Planetary Consciousness, Witnessing the Inhuman, and Transformative Learning: Insights from Peace Pilgrimage Oral Histories and Autoethnographies

Abstract

This article describes insights and consciousness transformations reported in several contemporary peace pilgrimage oral histories and autoethnographies, including my own. Autoethnography is a form of autobiographical writing that stresses the interpretation of experiences in their psychosocial, cultural, and historical contexts. Peace pilgrimages are typically self-defined journeys and projects which may be inward and metaphorical, or which may involve actual travel to destinations that memorialize historical events of mass killing and profound suffering, and places that envision, cultivate and educate for global or inner peace. The insights and learnings include (a) the call to journey and other out-of-the-ordinary communications; (b) understanding the transformative learning process; (c) glimpsing the meaning of planetary consciousness; and (d) bearing witness to the inhuman. These paradigmatic themes may be applicable to one's personal search for meaning, and as signposts for collective, societal healing from psychic and social wounding and traumas. The themes may be useful for educators and researchers in peace studies, religious studies, history, biography, philosophy, psychology and consciousness studies.

Calibrating Evolution of Transformative Tourism: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…This process of reflection can take place both formally, through post-trip discussions with various travellers and family [136] and even journal writing, or informally through keeping contact with locals and travellers that stimulate memories and imagination of the journey, along with various media representations, such as films, documentaries, television programmes, or even magazines [1]. Storytelling has the role of reinforcing the meaning of a transformative experience, thus often being used as a tool in the case of emphasizing the process of reflection [137,138], which is why some service providers take advantage of this fact, as a part of encouraging the circular economy [139] and by inducing reflection through questions and discourse art within transformative rituals [140]. Other reflective processes can be materialised into expressive drawings [69], interviews taken by academics that usually appear at the end of the trip [141], travel blogs [107], and through souvenirs as they offer consumers the opportunity to recreate the tourist experience long after its completion [142].…”

Museums and Sites of Persuasion

“…After Thompson made repeated radio calls to his superiors to report that a massacre was occurring, he landed his aircraft between the advancing US troops and the retreating villagers. The massacre ended only when Thompson threatened to open fire on the American troops if they continued their attacks (Oliver 2006;Hoang 2008;Tamashiro 2018b).…”

Ecovillages as spaces of place-based transformative learning

“…This chapter is based upon retrospective auto-ethnography (Tilley-Lubbs 2009), where autoethnography is understood as a mix of "research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political" (Ellis 2004: xix). Some examples of (related) autoethnographic studies include a critical autoethnography of a doctoral student's research journey (Lynch and Kuntz 2019), a paper reflecting on the journeys of peace pilgrimages (Tamashiro 2018), a 'transformative' autoethnographic account of an adult educator unravelling the implications of cultural identity on learners (Sykes 2013) and one study mentions the value of 'collaborative' autoethnography as a pathway for transformative learning (Blalock and Akehi 2017).…”