Project Description

This study investigates how citizenship and peace education can support peacebuilding by centring learners’ lived experiences amid rising violent conflicts globally and nationally. It addresses a gap between young people’s experiences of ethnic and religious intergroup tensions and the citizenship and peace education they receive in Nigerian schools. Focusing on adolescents aged 12–17 in three Lagos mainland communities, that experience intergroup tensions and/or have experienced intergroup violence, the study will employ ethnographic and participatory qualitative methods to explore how students encounter, perceive, and navigate conflict and peace; how they envision acting as peacebuilders; and how school practices and teacher pedagogy support or constrain the development of democratic peacebuilding citizenship capabilities for social cohesion and intergroup conflict transformation. It will centre both students’ and teachers’ voices. Grounded in Fraser’s (2008) justice framework (recognition, redistribution, and representation) and postcolonial perspectives, the study expects to identify gaps and potential bridges between students’ lived experiences and formal curricula, and to generate insights for strengthening democratic peacebuilding citizenship education in diverse and conflict-affected postcolonial societies.

Bio

Adaobiagu Nnemdi Obiagu trained in Education and Law and is licensed to practice both in Nigeria. She has over a decade of experience in university teaching, supervision, administrative duties, and educational research, and has also taught in Nigerian secondary schools across diverse contexts. Her research focuses on the intersections of education, democracy, citizenship, civic engagement, gender, and peacebuilding, with attention to curricular and pedagogical approaches that foster human rights, wellbeing, social cohesion, conflict transformation, nonviolent civic participation, and gender equality. Her publications have appeared in many reputable journals including Theory and Research in Social Education and Human Rights Education Review. She is currently completing her doctoral research as a Vanier Scholar at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto.