DEPA Webinar #ImaginingOtherwise: hope as a critical resistance

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.