Within CMU blogs, you'll find fascinating stories and pieces on current students and accomplished alumni. You'll also hear directly from students, faculty, and staff, as they tell their personal CMU stories in their own voices.
Justice for Manitoba migrant workers
Dr. Jodi Dueck-Read
I often ask students to reflect on justice. What is justice in family conflict, or in the face of inter-generational trauma and violence? In light of our globalized economy, how can we make justice in our consumption choices and how can we respond to the global inequities of trade and migration policies through our choice of food? Is locally grown, organic food always the best choice? Is it really local when Mexican workers are flown in each year to plant, weed, and harvest?
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Privilege, power, peacebuilding (tackling International Development Studies)
After a semester at a large institution, Melanie McGillis wondered if university just wasn’t for her. She took a year off to travel and found herself volunteering with International Volunteer Headquarters in Ecuador. There, she met people with dreams similar to her own who had studied International Development.
Back in Winnipeg, McGillis learned about the IDS program at Menno Simons and stopped in to visit Gina Loewen, the Academic Advisor. After trying out a few courses in IDS, she was hooked.
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Restorative justice: from Sierra Leone to Winnipeg streets
Before Victor Kaicombey had even heard of the Conflict Resolution Studies program at Menno Simons, he’d survived Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war and provided leadership in their Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The restorative justice model is one which he describes as a “traditional approach” to dealing with conflict in his homeland.
While the north american model of retributive justice traditionally focuses on the perpetrator of a crime and little else, the restorative model brings together three primary stakeholders: the perpetrator, the victim, and the community. Rather than having its sights set on punishment, the goal of restoration is bring a fuller healing to both the victim and the community affected by the crime. In some Sierra Leonean cases, this means that there are individuals who killed their neighbours during the genocide but have now been reintegrated into their communities and are living “as productive members of society.”
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A vocation to advocacy in Manitoba's child welfare system
Amy Linklater, a graduating student in Conflict Resolution Studies, says that her education and personal journey of healing are so intertwined it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. When she began studying at the University of Winnipeg at 21, she knew very little about the history of her Cree people and colonialism in Canada. “I didn’t know my history until university... my studies opened up a whole new trauma for me.”
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Joanne Epp: Writing to find home
When talking about what she enjoys about writing poetry, Joanne Epp (CMBC ’86) mentions Canadian painter David Milne, who once said, “The thing that makes a picture is the thing that makes dynamite – compression.”
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