CHIBOW Network Awarded the Ralf Dahrendorf Prize!
The CHIBOW network has been granted this year’s Ralf Dahrendorf Prize for European research by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The Dahrendorf Prize celebrates exemplary research and its circulation among the public. The BMBF provides awards every two years to researchers whose engagement in EU projects produces outstanding, fruitful work.
Funding brings new, important opportunities to platform knowledge and shape wider understandings of the experiences of children born of war in public spheres. Through partnership between the Universities of Leipzig and Birmingham and the collaboration of LOFFT-Das Theater, this venture will progress the CHIBOW network into other artistic and accessible areas. The Leipzig-based non-profit production company, LOFFT, supports and helps organise free and experimental performances by independent groups and artists. Its Director, Anne-Cathrin Lessel, will guide the crucial performance aspects of the initiative.
Professor Heide Glaesmer, lead of Psychotraumatology and migration research at the University of Leipzig expressed her joy: I am delighted to receive this award, which honours the work of 15 researchers from various European institutions and will now bring our research findings to the attention of the public. We intend to use the prize money to initiate an interactive European theatre project that communicates the diverse and frequently challenging experiences of children born of war, and thereby we hope to contribute to overcoming the silence that surrounds children born of war in post-conflict societies.
Professor Sabine Lee of Modern History at the University of Birmingham describes how, At its core, this doctoral research network was as much about progressing our knowledge about the experiences of children born of war as it was about training a generation of international and interdisciplinary researchers as it was about participatory approaches that allowed children born of war themselves to shape the research agenda and the dissemination of new knowledge to their own home communities and beyond. We are excited about this award that will allow us to build on the extensive network of academic and third-sector partners to broaden and deepen this dissemination further.
