Reimagining voice for transrational peace education through participatory arts with South African youth

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a co-produced project based in South Africa which aimed to support the development of youth committees in Safe Parks operating across Ekurhuleni municipality, by building young people’s capacity to claim greater voice within their communities through participatory arts practices. Drawing on recent perspectives in the field of peace education, our analysis engages a transrational onto-epistemology to examine how voice might be understood through participatory arts in this context. To do so, we critique the prevailing modernist, post-Enlightenment perspective on dialogue and voice in critical peace education, and offer a philosophical framework which moves closer to an acknowledgement of the material, embodied, and collective dimensions of voice. We then use the concept of voice to narrate our inquiry, drawing on data from the project alongside theoretical perspectives from new materialism, language and literary studies, and singing studies, to support and structure our different insights into voice as these emerged. From this analysis we present a conceptualisation of voice as both individually uttered and collectively produced, which acknowledges and accounts for the complexity of learning and knowing as a process inseparable from being-in-the-world. We conclude with a consideration of the decolonising potential of transrational approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Voice
• participatory arts
• transrational
• learning
• international development

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Higher Education Funding Council for England/Arts and Humanities Research CouncilGCRF [AH/S005579/1].

Notes on contributors

Lou Harvey

Lou Harvey is Lecturer in Language Education at the Centre for Inclusion, Childhood and Youth at University of Leeds. Lou specialises in learning at the intersection of language and the arts, particularly in intercultural, public engagement and post-conflict contexts, and her current interests lie in theorising the relationship between learning and voice in arts-based, collaborative and co-produced research. She currently leads the international AHRC Research Network Communicating the Unsayable: Learning at the Intersection of Language and the Arts, with colleagues at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and arts and cultural sector partners across the UK and Catalonia. She co-founded and co-convenes the AILA Research Network on Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics

Paul Cooke

Paul Cooke is Centenary Chair of World Cinemas at the University of Leeds and specialises in the politics of representation and voice in World Cinemas. Over the last few years, he has run a number of participatory filmmaking projects supporting young people to explore the legacy of ‘difficult’ pasts. He is currently the Principal Investigator on Changing the Story, a project looking at the ways in which heritage and arts organisations support the development of civil society in post-conflict settings (changingthestory.leeds.ac.uk). He is also working with marginalised groups of young people in South Africa and Lebanon to use film as an advocacy tool, as well as working with public health professionals to use participatory arts to develop community-led solutions to the misuse of antibiotics in Nepal.

The Bishop Simeon Trust is a UK-based charity that has provided support to vulnerable children in South Africa for 30 years. Initially responding to the lack of educational access for children during Apartheid the Trust has adapted to the priority needs of children with a focus on equipping them to be future leaders, maintaining a focus on its founding vision. Today the Trust’s work helps communities to ensure that children can be safe, healthy, access education, be aware of their rights and have the confidence to claim them, using an innovative support model which builds local capacity and uses creative arts to help them to participate in society. Work is focussed in City of Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, to the East of Johannesburg, where the Trust has strong partnerships with local community organisations, state departments, other NGOs and academic institutions.