Realizing Conflict Zone Children's Rights
Invisible Light
TM
Invisible Light Rationale and Aims
Children and youth comprise the majority of conflict zones. Since it is they who are most impacted, Invisible Light aims to shine the spotlight on media rights and uses that best aid and empower children and youth. These populations remain largely invisible, with even many of the conflict zones in which they reside being 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, disabled, and/or born as a function of them.
Human beings fail to see the invisible part of the light spectrum. At Invisible Light we seek to use media- and communication-driven research to help realize the human and, in particular, communication and education rights of these so-called invisible humans and zones. That means ensuring those ignorant of them are made fully aware, and can vividly conceive of conflict zones young people as what they indeed are, REAL. We seek to do so to ensure their rights, which they already (should) have, are brought into concrete existence.
Through our research, we aim to transcend typical maximal outcomes sought for young people in the form of "resilience." Instead, we 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 non-governmental and governmental organizations out in the field working with young people, policymakers legislating on or about their behalf, and donors working to fund related positive change, all of whom can benefit from our skills and expertise, and to other researchers, in or beyond academia, who may want to partner with us to achieve our same aims.
To achieve our outcomes, our services conceptualize the intersections between those our outcomes seek to serve—young people, media, and conflict zones, along the following three tracks defined by the scope of our current work:
Invisible Light Current Scope of WOrk:
1. Young People, 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, including as alternative measures
of public opinion.
2. Young People, Conflict Zones, and Media as Intervention ("PeaceComm"):
The assessment and evaluation of how children and youth are social-psychologically and
biologically affected and structurally impacted by peace communication (including peace tech
and peace media and ICT4D) intervention.
3. Young People, 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.