Visiting Professor of Peace Studies
Clark University
About
Sam Diener is a Visiting Professor of Peace Studies and the Education Coordinator at the Center for Nonviolent Solutions.
As an undergraduate, Diener helped create a new peace studies major at Washington University in St. Louis, spoke out as a public draft registration resister, volunteered at a program to confront men-who-batter, and was a core member of the student group that convinced the board of trustees to partially divest from apartheid South Africa. He served 100 days in jail after sitting-in at the world headquarters of General Dynamics, one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world.
As a peace practitioner, Diener has led nonviolent direct action trainings for participants coast-to-coast, and co-organized and co-led nonviolent direct action training-for-trainers sessions. Diener served on the National Committee of the War Resisters League (www.warresisters.org) for 25 years. As a man working to end men's violence, Diener transformed a men's consciousness-raising group into an activist and educational organization that today is one of the largest pro-feminist groups in the country (www.mencanstoprape.org). Diener is the co-founder of the GI Rights Hotline (www.girightshotline.org), and co-coordinated national campaigns against JROTC expansion and mobile military recruiting. Diener has initiated many successful Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover military data, and edited The Objector and Peacework magazines (www.peaceworkmagazine.org).
As a nonviolence educator, he has: led workshops on nonviolent conflict transformation for three year olds (and early childhood educators); taught history and peace studies in two inner-city high schools; was the conflict intervention coordinator in a large public middle school where he developed an anti-bullying and anti-teen dating violence program that was praised by the Massachusetts Department of Education as a model for the state; led Educators for Social Responsibility's Stories Program (www.esrnational.org) teaching teachers to deepen literacy and teach conflict transformation skills through literature, and helped establish peer mediation programs; taught US History at Bunker Hill Community College; led seminars on nonviolence and pro-feminism for adults at the Institute for Policy Studies Washington School (www.ips-dc.org); and has been a guest lecturer and speaker at colleges from Vermont to Honolulu (where he also led a workshop for university professors on nonviolent pedagogies).
