Invisible Lights
Impactful Research Illuminating Conflict Zone Children's Rights
Invisible Lights: Illuminating the Opinions of Conflict Zones Young and Disabled Peoples Worldwide and Ensuring their Rights Through Media-based Research and Evidence-based Practice and Policy
Rationale and Aims
Children and youth comprise the majority of conflict zones. Since it is they who are most impacted, the foundation aims to shine the spotlight on media rights and uses that best aid and empower children and youth. Alongside that, the rights of disabled peoples remain sidelined. Together, they remain largely invisible, with even many of the conflict zones in which the former reside, largely invisible themselves. Media constitute relatively accessible and non-threatening tools for intervention, yet scholarship does not adequately address the roles they play and could play for those who live in conflict zones, are displaced by, and/or born as a function of them, and/or are disabled.
Through our research, we aim to transcend typical maximal outcomes sought for young people in the form of resilience and work to empower them to leadership to co-manage and/or end the very conflicts that define the contexts of their lives and socialize them to violence. We attempt to do so by offering our services to organizations out in the field working with young people, policymakers legislating on or about their behalf, and donors working to fund related positive change, who can benefit from our skills and expertise and to other researchers whom want to partner with us to achieve our aims.
To achieve our outcomes, our services conceptualize the intersections between those our outcomes seek to serve, young people, and media and conflict zones along the following three tracks defined by the scope of our work:
Scope
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Young people and the disabled, conflict zones and media as artifacts: the critical understanding of children and youth’s everyday lives, artifact/technology-based uses, practices, reception and production of media in conflict zones and those of the disabled, including as alternative measures of public opinion.
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Young people and the disabled, conflict zones and media as intervention: the assessment and evaluation of how children and youth are social-psychologically and biologically affected and structurally impacted by peace communication interventions.
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Young people and the disabled, conflict zones and media as contents: the critical interpretation of how news, film, and NGO professionals cover and fundraise on behalf of young people in conflict zones and the disabled.