Transformation through Participatory Cinema: Working Creatively with Indigenous Youth through the Migrant Museum (Mumi) in Chiapas

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on research processes that combine creative activism, social science methodologies and visual anthropology as part of the GlobalGRACE Project’s (globalgrace.net) research conducted in the Highlands of Chiapas, south eastern Mexico. This research has been conducted with indigenous young people working with the NGO Voces Mesoamericanas and through the Museo Migrante (MuMi). MuMi is a space that draws on stories and artistic practices to strengthen and articulate initiatives and knowledges of indigenous communities who live in contexts of disappearance, detention and human rights violations. Through participatory research we explore indigenous migratory experiences that are intersected by gender, ethnicity, class and age. Participatory art and video are used to create a historical memory made by and about indigenous migrants to reflect on historically rooted exploitation, socio-cultural, political, economic and gender-based marginalisation, the worsening migration phenomenon in the region in recent years, and to discuss better possibilities for the future.

Creative Community Activism in Global Contexts

ABSTRACT In this introduction to this special issue about creative community activism in global contexts, we draw together key conceptual and methodological principles of this collection. We begin from the standpoint that equality is a cultural artefact, a socio-cultural and political product specifically located in time and space and as such subject to creation and re-creation. Creative activism offers us a medium to both engage with and take action on issues of culture and gender in/equality. Through the creative activisms explored here, communities, researchers, and artists combine social action with creativity and arts to challenge inequalities, promote positive futures, and enable socio-cultural wellbeing in innovative ways that can be simultaneously engaging and participatory, and decolonising and democratising. They underscore how through creative activism hierarchies of power and knowledge production and lived experiences of in/equalities can be explored, understood, and contested.

Aesthetic Grammars of Social Justice: Sex Work Reimagined

ABSTRACT Against a backdrop of the persistence of coloniality through structural forms of privilege and bias across socioeconomic manifestations, inequality and racial stratification of labour in South Africa, creative activism offers a lens, voice and perspective of sex workers. We relate these glimpses to rehumanisation and re-membering, challenging historically distinct modes of turning humans into objects as part of decolonial possibilities. We seek to make decolonization a praxis of making human and hence we ask two central questions: what provocations arise from aesthetics of creative activism? And what might rehumanizing/re-membering concretely mean? We consider these questions through an analysis of the activism, exhibitions and performance with participant sex workers that formed part of the GlobalGRACE project launch in South Africa. Ultimately, we argue that art practices fundamentally engage the imagination and open up possibilities for re-imagining, re-storying and re-centering marginalized knowledges.

Where is My Sweet Potato? Creating Change through Forum Theatre with Street Children in Burundi

ABSTRACT This paper examines the innovative use of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (Forum Theatre) with a group of 30 street children and young people in East Africa. Drawing upon a project in Burundi, this paper reveals how participants utilized the process of performance making through Forum Theatre as a platform to make visible problems in their lives, and a vehicle to challenge inequalities, abuse and violence. The authors demonstrate how the adoption of this methodology raised questions about interactive theatre as creative activism and a tool for opening up possibilities for dialogue with a community-based audience. This paper illuminates ways in which street children, explored, examined and problematized their lived experience, through the creative lens of Forum Theatre. It argues that this methodology generated a sense of collective consciousness, through which the children and young people created personal and social change, which extended beyond the life of the project.

Memory Written on the Streets: Graffiti and Pixação as Knowledge Production in Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT In this paper the author introduces graffiti in Rio de Janeiro as a method for creative activism, drawing on scholarly work and her experience since 2015 as a graffiti writer. Combining these elements, the author demystifies graffiti and untangles the multiple prejudices attached to this peripheral artistic culture. Locating graffiti within its roots in Hip Hop culture and drawing upon the memories and experiences of seven graffiti artists she introduces theories of memory and knowledge production to analyze the role of graffiti in constructing and deconstructing the city and its culture. The artists in this paper recount stories of how gender, race, and class have structured Brazilian graffiti and the reactions that it provokes, constructing a storyline stretching from the 1990s until today, a registry of knowledges about the culture of the city which have been constructed through an art which is always and already a form of activism from the periphery.

Creative Activism, Creating Pleasure: The Power of Emotion in Participatory Research

ABSTRACT In this paper the authors consider the power of emotion in participatory research and explore feelings of pleasure and joy that were experienced through processes of creative activism by researchers, trainers and participants during their involvement in feminist qualitative research conducted as part of the Global Gender and Cultures of Equality project (GlobalGRACE project: globalgrace.net). Specifically, we focus on one of the research projects within GlobalGRACE concerned with ‘Women Working in Men’s Worlds’. This project is working through participatory film and photography to enhance gender equality and wellbeing with a group of female construction workers based in Sylhet, north eastern Bangladesh. Here we are particularly interested in the dynamics of overlapping emotions: pleasure, friendship and joy that emerged during the course of the study and the experiences of three groups of participants: the research team, the group of young male audio-visual trainers, and the participant women.

Rewriting Postcards: Experiments in Collaborative Transnational Curation

ABSTRACT Since their invention, picture postcards have played a key role in circulating racist and imperial ideologies. In this paper, the researcher explores how experiments in producing and exchanging postcards used in the Global Gender and Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE) project attempted to subvert traditional anthropological and colonial perspectives. Drawing on examples created for the exhibition Exchanging Cultures of Equality held in London in 2018, the author discusses how GlobalGRACE researchers in six different countries individually and collectively sought to disrupt and challenge historical imaginaries using postcards. The creative process required them consider how they might differently visualize, articulate, and publicly share ideas about their work and field sites while also asserting the value of transnational exchange. The researcher argues that critical reflection on the tensions and challenges that arose from this transnational collaborative experiment are both productive and necessary in informing further and new decolonising engagements with postcards