Topic: Supporting young people’s resilience to drought: An arts activist approach in South Africa – Selogadi Mampane
Resources: You can read our Blog post
Summary: This workshop will highlight theatre making methodologies in what Makgathi Mokwena and Sara Matchett have called “mapping in processes of theatre making” (2013) as research outputs and community activism. The workshop will draw on theatre processes that can be used as a reflection of data gathering to be expressed as art based outputs for further consideration and policy making. In our research project on Patterns of Resilience to Drought in Leandra, South Africa, youth co-researchers engage in various research activities with an aim of centering community experiences to drought in policy formation. This theatre workshop will focus on “the self as a starting point” (Mokwena and Matchett 2013) using mapping to explore, communicate, share and make sense of personal narratives in relation to wider issues of human security, such as drought.
Biography: Selogadi Mampane is a performer, part-time lecturer, grass-roots arts activist and qualified artist as peacebuilder. She works as a peacebuilder alongside NGOs. Her academic focus is on performance as a tool for activism and research with a focus on hate crimes against Black lesbian women in South Africa. In our project on Patterns of Resilience to Drought she is facilitating our young South African co-researchers with lived experience of adversity to collectively develop image theatre performances from their own experiences of drought.
This session took place on Friday 9 June 2017.
The Resilience Forum is for ANYBODY (with a pulse!) involved with or interested in resilience research
Physical Geographer David Nash from the University of Brighton reports on his work with the GCRF drought project in Leandra, South Africa
David Nash describes his research building a historical timeline of droughts and wetter periods affecting Gauteng and southern Mpumalanga provinces since records began.
Cultural awareness training blog
The Cultural Awareness session was an opportunity to have an open discussion about some of the issues that come up around cultural awareness. Like an iceberg, a lot of what makes up culture are things that we often cannot see or are below the surface.
