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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
In majority of the households, decision on items to cook is done predominantly by housewives and thus, their knowledge about healthy food is a key factor in deciding food consumption pattern and hence, overall family health.The current study, based on data collected through a semi-structured interview schedule from 84 currently married women of the district of Balasore in India, selected through a multi-stage sampling process, aimed at analyzing the level of and factors associated with women's awareness about healthy diet and eating practices.It was observed that affluent, educated and urban respondents were more aware of healthy eating habits, while the large chunk of economically and educationally disadvantaged samples were backward in their awareness level and more seriously; such respondents were highly complacent about the healthiness of their diet.All it asks for is a need and behavior based nutrition education intervention especially in rural areas of the district.
In majority of the households, decision on items to cook is done predominantly by housewives and thus, their knowledge about healthy food is a key factor in deciding food consumption pattern and hence, overall family health.The current study, based on data collected through a semi-structured interview schedule from 84 currently married women of the district of Balasore in India, selected through a multi-stage sampling process, aimed at analyzing the level of and factors associated with women's awareness about healthy diet and eating practices.It was observed that affluent, educated and urban respondents were more aware of healthy eating habits, while the large chunk of economically and educationally disadvantaged samples were backward in their awareness level and more seriously; such respondents were highly complacent about the healthiness of their diet.All it asks for is a need and behavior based nutrition education intervention especially in rural areas of the district.
In majority of the households, decision on items to cook is done predominantly by housewives and thus, their knowledge about healthy food is a key factor in deciding food consumption pattern and hence, overall family health.The current study, based on data collected through a semi-structured interview schedule from 84 currently married women of the district of Balasore in India, selected through a multi-stage sampling process, aimed at analyzing the level of and factors associated with women's awareness about healthy diet and eating practices.It was observed that affluent, educated and urban respondents were more aware of healthy eating habits, while the large chunk of economically and educationally disadvantaged samples were backward in their awareness level and more seriously; such respondents were highly complacent about the healthiness of their diet.All it asks for is a need and behavior based nutrition education intervention especially in rural areas of the district.
This study investigated the clothing storage practices of women living in tribal areas of Udaipur.Specifically the study determined: storage facilities and materials used by the women; ways they store different types of clothing articles, clothing practices.The study adopted a survey research design.The area of study was 'Jhadol' Tehsil of Udaipur district.A sample of 120 respondents was used for study.Questionnaire, interview and informal discussions were used as tool for data collection.Data were analyzed using frequency and percent.Findings include that clothing selection was highly influenced by socio-religious factors, sixty-three percent respondents bought clothes for themselves, and fifty-one percent purchased clothing from open air market.Tribal women were least aware of brand names.Majority of them were affected by fashion, fitting, colour and price.Iron boxes (85%), ropes string (59%) and storing in tight wrappers (64%) was used for storing purpose.Only twelve percent used mulmul fabric to wrap heavy clothes before storage and similar percent was aware about the importance of clean and dry storage areas.It is recommended that proper guidelines should be given to tribal women through workshops, training programmes to improve clothing storage practices.
This article poses the question of whether a ‘Culture of Equality’ might emerge through a progression of moves which bring greater equality to existing structures of gender inequality, or if something altogether more radical is necessary? Considering machismo in the south of Brazil, it moves beyond an analysis of women’s resistance to machismo and towards a focus on the ways in which women use machismo productively, even turning it to their advantage. In this formulation machismo becomes a productive site within which women who understand the rules of this folk model of patriarchy are able to not only play its games successfully, but also construct their own gendered, and in their view ‘modern’, lives. This however leaves us with the unanswered question of whether this is sufficient, or just a beginning?
ABSTRACT This article is an attempt to identify and reflect upon the accountabilities and practices that arise from my research on menstrual apps. Employing Haraway’s concept of multispecies response-ability and drawing on the field diary that accompanied the research process, this text can be situated somewhere in between autoethnographical exploration and theoretical reasoning of how to determine responsibilities and implement ethical responses. After a short introduction of multispecies response-ability and period tracking apps, I pay close attention to my affective and sensory perceptions during the fieldwork. I then identify concrete practices of response-ability and acknowledge the limitations I have encountered in the field. Finally, I briefly draw on the figure of the cyborg to conceptualise the complex intertwinings of bodies and technologies.
Sport is a mirror of society and vice versa. From this perspective, this article highlights the continued existence and impact of biologist and essentialist discourses, hegemonic masculinity, and formal rules based on socially constructed gender differences in sport. Based on a literature review of gender and sport and through utilising a feminist analysis, I conclude that as long as sport remains an arena where gender inequalities are naturalized and normalized, as well as a sphere dominated by masculine structures of power, actions towards equality may have little impact. In this way, the article addresses some of the challenges for considering sport as a site for gender equality. This gains importance due to the importance of sport nowadays and to the existing expectations that it can deliver positive social outputs.
This paper explores the way in which women of colour writers are changing the face of science fiction (sf), both by their mere presence within the genre and through the hybridisation of ‘hard science’ fiction with spirituality, mythology and indigenous scientific literacies from Africa and the Caribbean. The methodology adopted in this paper is a textual analysis of literary and visual media, with specific focus on the geographical, historical and cultural contexts of these texts and of the narrative traditions from which they emerge. Focusing on Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), British-Jamaican author Jennifer Marie Brissett’s ‘Kamanti’s Child’ (2016), and Kenyan writer and director Wanuri Kahiu’s short-film Pumzi (2009), I will argue that global variations on the genre are correcting myopic understandings of what sf looks like, both as a ‘science’-forward branch of speculative fiction and as a traditionally white/male discipline. The result is a healthy genre re-brand, in which mythology and spirituality is set against a backdrop of technology to specifically stress the relevance of women of colour in the future.
This study investigated the clothing storage practices of women living in tribal areas of Udaipur.Specifically the study determined: storage facilities and materials used by the women; ways they store different types of clothing articles, clothing practices.The study adopted a survey research design.The area of study was 'Jhadol' Tehsil of Udaipur district.A sample of 120 respondents was used for study.Questionnaire, interview and informal discussions were used as tool for data collection.Data were analyzed using frequency and percent.Findings include that clothing selection was highly influenced by socio-religious factors, sixty-three percent respondents bought clothes for themselves, and fifty-one percent purchased clothing from open air market.Tribal women were least aware of brand names.Majority of them were affected by fashion, fitting, colour and price.Iron boxes (85%), ropes string (59%) and storing in tight wrappers (64%) was used for storing purpose.Only twelve percent used mulmul fabric to wrap heavy clothes before storage and similar percent was aware about the importance of clean and dry storage areas.It is recommended that proper guidelines should be given to tribal women through workshops, training programmes to improve clothing storage practices.
Defining contemporary social movements as 'Twitter revolutions' has become increasingly common. A wide array of studies, however, suggest that social media and political participation have a complex relationship that cannot be reduced to easily intelligible causal links. Based on Gerbaudo's choreography of assembly and Butler's performative theory of assembly, this paper will firstly explore the case in favor of an understanding of Twitter as a place where people can perform their political claims and enact resistance. Based on Fuchs' asymmetrical political attention economy of capitalism, this paper will then put forward the argument that inequality in access to visibility substantially hinders Twitter's potential as a space for political engagement. Based on this framework, this paper will finally offer a short review of two recent cases of Twitter activism, and namely the Ni Una Menos feminist movement in Argentina and the Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall student movement in South Africa.
Globally, understandings and experiences of masculinity have drawn significant attention and critique, generating lively academic debate and scholarship over the past several decades. However to date there has been relatively little such debate pertaining specifically to constructions and experiences of situated masculinities in Bangladesh. Going some way towards filing this lacuna, in this article we explore and articulate constructions of masculinities among and within the households of construction workers in Sylhet, Bangladesh. These workers – both male, and, to an even greater extent, female workers – are particularly situated in a relatively marginal position within Bangladeshi society in terms of their socio-economic, educational and cultural capital. Based on ethnographic research carried out with 40 female construction workers and 20 male construction workers and husbands of female construction workers in Sylhet, Bangladesh, we investigate constructions of masculinities in a patriarchal context which is undergoing rapid socioeconomic transformations.
ABSTRACT In this practical methodological piece I provide an illustration of what form gender analysis training might take. This is an example of training that I have devised and employed in various ways and formats in my work with a range of NGOs and non-statutory organisations in the UK. I offer this overview merely to allow readers to see what gender analysis training might look like, and how it might be planned for a one day training delivery. There are multiple ways one might construct and organise gender analysis training depending on the specific needs and particular remit of a given client. Here I provide one example of such training that focuses particularly on engaging clients in reflecting on their own processes of gendering, how their own gendered positionalities and intersectional identities influence and affect their lived experiences, attitudes towards others and normative understandings of gender roles, responsibilities and, ultimately of power.
This paper explores the application of intersectionality in gender+ training. I present findings from research on the translation and transfer of feminist and gender knowledges, drawing from in-depth interviews with gender trainers working in Europe and internationally across private, public and civil society contexts. I outline the use of intersectionality by trainers as a theoretical, analytical and methodological paradigm. These equality actors call for historicization, a recouping of the genealogy of intersectionality and increased attention to the interrelation of systems of power and oppression over time. I apply an emic approach to intersectionality in training scenarios. This is grounded in responsiveness to workshop participants and is supported through affective connection and participatory learning. Dialogue between intersectional subject positions, including that of the trainer, is key to processes of knowledge exchange, reflexivity and social change. Finally, I consider the implications of these insights for engaged pedagogy and transformation oriented praxis.
