Stacey Connaughton
Please join me in congratulating Stacey Connaughton, Associate Professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication and Principal Investigator & Director of the Purdue Peace Project, who has been chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Humanitarian Award of the Lafayette chapter of the Association for Women in Communications for her work with the Purdue Peace project in Liberia on Ebola awareness. She will be honored on April 21 at their annual spring luncheon.
Additionally, Professor Connaughton was invited to give two recent lectures. The C. Jack Gravlee Memorial Lecture at Colorado State University, was delivered on March 5, 2015. Her talk was titled “Organizing to Survive: The Unwavering Resilience of Everyday Liberian Citizens in Combating Ebola.” She discussed the leadership and impact of local Liberian citizens who, in collaboration with the Purdue Peace Project, had initially been working to reduce the likelihood of political violence in their communities and then transitioned to designing and implementing a citizen-to-citizen Ebola Prevention Campaign that ran from late August, 2014 through the end of January 2015.
Dr. Connaughton was also invited to give the Bernard Brock Distinguished Lecture at Wayne State University on March 11, 2015. The title of her presentation was “Preventing Political Violence and Combating Ebola: A Locally-Led, Dialogic Approach to Peacebuilding and Beyond.” The lecture discussed the locally-driven political violence prevention approach of the Purdue Peace Project, its collaborations with local citizens from multiple sectors in Ghana, Nigeria, and Liberia, and the impact those collaborations have had. Local citizens helped expedite the ruling on a 12 ½ year chieftancy dispute in Ghana; they brought disputing communities together for the first time in decades to work toward resolving a land dispute in Nigeria; and they worked toward violence prevention and Ebola prevention in Liberia.
Congratulations, Dr. Connaughton!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts