Art Education and Peace: Exploring the Empathetic Object‐ive

This paper was developed as a conversation piece, based on the various presentations and conversations that happened in and around the iJADE conference that took place in November 2024 at Liverpool Hope University (UK). We reconvened as a group more than 8 months later in September 2025, continuing our dialogue in an attempt to capture something of the significance of the issues raised through the conference and to reflect on the meaning of peace for art educators in our current context. Our thoughts are represented here as discrete entries or monologues that address our own understanding of peace and its disruptors, yet these reflect our quiet listening as we attended to each other's attempts at sense-making around the themes of peace, conflict and the nature and potentialities of the empathetic object. The paper exemplifies the use of the empathetic object-ive introduced by John Johnston, as a means of engaging with the complexities of peace education for art educators. In our first conversation, we talked about the concept of peace and how difficult it was to provide concrete examples of what peace was or, more to the point, what it looked like as a physical form. However, it is very easy to visualise and concretise war and conflict. These concepts offer a wealth of objects that form their meaning, such as guns, missiles, helicopter gunships and the like, all commonly known as the weaponry of war. The results of their use provide images; narratives; and histories of pain, destruction and loss. Like the perpetrators of war, weapons of war, including propaganda, are loud mouthed and blunt. They hold a one-dimensional mirror that reflects self-interest, while ignoring our basic human instinct, to think, act and care for others. The times, place and people of Gaza hung unapologetically in the air of our first conversation. While I was also mindful of the many other conflicts that are taking place at this time, I refrain from naming them or presenting corruptible timelines. As was once said, ‘the first casualty of war is truth,’ and as we know, truth is highly subjective. However, our theme was simply ‘Peace,’ and I recall that choosing this title was, in itself, an act of courage, yet it also presented a major challenge as peace in itself is highly subjective. I found myself wondering how a conference (which is ultimately a gathering of individual people) can find a way to concretise or objectify peace as such an abstract concept. We discussed how peace is described in both a personal and a geopolitical way. We drew attention to Norwegian peace academic Johan Galtung, who describes peace in two ways: negative peace, which is the absence of war, and positive peace, which recognises the ongoing process of preventing war (Galtung et al. 2002). The latter, prevention, is quiet, and the vast majority of the world does not know about the work that goes on behind the scenes that prevent war. This work is done at grass roots level and often involves creative interventions that eventually (through various means) reach the negotiation table of the political elite. There is a distinct lack of form to such work, and its ambiguity allows each party to see their interests reflected in whatever may ultimately exist. In this respect, peace calls for imagination, the ability to see something that has yet to become. However, as our conference intended to engage with artist educators and creative activists, I wondered if each of us could select or make an object that could represent peace. In this regard, I became interested in understanding how we could trigger a flow of thought that could lead the conference to objectify peace. As the conversation progressed, it became clear that we all, in our own ways, could describe what peace felt like or what it felt like to be at peace. However, these descriptions fell into stereotypical notions of serenity and conjured images that are often used to promote naturopathic healing. However, even then, what we described as peace was highly subjective and fell short of what I believe is one of the primary purposes of art education, to problematise and give form to the complexity of life in order to share your quest with others. I considered how John Paul Lederach drew attention to the value of ‘artistic thinking’ as an important capacity needed to transform conflict. He describes this well in his book, The moral imagination: The art and soul of building peace (Lederach 2005). Lederach provides a sound foundation to explore how the moral imagination compels us to act imaginatively when faced with the challenges of negotiating the materiality of difference and histories of pain. The material I talk of is often found in the detritus of war. It shows itself as symbols, images, stories and is often embedded in the practices, content and language of education. 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