Radical Performance Knowledge: Co-production in action: arts education beyond ‘disposable youth’

This GCRF project, part of Changing the Story, emerges from a partnership with Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, Bottomup NGO and researchers from  the University of Leeds – Schools of PCI and Geography.

We worked with 25 young people from the Cape Flats and nearby, this project considers how young people in South Africa perceive and respond to the post-Apartheid social and political landscape, examining the arts and education as methods that generate active partnerships to address and transform issues of hopelessness, injustice and lack of visibility among the country’s youth.

We will use this opportunity to share youth voices and some of the learning about the project shifting online due to lockdown.

Our collective greeting poem as we welcome people to join us:

We, who come together in the spirit of activism, driven by injustice;

We, who listen with all our senses and act to make the impossible possible;

We, who laugh, improvise, care, change gears, start again, build anew;

We, who bring our individual skills, concerns and sensitivities together into a collective dream for social justice;

We, who believe that the arts can be radical;

We, who walk in uncertainty with heads held up high form pathways for greatness;

We, who imagine otherwise.

See some of our material on our project page at this link: https://www.tshisimani.org.za/2020/12/10/imagining-otherwise/

These are project partners:

PI Dr Aylwyn Walsh: Associate Professor of Performance and Social Change, School of Performance and Cultural Industries.

Co-I Alex Sutherland: practitioner and coordinator of creativity in activist education

Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education: The centre was established in 2016 to assist social justice movements and activists challenging race, gender and class inequalities.

Co-I: Prof Paul Routledge, Chair in contentious politics and social change, School of Geography, University of Leeds.

BottomUp [Ashley Visagie and Helene Rousseau] - Partner and Impact project lead. Promoting active citizenship and participatory democracy at schools. The organisational mission is to promote active citizenship and participatory democracy with children and youth.