May 1, 2008

Whitworth's James Waller to Teach Genocide Prevention to 'Front-Line' International Leaders

Multinational team to lead inaugural seminar on the grounds
of former Auschwitz death camp in Poland

Whitworth Professor of Psychology James Waller, Ph.D., will teach in the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation's inaugural genocide-prevention training seminar, to be held on the grounds of the former Auschwitz death camp outside of Krakow, Poland. During the May 12-20 seminar, 20 junior-level government officials from around the world, including two from China, will engage with noted scholars, legal and human-rights experts, activists and policy makers to learn about the early warning and prevention of genocide.

"For all academics talk about genocide awareness and prevention, most of that talk is done amongst ourselves," Waller says. "What is distinctive about this program is its front-line strategy to teach genocide awareness and prevention to the very people who can actually make a difference – current and future policymakers. This is a significant opportunity for me to be part of a multinational, interdisciplinary team educating world leaders."

The AIPR seminar is being run in conjunction with the Auschwitz Museum, which is supported by the Polish government, and will be presented three times in 2008 and five times per year thereafter; participants will undergo seven days of training that will take place in one of the camp's prison dormitories.

"The program's effectiveness will be fueled by the 'power of place' at Auschwitz," Waller says. "Teaching genocide prevention on the grounds of one of the most notorious killing spots of recent history will bring an immediacy and urgency to the discussions."

Waller's AIPR teaching appointment arose from his summer 2007 travels to Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he chaired a panel and delivered a paper on perpetrators of genocide at the biennial meeting of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Waller participated in a pre-conference seminar held at Auschwitz, where he presented a paper focused on the death camp's Nazi doctors. While in Sarajevo, Waller worked with the International Commission on Missing Persons to excavate a recently discovered mass grave near Potachari, which, Waller says, was "a very powerful way of seeing firsthand the consequences of what I study."

The AIPR is directed by philanthropist Fred Schwarz, of New York City. Its council members include Juan Mendez, former United Nations special advisor on the prevention of genocide, and Michael Berenbaum, former director of the Research Institute of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Teachers will vary from seminar to seminar; in addition to Waller, Mendez and Berenbaum, teachers who will take part in the inaugural seminar include Phil Zimbardo, psychology professor emeritus at Stanford University and former president of the American Psychological Association; Janice Kaminer Reznik, president of Jewish World Watch; Ben Kiernan, of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale; and Sheri Rosenberg, director of the Human Rights & Genocide Clinic and director of the Program in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies at the Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.

The AIPR program's inaugural group of teachers has designed the seminar curriculum so it can be delivered by other instructors leading future classes. The instructors' course modules will provide direct and practical "take-away lessons" that participants can apply in their own work as foreign-policy practitioners and that will help them recognize and respond more effectively to threats of genocide and mass atrocities. AIPR's goal for the classes is to foster an active learning environment that will engage participants in joint problem-solving and help build a community that will persist beyond the conclusion of the seminar.

Participants' active engagement is especially important because the seminar will be an emotionally and intellectually overwhelming experience, not only because of its physical setting at Auschwitz, but also because participants will take part in six to eight hours of daily instructional programming on the topic of genocide for seven days straight, without respite.

In addition to Waller's annual teaching with the AIPR, he is serving as program chair for the June 2009 biennial conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, to be held in Kigali, Rwanda. In June 2008 he will teach for the second consecutive time at the annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill. In 2007 he was selected as the recipient of the First Voice Humanitarian Award from the Chicago Center for Urban Life & Culture.

Waller is currently completing a book-length manuscript, tentatively titled Deliver Us from Evil: Genocide and the Christian World. In March of 2007, Oxford University Press released the revised and updated second edition of his book Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (the first edition was published in 2002). The book was selected as a finalist for the Raphael Lemkin Award for Outstanding Book Published in 2001-02 from the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and it is used by universities worldwide in dozens of courses on Holocaust and genocide studies. Becoming Evil will be translated into Hungarian in 2010. 

Waller holds a Ph.D. in experimental social psychology from the University of Kentucky and joined the Whitworth faculty in 1989. From 2003-07, he served as Whitworth's Edward B. Lindaman Chair, an endowed, rotating chair for senior Whitworth faculty who are engaged in significant regional and national academic initiatives and who contribute to public dialogue concerning important social issues. He is founder of the university's Prejudice Across America study program, which he leads every other year, and the study program Peace and Conflict in Northern Ireland, which began in 2006.

In addition to his book Becoming Evil, Waller is the author of Prejudice Across America (University Press of Mississippi, 2000) and Face to Face: The Changing State of Racism Across America (Perseus Books, 1998).

Located in Spokane, Wash., Whitworth is a private, liberal-arts university affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). The university, which has an enrollment of 2,600 students, offers 53 undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Contacts:

James Waller, professor of psychology, Whitworth University, (509) 777-4424 or jwaller@whitworth.edu.

Julie Riddle, public information officer, Whitworth University, (509) 777-3729 or jriddle@whitworth.edu.