Vaughn John

Educator and researcher Vaughn John is a leading figure in peace and justice education in Africa and beyond. A professor in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, he was recently appointed to the South African Research Chair: Peace and Justice Education. As an activist-scholar in a context of long histories of dehumanization and extreme levels of violence and injustice, John seeks to harness education for peace, justice, and humanization in southern Africa and more broadly. His major contribution is responsive, practical, and engaged scholarship in peace and justice education.

After political violence struck KwaZulu-Natal in the 1980s, John set up a peace education program at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), where he teaches. Over the course of three decades, the program has developed more than twenty peacebuilding interventions in the areas of community peacebuilding, community mediation, xenophobia, bullying, and more, for community, school, and post-school settings. These interventions combined with research have created a peace education praxis.

While John was setting up this program, he also developed what is his greatest contribution to the field of adult education: internationally recognized scholarship in the crucial but underdeveloped field of transformative peace education. The title of his inaugural lecture, “Troubling Violence: A Praxis for Transformative Learning,” captures the golden thread running through his research. He explores, on one hand, the different kinds of violence that trouble society and development but, more crucially, asks how we as critical educators and citizens may also “trouble violence” for the purposes of disruption, humanization, and creating hopeful alternatives. John’s scholarship has developed along three lines of inquiry: critical peace education, participatory pedagogy and research, and Afrocentric transformative learning theory.

Before his focus on peace education, John delved into applied and policy-oriented research. He looked particularly at political violence in Natal and supporting communities and organizations affected by state-sponsored war. Much of this work appeared as reports used by local and international media, law firms, humanitarian organizations, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. John also became an expert in case study research, drawing on participatory pedagogy and participatory methodology, which have allowed for the generation of decolonized and Afrocentric knowledge.

In addition to his work in peace and justice scholarship, John chaired a national task team that developed South Africa’s first qualification on conflict transformation. He also served on an international task team that developed a master’s program for the United Nations’ University for Peace. He served two terms as co-convener of the Peace Education Commission of the International Peace Research Association and is a founding member and trustee of the KZN network of the Alternatives to Violence Project. Among other honors, he was recognized in 2018 for excellence in teaching from the UKZN College of Humanities and excellence in research, community engagement, and teaching portfolio from the university’s School of Education.

John maintains that adult education, including peace education, could be conceptualized as care work. His theorization of adult education and learning in contexts of violence, fear, and trauma contribute to the many areas of critical praxis across disciplines and society. In the midst of growing violence and inequality in the world, John is the rare scholar who works to trouble violence to foster hope and humanization.