About Us
Sara Koopman
I am an assistant professor at the Kent State School of Peace and Conflict Studies. I am activist-academic feminist political geographer interested in the socio-spatial aspects of peace, and the ways that both peacebuilding and international solidarity can fall into colonial patterns. I am particularly interested in how grassroots groups build alternative securities through solidarity, a process I have framed as doing alter-geopolitics, and the work that telling stories (like these) does for that process. More broadly I am interested in how the ways that social movements make social change are changing towards more horizontal and connective action using information and communication technologies (like these blogs), and what this means for solidarity and peacebuilding. I grew up connected to FOR through my Quaker Meeting, and first worked with the archives of the Fellowship of Reconciliation as a student research assistant at the Jane Addams Peace Collection at Swarthmore College in the early 90s. My other grassroots archiving project is about Kent State in 1970, MappingMay4.kent.edu.
Contact information: skoopman@kent.edu
Jo Cottrill
I’m a senior Peace and Conflict Studies major at Kent State. I contributed to this website during the summer of 2021, when I was a research assistant for Dr. Koopman through the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience program.
Naidi Valverde-Romero
I am a senior at Kent State majoring in International Relations and minoring in Chinese. I worked on this website as a part of the Kent State Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) for the summer of 2022.
Christian Heller
I am a junior at Kent State majoring in Peace and Conflict Studies with minors in Political Science and Sociology. I worked on this website as a part of the Kent State Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) for the summer of 2023.
Mathulan Manikkarajan
I worked on an early stage of building this digital archive while I was an undergraduate at York University.
Mellissa Robinson
I worked on an early stage of building this digital archive while I was an undergraduate at York University.