Urban Peace Lab

The Urban Peace Lab (UPL) was founded in August 2016 by Sociologist, Criminologist, and Peaceologist, Dr. Peter K. B. St. Jean to be a university based unit to advance the development of Social Promise, Peaceology, and Better News Research.  It is a research, development, evaluation, training and action unit at North Park University, Chicago. Although it is housed administratively within the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at North Park, it involves scholars, practitioners, and community collaborators from multiple disciplines and sector in society. In August 2017, the UPL occupied its first office location at 307 Magnuson Center, 5000 N. Spaulding Avenue, North Park University, Chicago, 60625. 

The vision of the UPL is to see Social Promise, Peaceology, and Better News Research become well established practices in academic and practitioner aspects of society.

The mission of the UPL is to engage in research, development, training, evaluation, and action initiatives aimed at further establishing Social Promise, Peaceology, and Better News Research.

Some activities of the UPL include periodic organizing of lectures, workshops, training, and other activities on and off campus, organizing an annual Escalating Peace Lecture Series, hosting an annual CHI-PEACE Show in collaboration with the Peaceful World Movement, helping to facilitate the Peaceology Working Group, and helping to advance the development of Peaceology products.

Key Definitions to know in Reference to the Urban Peace Lab:

Better News Research (BNR) (St. Jean 2016): Better news research is a tradition developed by Dr. St. Jean within the epistemology of social promise. It refers specifically to research projects that begin with questions aimed at providing insights into understanding, describing, or explaining how various aspects of society succeed. The first major presentation of BNR was conducted at the 2017 Illinois Sociological Association (ISA) Meeting held at Decatur, IL. It featured three panels and eleven presentations on topics such as the following: Peaceology, Devenge (revenge without violence), Decidivism (as opposed to recidivism), Success in Chicago Underfunded Schools, Poverty and Peace, Youth Gang Avoidance, and Visual Urban Peaceology. During the 2018 ISA meeting, Dr. St. Jean and his students presented their research on similar subjects. To help build the traction of Social Promise, Peaceology, and Better News Research, as the President of the ISA in 2018-19 and 2019-20 respectively, Dr. St. Jean has selected the respective themes for those meetings: Social Promise and Peaceology in 2019, and Better News Research in 2020.

Peaceology (St. Jean, 2016): The sience and practice of making peace profitable.

Profit: A return that is larger than its deposit.

Quality of Life: Pathways of development in reference to 8 major components of life: Cultural, Environmental, Economic, Physiological, Political, Psychological, Social, and Spiritual. 

Social Promise (St. Jean 2015): An epistemology (way of knowing) that seeks answers to empirical questions by asking why conditions are not worse. Dr. St. Jean developed social promise as a way to bring balance to social science research that seems to primarily focus on social problems. He argues that while it is true that the discipline of Sociology began with developing scientific approaches to better understand and address a series of social problems after the French Revolution, it has primarily remained in social problems mode since then. As a result, current social science knowledge is more associated with understanding how various aspects of society fail, rather than how they succeed. For instance, much is known about the development of violence, but little is known about the development of peace. Considerable research focuses on racism, bigotry, and intolerance, but comparatively little is known about the inner workings of the opposite realities. Inquires associated with social problems typically focus on understanding, describing, and explaining how and why certain social problems come about, with hopes of using such knowledge to diminish or eliminate them. Using relevant social problems research as points of departure, social promise research typically begins  with extensive review of social problems literature, and highlighting its findings, then asks, why the problems are not even worse. For instance, as a social promise project, the CHI-Peace Initiative begins by asking, given all that we know about socioeconomic, racial, family structure and other demographics in Chicago, why isn't there even more violence in the city. The idea, as Dr. St. Jean explains in his 2017 TEDx talk, this question provides direct insights into understanding the factors associated with curative solutions.

Success: Pathways associated with improving quality of life.