. American citizens on Guam are not allowed to vote for president and have a non-voting representative in Congress.
References
Åhäll, L., & Thomas, G. (Eds.). (2015). Emotions, politics and war. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edingurgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Alexander, R. (2007). Popoki, what color is peace? Popoki’s peace book 1. Kobe: Epic.
Alexander, R. (2016). Living with the Fence: Militarization and military spaces on Guahan/Guam. Gender, Place and Culture, 23(6), 869–882. First published on-line in 2015.
Alexander, R. (2018a). Drawing disaster: Reflecting on six years of the Popoki Friendship story project. Journal of International Cooperation Studies, 25(2), 59–96.
Alexander, R. (2018b). Teaching peace with Popoki. Peace Review, 30(1), 9–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2017.1419669.
Blackman, L. (2012). Immaterial bodies: Affect, embodiment, mediation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Clandinin, D. J. (2016). Engaging in narrative inquiry—Developing qualitative inquiry (Vol. 9). New York: Routledge.
Crawford, N. C. (2000). The passion of world politics: Propositions on emotion and emotional relationships. International Security, 24(4), 116–156. Posted Online: March 29, 2006.
Crawford, N. C. (2014). Institutionalizing passion in world politics: Fear and empathy. International Theory, 6(3), 535–557. Published Online: October 09, 2014.
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Penguin.
Hutchison, E., & Roland, B. (2008). Fear no more: Emotions and world politics. Review of International Studies, 34, 115–135.
Hutchison, E., & Roland, B. (2014). Theorizing emotions in world politics. International Theory, 6, 491–514.
Ling, L. H. M. (2014). Decolonizing the international: Towards multiple emotional worlds. Forum: Emotions and world politics. International Theory, 6(3), 579–583. Retrieved May 20, 2017, from https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/026BC7C8D8B25151DB4862D3E6F08DFA/S175297191400030Xa.pdf/decolonizing-the-international-towards-multiple-emotional-worlds.pdf.
Lutz, C. A., & Abu-Lighod, L. (2008). Language and the politics of emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDermott, R. (2014). The body doesn’t lie: A somatic approach to the study of emotions in world politics. International Theory, 6, 557–562.
McSorley, K. (Ed.). (2013). War and the body: Militarisation, practice and experience. New York: Routledge.
Mercer, J. (2014). Feeling like a state: Social emotion and identity. International Theory, 6, 515–535.
Parpart, J. L., & Parashar, S. (Eds.). (2019). Rethinking silence, voice and agency in contested gendered terrains. New York: Routledge.
Popoki News 2018.11. No. 159. Retrieved December 25, 2018, from http://popoki.cruisejapan.com/pdf/Popoki_News_No159.%202018.11.pdf.
Reardon, B. A. (1996). Sexism and the war system. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Reardon, B. A., & Hans, A. (2019). The gender imperative: Human security vs. state security (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Reardon, B. A., & Snauwaert, D. T. (2015). Betty A. Reardon: A pioneer in education for peace and human rights. Heidelberg: Springer.
Repo, J. (2016). The biopolitics of emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shepherd, L. (2013). Gender, violence and popular culture: Telling stories. New York: Routledge.
Sylvester, C. (Ed.). (2011). Experiencing war. New York: Routledge.
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). (1994). Human development report.
Vaittinen, T. (2017). The global biopolitical economy of needs: Transnational entanglements between ageing Finland and the global nurse reserve of the Philippines. Dissertation.
Vaittinen, T. (2019). Embodied in/security as care needs. In C. E. Gentry, L. J. Shepherd, & L. Sjberg (Eds.), Routledge handbook of gender and security (pp. 241–251). New York: Routledge.
Wada, K. (2011). Conversations with Ronni Alexander: The Popoki peace project: Popoki, what color is peace? What color is friendship? International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13(2), 257–271.
Wibben, A. (2011). Feminist security studies. New York: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Alexander, R. (2019). Some Questions from Popoki to Betty Reardon About Human Security, Gender and Teaching/Learning/Creating Peace. In: Snauwaert, D. (eds) Exploring Betty A. Reardon’s Perspective on Peace Education. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18387-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18387-5_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-18386-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-18387-5
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)