Conflict Resolution Studies
Telephone: (204) 953-3872
k.ridd@uwinnipeg.ca
Karen grew up in Winnipeg, the youngest child of a United Church minister/Religious Studies professor. She attained a BA (Hons) in English at the University of Winnipeg while playing basketball with the Wesmen women’s basketball team. Karen’s interest in peace and global justice led her to find herself - unexpectedly – in a workshop entitled “Clowning for Peace.” Smitten by power of clowning, Karen left formal studies to explore the ways that theatre, and in particular the role of the clown, can change balances of power. To that end, Karen initiated the world’s first therapeutic clowning programme at the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital, clowning for and with children, their families, and the staff.
Karen left hospital work in 1988 (although in 1991 she set up a similar programme in Toronto) to return to active peace work in Central America, where she volunteered with Peace Brigades International, a grassroots NGO which provides nonviolent accompaniment to human rights defenders threatened by political violence. In the course of this work, Karen was arrested and briefly detained during the civil war in El Salvador: her arrest, and subsequent return to jail for a colleague garnered her national and international attention and forced her return to Canada.
Since that time, Karen has expanded her peace work in a variety of areas: she’s lived in Winnipeg’s inner-city, worked with street youth, trained volunteers to accompany refugees returning to Guatemala, visited communities living in hiding in the Guatemalan jungle, studied popular education, taught workshops in Cambodia and Thailand with renowned US writer and activist George Lakey, guest-taught at Ouyporn Khuankaew’s International Women’s Partnership in Mae Rim Thailand, lived in community in rural Manitoba, worked as a mediator and trainer for Mediation Services of Winnipeg, and taught with Training for Change of Philadelphia. She graduated from UW with an MA in Peace and Justice in 2010.
Karen has a highly participatory teaching style that shows the influence of Freire’s popular education. The courses that she has taught include:
Introduction to Conflict Resolution Studies
Violence and Nonviolence
Creative Tools for Social Change
Peace Skills (Canadian School of Peacebuilding)
The Art of Peace-Building
Nonviolent Social Change
Conflict Theory and Analysis
Voluntary Simplicity (International Development Studies)
Karen presently lives in rural Manitoba with her partner Gord McIntyre. They are the unschooling parents of Daniel and Ben, and drive a car that runs on waste vegetable oil.
Recent Presentations:
“Crossing Borders in the Academy: Participatory Education and the Creation of an Alternative Learning Environment”, PJSA Conference, Oct 2, 2010.
“Finding Your Voice”, Orientation at MSC, Aug 25, 2010.
“Classroom Challenges: Reluctant Readers and Silent Classrooms,” MSC, Feb 8, 2011.
“Creating the Interactive Classroom”, MSC, March 15 2011.
Academic Publications:
“Protective Accompaniment” with Craig Kauffman in Peace Review 9:2,1997.
Selected Additional Publications:
“Resistance”, Peace Magazine, Nov/Dec, 1991.
"to be a woman: African women's response to the economic crisis," Video Guide, All Africa Council of Churches, 1993.
“The Hardest Thing is the Unknown” chapter in Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier, ed. Wendy Priesnitz, Life Media, 2008.
“Lost in the Parenting Wilderness”, Life Media, Sept/Oct 2008
“It Takes a Community to Help Children Learn: Creating a Community Learning Centre for Homeschooling Families, with Marilyn Firth and Mona Sobkowich, Natural Life magazine, Jan/Feb 2009.
“There Ought to Be Clowns: Child Life Therapy Through the Medium of a Clown”, The Canadian Association of Therapeutic Clowns, 1987, 2009.
“And Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them: Shakespeare from an Unschooling Lens” Life Learning, March/April 2010.
