Associate Professor in Education, Peace and Conflict, School of Education
Julia’s research focusses on education, peace and conflict. She studies how educational transformation might contribute towards peace and justice by providing ways to understand past injustices and thereby repair them. Her work interrogates relationships between education and transitional justice, education and memory production, and education about difficult pasts. She is interested in knowledge production and the ethics of collaborative research in education in emergencies.
Her current collaborative projects include ‘Transformative history education’, which conceptualises education as a site of memory production and explores creative practices of teaching and learning about the violent past inside and outside the classroom in Cambodia, Colombia, Iraq and Uganda. She also works with partners in Colombia on ‘MEMPAZ’, a project to connect creative community-based memory initiatives with national-level transitional justice processes. In ‘Transitional justice as education’ she works with the Colombian Truth Commission to support its work as a feminist, pedagogical commission working in a politically charged context. And in ‘Teaching peace in a charged landscape’ she explores how Bogotá schools and students engage with peace education policy and displacement, including integrating children whose families arrived in Bogotá due to Colombia’s conflict or the crisis in Venezuela. Julia leads the Education, Justice and Memory Network, which will begin research into creative approaches to teaching about the violent past in 2021.
Recent publications:
- Paulson, J., et al., 2020. ‘Education as a site of memory: Developing a research agenda’. In International Studies in Sociology of Education, 15 Apr.
- Shah, R., Paulson, J. & Couch, D., 2019. ‘The rise of resilience in Education in Emergencies’. In Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 18 Dec.
- Paulson, J. and M.J. Bellino, 2017. ‘Truth commissions, education, and positive peace: an analysis of truth commission final reports (1980-2015)’. In Comparative Education, vol. 53, issue 3.