#ImaginingOtherwise: hope as a critical resistance

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Aylwyn Walsh will talk about her artistic engagement with artists and young people from Cape Town.

About this event

DEPA (Decolonising Peace Education in Africa) webinar series aims to promote dialogue on diverse theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives within Africa. Our next speaker is Dr Aylwyn Walsh.

28 October, Thursday, 2 pm UK time & 3 pm South Africa time

This webinar series explores what other knowledges and values could be used to embed and inform peace education. It thus aims to outline a framework for a decolonised peace education. We will hear from academics, activists and educationalists globally as they debate what is the history of coloniality in different countries and how does this influence peace and conflict as well as its’ deployment in education. It will multiply and amplify voices, especially of young scholars and will share knowledges around local meanings, practices and values of peace. The seminars will engage scholars working in cognate areas such as gender and education for peace, young people’s engagement and leadership and ethical bases for peace.

Aylwyn Walsh will present the key outcomes from a year-long GCRF funded collaborative project. The partners from the Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, BottomUp and the University of Leeds worked with artists to engage young people from Cape Town to explore the specific conflation of race, space and violence in South Africa’s most unequal city. The participants from the Cape Flats alongside young refugees worked intensively using visual arts, creative writing and digital storytelling, asking ‘when we create and make the world, can that assist in redressing the psycho-social effects of poverty, unemployment and rampant violence in educational and activist alternatives?’. In addition to a sharing of arts outcomes, the project produced 3 digital toolkits on films for social change and a youth arts toolkit as well as a glossary of arts education. In this presentation, she will share some of the themes and outcomes from the project, with a specific focus on the importance of critical hope that can emerge through the arts in order to enable activist dimension that can challenge the perniciousness of gender based violence in South Africa – affecting poor and working class communities asymmetrically.

Film: ‘#ImaginingOtherwise Mobile Digital Storytelling toolkit’

See youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/...forActivistEducation

South African scholar-activist Aylwyn Walsh is Associate Professor of Performance and Social Change at the University of Leeds in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. She is programme leader of the MA in Applied Theatre & Intervention and artistic director of Ministry of Untold Stories. Her book Prison Cultures, maps performance, resistance and desire in women’s prisons (Intellect, 2019). She has published in Crime, Media, Culture; Qualitative Inquiry; Cultural Studies ?? Critical Methodologies; RIDE: Journal of Applied Theatre; Journal of Arts and Communities; and Applied Theatre Research. She is currently running #ImaginingOtherwise - a project on youth, violence and arts activism in South Africa with Changing the Story (GCRF/ AHRC).