Collaborative scenarios
In 2016 colleagues from Action Aid International held a workshop together in South Africa to see if producing imagined collaborative utopian scenarios was a useful way of re imagining the possibilities for the future. They produced the scenarios from a selection of fake creative and evidential prompts - songs, newspapers, interviews, posters for events - that muddled up and recombined different existing governance structures, technological innovations, social norms and inequalities to help them imagine different possibilities for the future. The groups showed their work in different art forms to represent their new worlds.
The first round of creative alternatives workshops continued exploring the possibility of creating future scenarios together, while intentionally thinking about development and human rights ‘from the side on’, with no reference to standardised languages and categorisations (eg sustainability, equality, youth, women, migration, civic space, neo-liberalism etc…).
The second round of workshops explored the
The third round of workshops, part of the follow on funding impact project, put into practise some of the poetry and storytelling exercises used in earlier workshops that had enabled people to step outside their usual performances, and encouraged critical conversations. The emphasis here was less on the production of imagined scenarios - structures - and more on individual motivations to inform future practise, a personalised turn. That self awareness was a critical part of being able to break free from the conventions of history - awareness that we are telling a particular version of history, and whom we are excluding as a result.
Results.
The team found that the imagined scenarios
Collaborative improvised poetry
‘Should I stay or should I go,’ a video collage of performances of a poem by Helena Okiring about diaspora and politics, composed and performed during the workshop in each of the different
Can arts-based research methods and practices disrupt dominant ways of knowing and performing “development,” allowing activists and practitioners to explore different ways of knowing, and to identify and articulate development alternatives. In June and July 2017, a workshop was held with artists and activists from Bangladesh and Uganda to explore this question, led by artist Emilie Flower and researcher Ruth Kelly from the York University Centre for Applied Human Rights.
