CIDEC Seminar with Dr. Heddy Lahmann
"Creative Pathways to Peace: Arts Education in Conflict and Divided Settings"
Increasingly, education interventions in conflict and emergency settings incorporate arts-based practices as strategies for peacebuilding. This talk examines how artistic and creative activities can function not only as interventions, but also as participatory research methods for understanding lived experience in conflict-affected contexts. Drawing on a case study of a youth arts and service-learning program in Afghanistan, it explores how arts-based approaches cultivate curiosity, emotional openness, and a sense of common humanity across difference. Rather than framing the arts as tools for messaging or persuasion, the talk foregrounds their methodological value in shaping conditions for engagement: activating imagination, supporting embodied and relational forms of learning beyond language, and creating spaces where empathy and connection can emerge. The talk also critically engages with the limits and ethical tensions of arts-based peacebuilding, including questions of sustainability, power, representation, and external funding, highlighting both the promise and pitfalls of these approaches within peace education and education in emergencies.
About the Speaker
Dr. Heddy Lahmann
Heddy Lahmann is a Clinical Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the International Education program at New York University. Her work and research focus on arts education for social change. As a research-practitioner, she has worked with the Community Arts Network, Carnegie Hall, UNICEF, FCDO, IRC, UNHCR, and the World Bank, providing expertise in arts and education for peacebuilding, exchange, and social emotional learning. In addition to her research, she has worked as a teaching artist, performer, and artist-researcher with children and youth domestically and internationally including projects with Clowns Without Borders, Bond Street Theatre, and the Refugee Youth Summer Academy and Saturday Learning Series with the International Rescue Committee and Artists Striving to End Poverty. She is currently engaged with projects focusing on multimodal distance learning to support girls learning in Afghanistan, and arts education in global public schools. She received her Ph.D. in International Education from NYU, and an MFA in Theatre from the University of Connecticut.
