Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić Bosnia and Herzegovina 2004 Grantee US - Canada Program PhD in English Language Pedagogy and Intercultural Education from University of Sarajevo
Dr. Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić is Associate Professor at the University of Sarajevo (Teacher Education Program of the Department of English Language and Literature) and has been actively involved in peaceful upbringing; community youth development programs based on psycho-social support for war-traumatized children; the philosophy of peace and nonviolence; and intercultural pedagogy in teacher education, for the past 25 years.
During the war in Bosnia (1992-95), as a young teenager and high school graduate, Larisa began her first professional development activities by working as a translator for the Child Mental Health Program of -the International Medical Corps, which helped provide psycho-social support to war-traumatized children. The methods used were mostly focused on arts therapy and the use of creative expression in processing difficult traumatic memories and experiences. In 1995 she joined several other colleagues to co-found a local organization—SEZAM--that provided psycho-social support for war-traumatized children and their families who had been forcibly displaced from different parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The programs in this NGO built on the early work in war trauma and developed different activities and initiatives for peace education and nonviolent communication modules for teachers and schools.
In 2003 Larisa was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship by the US State Department, within the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program, to spend a year at Cornell University where she took courses along with practice-oriented activities within the field of peace education, youth development, and community work. From 2003-2005 she did her master’s studies at Cornell University in International Development, and with the concentration in Education; her master’s thesis focused on Engaging Youth in Community Development: Post- war Healing and Recovery in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina (Cornell University, 2005).
In 2014, she completed her Ph.D. in English Language Pedagogy and Intercultural Education from Sarajevo University. Her doctoral research (2010-2014) focused on Intercultural Communicative Competences of English Language Teachers and Students in Primary and Secondary Schools in Sarajevo Canton (University of Sarajevo, 2014).
In 2006-07 Larisa was a coordinator of the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies “Living together: Education and Intercultural Dialogue,” which was held in Sarajevo, BiH, and gathered close to 800 educators from around the globe. In 2016, she was invited as a guest professor to Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, where she taught courses on Intercultural Learning, Peace Education and Action Research in Education, for one full semester.
Since January 2019, Larisa has been involved in an international research project on Higher Education Pedagogies for Peacebuilding under the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK as a coordinator for the Bosnian branch of the project and as one of the co-investigators along with the professors from Rwanda, Columbia and UK. She is a member of the Society of the Study of English language in BiH, and the Secretary of the Society for the Advancement of the Applied Linguistics in BiH. She is the founder and the president of the Peace Education Hub that was established in February 2020 at the University of Sarajevo (https://peacehub.ba/).
