Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence
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The mission of the Brudnick Center for the Study of Conflict and Violence at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts is to seek solutions to problems of hostility and hatred based on group differences. Involving faculty from a range of disciplines, the Center will initiate research projects and educational endeavors in the area of inter-group conflict and violence (e.g., inter-group tensions and violence in the schools, state-sponsored terrorism, hate crimes, international conflict and warfare, hate speech on campus, skinhead activity, religious persecution, organized hate groups, and so on). To fund individual projects, faculty associated with the Center will apply for appropriate support through federal agencies and private foundations.
Faculty members will communicate their research findings to a broad audience by writing for major newspapers as well as academic journals and books. In addition, they will hold annual conferences on campus in order to bring together researchers and practitioners from around the country as well as relevant parts of the world.
The Center will involve students on campus in several different ways. For undergraduates, the Center will initiate an interdisciplinary minor in Conflict and Violence Studies, consisting of required courses from several different departments. In addition, the service-learning course, Social Conflict and Community Service, designed to help prepare undergraduate students for an increasingly diverse environment, will become institutionalized in the curriculum and taught on an annual basis. At the Ph.D. level, graduate students will be able to select the Sociology of Conflict and Violence as an area of specialization. Ph.D. candidates will be encouraged to work with the Center in focusing their dissertation research on issues of inter-group conflict or on violence.
Much of the work of the Center will be dedicated to the task of increasing our understanding of the sources of inter-group tension and hatred in order to promote cooperation between and among groups. The emphasis of research and teaching efforts will therefore be on providing effective solutions. To this end, the Center will serve as a repository of information about violence and conflict and will generate and evaluate practical interventions for the purpose of reducing harmful forms of violence and conflict throughout society.
The Founders of the Center are Irving and Betty Brudnick who also established the Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Institute (BNRI), a part of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Professor Jack Levin is the Director and Professor Gordana Rabrenovic is the Associate Director of the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence.
Sources: http://www.violence.neu.edu/about_the_center/ and http://www.violence.neu.edu/people/ and http://www.umassmed.edu/bnri/bio.cfm
