Strength of combining participation with peace-building

VUB researcher Dr. Derya Yüksek has developed a method to transform conflicts, by using participatory community media practices to unite young people of Cyprus, a still deeply divided island with a violent past. Dr. Derya Yüksek: " In a worldwide tendency to relapse back to politics of antagonism and aggression, we need processes and models that can constructively deal with the diverse make-up of our societies, and the conflicts this brings. We need tools to prevent conflicts from taking violent forms -be it hate speech, structural discrimination, physical violence, or war. The participatory-democratic communication model is an effective tool for such transformation ." In scope of this study, Yüksek, sponsored by the FWO Flanders research as part of the VUB's Cyprus Community Media Research Programme supervised by Prof. Nico Carpentier, organised a research intervention involving a series of community media training and production workshops. The workshops brought together Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot school youth to collectively produce community media content. The research data, gathered through an ethnography of the workshops with 3 mixed production groups of total 24 teenagers, followed by participant interviews and a reception study of the workshop's multimedia outputs, were then analysed using qualitative methods. " Media-making is an interesting topic for youth, so it increases the willingness and motivation from young people to join the workshops, despite the odds.