Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams

Daria L. and Eric J. Wallach Professorship of Peace and Justice Studies & Associate Professor

Africana Studies

Contact

Email

hwilliam@gettysburg.edu

Phone

(717) 337 - 6694

Box

Campus Box 2451

Address

339 Carlisle St.
Room 203
300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400

Website

Education

EdD Columbia University, 2012
MEd Columbia University, 2006
MA Columbia University, 2005
BA (Hons.) St. Francis College , 2002

Academic Focus

Caribbean Studies, school/structural violence, educational inequity, and peace education

Dr. Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams, native of Laventille, Trinidad and Tobago, is the inaugural Daria L. & Eric J. Wallach Professor of Peace & Justice Studies, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, and faculty affiliate in Educational Studies, International & Global Studies, and Public Policy. He currently serves as the College’s Director of Peace and Justice Studies. Prof. Williams teaches classes on human rights; post colonialism; race, gender and identity; education for social change; Caribbean studies; and globalization.

He completed his B.A. (Honors) in Psychology at St. Francis College, Brooklyn; a Master of Education in Comparative and International Education with a concentration in philosophy of education, and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Education in International Educational Development, with a concentration in peace education, at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research centers on school/structural violence, educational inequities, and youth and community empowerment.

He was the recipient of the Early Career Alumni Award from Teachers College, Columbia University (2019), the inaugural Emerging Scholars Award from the African Diaspora SIG of the Comparative and International Education Society (2017), and the Dr. Ralph Cavaliere Award for Excellence in Teaching from Gettysburg College (2013).

Prof. Williams was a Visiting Scholar (15-16) at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, & Complexity (AC4), Earth Institute (Columbia University) and during the summer of 2017 he taught a week-long class for high school students on human rights as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Prof. Williams was an Associate Editor of the academic journal Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and serves on the Editorial boards of the Journal of Peace Education, InFactisPax, and the International Journal of Human Rights Education, and reviews for several other academic journals. He travels the world conducting restorative circles, workshops on peer mediation /conflict resolution and leadership development with parents, youth, teachers, political leaders, and varied NGOs.

He was the recent recipient of a Fulbright Global Scholar Award and a Spencer Foundation Grant for a research project on decolonial peace and justice education in Jamaica, Ghana, Brazil and the USA (Atlanta, Georgia); he will be a Visiting Scholar (26-27) at the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (Teachers College, Columbia University) during which he will work on a manuscript on this project and offer workshops across NYC on healing.

For more information on Prof. Williams and links to his publications, please see www.hakimwilliams.com.

Courses Taught

Sunny skies, white sands, and mixed drinks with a dash of Bob Marley: that's the image many have of the Caribbean. Once the preeminent site of imperialist expansion and a major cog in the development of capitalism, the Caribbean now sits at the margins of the global economy. This multi-disciplinary course will traverse a geographically tiny, yet politically, historically, and culturally rich terrain. This course seeks to enliven the many other aspects of life in the Caribbean outside of tourism; it will commence with the historical influences of the Indigenous peoples as well as the colonizers, and cover contemporary issues such as international and sustainable development, climate change, race-based politics, and syncretic art forms and religions.
“Everyone has the right to leave any country”; “Everyone has the right to work and to receive equal pay for equal work”; “Everyone has the right to education”: These are excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a document adopted in 1948. This course involves exploration of the rise and spread of human rights; various human rights policies and practices in different parts of the world, with an emphasis on the Caribbean.
This course explores how schooling has made us the people that we are today, and asks if formal education has prepared us for the challenges that we face in this age of globalization. The course assaults the status quo nature of education and challenges us to imagine a pedagogy that is central to social change. This interrogation of education is not meant to raze the entire historical edifice to the ground, but rather to lead us to critically reflect on the far too frequent manifestations of dull educational processes that produce conformists, rather than inspire us to creatively overturn structures of inequities. AFS 264 and EDUC 264 are cross-listed.
Multidisciplinary survey of issues, concepts, and approaches to peace and justice at individual, social, and cultural levels. Topics include models of peace, the nature and causes of conflict, theory and practice of nonviolence, arms and disarmament, international peace-keeping strategies, and the relationship between peace, human rights, and social justice. This course may contain a service learning and/or internship component.
Multidisciplinary survey of issues, concepts, and approaches to peace and justice at individual, social, and cultural levels. Topics include models of peace, the nature and causes of conflict, theory and practice of nonviolence, arms and disarmament, international peace-keeping strategies, and the relationship between peace, human rights, and social justice. This course may contain a service learning and/or internship component.