Danielle Blaylock:
Fighting Prejudice in Belfast
Dani Blaylock recently returned from Belfast, where she worked with the local population to study ways to reduce prejudice.
Doctoral student Danielle Blaylock spent nine months of her fourth year at CGU in Belfast, Northern Ireland—during which she managed to pack in an enormous amount of research on several projects. The host institute in Belfast that sponsored Dani’s work was the Institute for Conflict Research (ICR), an independent research organisation which specialises in working on issues related to conflict, social transformation and social justice.
Among other projects, Dani helped with the initial stages of creating an educational intervention to fight recruitment into extremist groups. The program she helped launch attempts to deter youth from joining paramilitary groups that spur the country’s chronic problems with violence. “You have to get early teens away from the romantic idea of what it means to join these groups,” Dani says. “We were trying to educate thirteen to sixteen year olds about what it really means, and what the life in a paramilitary group is really like.” The program targeted the teens who were most likely to join, often from challenged socio-economic groups.
A more recent but equally pressing issue for both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is immigration and migrant workers. The rapidly expanding economy of Ireland makes it an attractive destination for immigrants looking for their own place in the European Union. The governments of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland are attempting to fight the backlash of prejudice against these new arrivals. “We looked at prejudices within the health system,” Dani says. “Romanians and other Eastern Europeans in the industry are not receiving the same kind of treatment as their colleagues.” The problem is not limited to natives of the European Union, however. “Many Filipino nurses are coming, and are not being treated as well as their Irish counterparts. Many of them actually have superior training, but are faced with worse hours, less pay, and personal discrimination.” She also worked with less successful government programs for reducing prejudice against “travelers,” the countries’ long-standing gypsy populations.
One place she found that programs are having some impact is in the reduction of hate crimes against people of Asian decent on the east side of Belfast. “We conducted an evaluation of the government’s educational programs, and found they are having positive results. Our findings will hopefully lead to increased funding for cultural education programs that improve the lives of people in Belfast.”
The ICR conducted, among other programs, an evaluation of Playing for Peace. The program encourages intercultural relations by teaching twelve to fifteen year olds to place basketball. This U.S.-based program aims to bridge community divides by using the game of basketball to unite and educate children and their communities. The program has been implemented in Cypress, Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa—all areas with tough cultural or religious divides. Dani’s team at the ICR examined ways in which prejudice might be reduced by the program. Were attitudes changed? Were the friendships begun on the court continued outside of the program? Happily, the answers to both questions appear to frequently be “yes.”
Dani even found herself conducting interviews in some of the rare, but successful, areas with mixed religious demographics. “We conducted interviews to find out why these few communities work. It was essentially establishing a baseline of knowledge, to see if their success could be emulated elsewhere in the country.”
“I was involved in everything while I was there, I can’t say enough about ICR and the amazing researchers I worked with,” Dani says. Now back in the United States, Dani continues to make progress towards her Ph.D. while staying very active. Among other projects, she helped organize a pre-conference for the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations before the 2008 Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is currently helping coordinate CGU's Spring symposium on "Extremism and the Psychology of Uncertainty," to be held on Sunday, April 6, 2008.
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