UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State faculty Yael Warshel is poised to receive another award in recognition of her book "Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication, and Socialization," published by Cambridge University Press. Warshel will receive the Activism, Communication and Social Justice Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention for her ground-breaking work at the International Communication Association’s 73rd annual meeting on May 26.
Warshel is an assistant professor of telecommunications and media industries and African studies in Penn State’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute and an affiliate faculty member of international affairs, international and comparative education, and Middle Eastern studies. She is also vice president of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), the North and Northwest African Studies Association, a Stanford University-University of California at Berkeley John Gardner Public Service Fellow, and has received two teaching awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) for her educational modules on international communication, international journalism, and peace communication.
This recognition is the second major accolade for Warshel's book examining peace communication and its impact on children living within conflict zones. The book previously earned the Sue DeWine Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the National Communication Association, a recognition for significant contributions to applied communication theory and method.
"Receiving these awards, from flagship international and domestic scholarly associations, from two notably opposing traditions in communication scholarship, is rare. In the first place, few scholars work across the aisles like this, so to speak, and even fewer, try to weave together historically ideologically opposing approaches into one cohesive whole,” said Warshel. "Receiving these awards for my approach underscores the relevance and impact of transdisciplinary work, reminding us that effectively examining complex social issues requires we work backwards from a problem, in this case, armed political conflict, and fuse the insights and approaches of multiple disciplinary traditions, herein, comparatively, globally and self-reflexively, if we are to best have a chance at forging ethically impactful approaches to their resolve."
Warshel's work, praised as being "among the best ... Applied Communication ... has produced," provides a rigorous study questioning the effectiveness of peace communication interventions, specifically focusing on Israeli and Palestinian versions of "Sesame Street." It critically and empirically evaluates the impact of these initiatives, comparatively observing Palestinian, Jewish Israeli and Arab/Palestinian Israeli children’s lives at a grassroots level, and lays a foundation for future research and policy-making in this space.
Panelists for the Activism, Communication and Social Justice Outstanding Book Award highlighted the book’s focus on children in conflict zones as a "much-needed intervention." One panelist noted, "Warshel's work astutely asks whether peace communication interventions can have any relevant social change impact” — a pertinent question at a time when “One in 10 of the world’s children — or more than 230 million — currently live in countries and areas affected by armed conflicts."
Reflecting on the recognition, Warshel said, "I am proud of all the hard work I put into this book, from designing the study for and executing it, to painstakingly conducting and working through Arabic and Hebrew interview and survey responses from children, to critically translating and transcribing those together with their drawings and photographs, and my own ethnographic field notes documenting their mundane lives, all the way to visually illustrating the book and the component closet to my heart, producing the photograph for its cover. I am truly grateful that what I created, transformed into some 500 pages and published by Cambridge University Press, is being recognized internationally by book awards, and honored by the reception it has been receiving. This is truly humbling.”
Warshel added, “For much of its history, the field of communication has avoided the study of conflict, despite that ironically, in many senses, it was born out of conflict, namely, WWII. To a large extent, the field remains rooted in U.S.-based peace time, peace zone approaches and samples, focusing on how Americans feel and think, whether about events happening here, or elsewhere, while ignoring how people elsewhere actually feel and think. Globally engaged efforts like mine were sidelined and received little support. I hope this recognition inspires a shift to the study of conflict zones-based populations, sampling those experiencing such physical and structural violence, and deploying comparative and global, specifically, field-based methodologies, to self-reflexively interpret daily lives of all members of the global community. And since the demographic majority of most conflict zones are young people, I also hope this recognition shifts the tendency to solely explore the lives and political opinions of the demographic minority, adults; whilst ignoring the experiences and public opinion of the majority.”