Kanekar Completes Atrocity Prevention Fellowship

After an intense year of study and collaboration, Dr. Amar Kanekar, professor and graduate coordinator of health education and promotion at UA Little Rock, has successfully completed a one-year fellowship focused on atrocity prevention, equipping him with new insights and strategies to address human rights violations worldwide.

Kanekar participated in the 2023-24 Charles E. Scheidt Faculty Fellows in Atrocity Prevention program with the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University in New York. The program was created to engage faculty in a guided process of learning and exploration of the potential for their own disciplines to contribute to atrocity prevention.

"I think the fellowship was well developed," Kanekar said. "I never knew so much research existed in the field of atrocity prevention. The fellowship coordinators were more than happy to help and provide as many resources as we wanted. The fellowship was well worth the time commitment because I learned a lot."

Fellows come from a wide range of academic disciplines, including history, nursing, theater, education, business, data science, comparative literature, language and cultural studies, anthropology, political science, public administration, computer science, and environmental studies.

While Kanekar initially thought the fellowship would be more geared toward political science, he was surprised by how well it fit in with his own area of research.

"I work in public health, and I was surprised by how much we learned about prevention techniques during the fellowship," Kanekar said. "They even talked about borrowing prevention techniques from the public health field, so these two subjects are connected."

Prevention includes strategies that can reduce the likelihood of violence before it starts, mitigate harm and motivate an end to conflicts once they begin, and rebuild in the aftermath of atrocities.

Fellows learn from I-GMAP's faculty, staff, and practitioners at the Institute as well as each other. The program culminates with each faculty member developing or modifying at least one of their own courses to integrate an atrocity prevention lens through innovative and engaged pedagogical approaches.

"I am teaching a summer course that is a special topics course in public health where we discuss a different topic each week like COVID or substance abuse prevention, and we are spending one week talking about atrocity prevention," Kanekar said. "I also teach an Intro to Public Health class, and I could introduce the topic in that class as well. I know there were other faculty members in the fellowship who were dedicating an entire course to this topic."

The goal of the program is for college students to learn effective strategies to prevent atrocities and violence through the courses created and modified by Scheidt Faculty Fellows. Thus, more students will be asked to consider how they can contribute to the prevention of mass atrocities and other forms of identity-based violence throughout their educational and professional careers.

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