Students

Hannah Adamson, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution, is one of 62 recipients nationwide awarded a fellowship by The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi.

Hannah Adamson knew after an 8th-grade trip to Washington, D.C., that the capital region was the place for her. She is graduating this May with a bachelor of arts in conflict analysis and resolution.

Graduate students at Mason Square (formerly Arlington Campus) recently attended Movers and Shakers, a professional networking event with Arlington’s business, government, and community leaders.

Despite being more than 5,000 miles away from the war in Ukraine, students at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution are actively assessing the conflict dynamics, with hopes that their research could improve the situation.

As a junior and senior at Annandale High School in Virginia, Emily Sample spent her summers as a docent at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was a teenager who had just lost a friend to police violence, she said, and joining the museum’s Young Ambassadors Program resonated with her.

“I was fascinated and continue to be fascinated by this highly illogical idea of genocide,” said Sample, a PhD candidate at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Arturo Barrera is receiving his bachelor’s in conflict analysis and resolution. He said Mason supported him before he was a freshman.

Isidore Nsengiyumva, only four years old at the time, was in the fields with his father and older brother in Burundi, when suddenly they heard the sound of motors and guns. Troops involved in the country’s civil war attacked their village, and rapidly, their lives were changed.

“We hid in a bush, and when the noise of the guns and fighting subsided, we went back and found our home burned,” Nsengiyumva said. “That’s when my dad decided it was no longer safe.”

A cultural immersion trip in 2008 brought Charles Davidson (PhD ’19) inside the walls of San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia. What he saw there not only changed his life, he said, but ignited a spark of inspiration that led to peacebuilding efforts around the world.

As a child, Nathaniel Socks said he was restless, and could often be found tapping his hands on nearby objects. His mom enrolled him in drum lessons in second grade, he said, which led to his favorite hobby—one that taught him valuable life lessons.

“I got to see how if you put in hard work and dedicate yourself to something really hard, how cool the product can be,” the incoming George Mason University freshman said. “That was one thing that really got me into drumming—you can see the progression of practicing.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it so most museums are closed, but students and researchers at George Mason University’s John Mitchell, Jr. Program (JMJP) are working hard to create a digital one that sheds light on civil rights pioneers with largely untold stories.

Thanks to an $8,000 grant from Virginia Humanities, the team is building a digital exhibit on the life of anti-lynching advocate John Mitchell, Jr., and his colleagues Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells. The grant is part of $181,500 in funding awarded to 25 nonprofits.