Comics for change- Peace education through alternative methods, teaching communities about social issues through accessible means.
We hope to use this opportunity to help educate young people in Scotland about critical social issues through storytelling. Intergroup conflict is often perpetuated due to a lack of contact and understanding of groups. Utilising para-social contact theory we hope to develop a series of educational comic books for young people to help prevent and reduce prejudice in Scotland. We believe there is an opportunity to create these tools using tenants of peace education and intergroup contact theory to create a series of stories and resources to help educate Scotland’s youth on critical social issues. The first topic to be tackled would be forced migration due to climate change a topic the university has highlighted as a key issue.
Climate change is and will continue to force millions of people to migrate from their homes. However, there has been an increasingly hostile response to migrants within UK politics and public (Charlemagne, 2022; MacDougal, 2022; Merrick, 2022). The Institute for Economics & Peace, an international think tank, forecasted that there may be as many as 1.2 billion climate refugees globally by 2050 (IEP, 2022). To help mitigate hostility towards migrants coming to Scotland in the future we need to educate people to this topic now. We have produced a short comic and lesson plan and research study on this topic. However, through this program with the universities assistance we would like to develop this idea into an enterprise to create tools for peace education in the forms of books.