Shinrin yoku as a pedagogy for peace amidst violence: generating dynamic narratives of Palestine-Israel relations on college campuses

ABSTRACT

Amidst violent conflict over Palestine-Israel relations at colleges across America, how might we use our classrooms and campus landscapes to generate dynamic narratives that facilitate peace? Moving beyond a chronological ordering of events, a narrative is a constructed cohesive account of occurrences used to make sense of experiences and motivate action. In violent settings, narratives tend to retrench into static accounts that increase prejudice and motivate greater acts of violence. Alternatively, dynamic narratives offer complex judgement, plot, character, and value assessments of the world thus encouraging more openness to others and peace. I propose a novel intervention for the generation of dynamic narratives. I use the practice of shinrin yoku or guided forest walks in a seminar about Palestine and Israel, to invite liminality, the experience of communal spaces where traditional markers of power and social obligations are stripped. I expected that increasing experiences of shinrin yoku, and in turn liminality, will induce dynamic understandings of Palestinian Israeli relations on campus. Digital diary responses from eleven student participants kept over twelve weeks in a Fall 2022 seminar reveal that even with the eruption of hostilities,¹ students adopted dynamic stories about Palestine and Israel relations when they spent increasing time engaged in shinrin yoku.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict transformation
• narratives
• environment
• Palestine
• Israel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2023.2252345

Notes

1. The Fall 2022 Mapping Project conflict at Wellesley College is discussed in great detail in the introduction.

2. https://bdsmovement.net

3. http://thewellesleynews.com/2022/09/28/the-wellesley-news-calls-for-the-liberation-of-palestine/

https://mapliberation.org/plain/entities/WellesleyCollege.html

4. Specifically President Johnson wrote, “The project encourages the targeting of approximately 500 Jewish and other organizations in Massachusetts, including educational institutions like Wellesley, MIT, and local public school systems, and lists the names and addresses of individuals who are affiliated with these organizations. Its stated goal is ‘to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted. I am deeply concerned that the Mapping Project poses a significant threat to the physical security of the Jewish community of Greater Boston, including neighbors and partners of the College. Claiming that Jewish people and organizations are responsible for a host of societal harms and calling for action against them is, by definition, antisemitism’

5. https://jewishjournal.org/2022/10/13/wellesley-college-paper-endorses-bds-and-mapping-project-tufts-investigates-alleged-antisemitic-incident/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/opinion/stanford-antisemitism-report.html

https://www.jns.org/wellesleys-student-paper-editorial-board-says-anti-israel-mapping-project-is-providing-a-vital-service/

6. Just a few of many examples: https://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/33070/AntisemitismCampuses102016.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/21/us-campuses-sraeli-palestinian-conflict-universities

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/548748b1e4b083fc03ebf70e/t/560c2e0ae4b083d9c363801d/1443638794172/Palestine+Exception+Report+Final.pdf

(Stern 2020), pp. 158–159

7. The primary investigator (PI) spent a portion of 2021–2022 taking course work in forest therapy through the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT).

8. There is extensive scholarship documenting the conflict over BDS and Palestine/Israel relations on campuses though a broad review of it is beyond the scope of this paper. Stern’s 2020 book provides one of the most recent in depth accounts.

9. Protocol 22,226 R was approved by Brandeis University’s IRB. Wellesley College’s IRB is subcontracted to them.

10. Indeemo is ISO 27,001 and HIPAA certified.

11. The student unearthed a news article from 1934 about a Wellesley Agora Society dance with Nazi soldiers that had moored in Boston Harbor as part of a global propaganda tour. Students were infatuated with the soldiers’ blond hair and blue eyes and mentioned that, ‘not a single swastika’ was present, ‘just cute boys with shy smiles.’ At the time in 1934, the boat, called the Karlsruhe, garnered numerous protests from students at Harvard and MIT. The Crimson and Boston Herald reported on the arrest of students that protested.

12. The student used they/them pronouns.

13. All names are pseudonyms used to protect student identity.

14. The student used they/their/them pronouns.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Whitehead Critical Thought Fellowship; Paulson Initiative For Ecology, Wellesley College.

Notes on contributors

Nadya Hajj

Nadya Hajj is an Associate Professor of Peace and Justice Studies at Wellesley College.