Mobile Arts for Peace

Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) is a 4-year international, interdisciplinary applied research project, which began in 2020. MAP demonstrates the value of arts-based methods for everyday peacebuilding with and for young people in post-conflict affected countries (namely, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia and Nepal). MAP had the overall goals of first, influencing curricula and approaches to working with in- and out-of-school youth and second, creating structures and modes of communication between youth and policymakers from the local to global. Each country has different histories and approaches to peacebuilding, yet all four have a rich tradition of using cultural forms for dialogue. The project addressed crosscutting issues of gender and intersecting inequalities, environments and the exclusion of children and youth from policymaking processes.

Arts-based methods enhanced dialogue to drive conversations between children and young people and local policymakers, as well as raising awareness of issues with parents and other adult groups. Further, arts-based outputs had powerful impact and effects on local policymakers. MAP had a strong impact on the well-being of children and young people over time, as well as their confidence, understanding and ability to articulate peacebuilding to wider audiences. MAP and the use of arts-based methods creates safe spaces for the sharing of problems and dialogue on their solutions, in a way that is less confrontational than normal conversations between groups may be. These methods have a way of emotionally engaging with audiences and bridging generational, gender, ethnic and other social barriers that may ordinarily prevent positive societal change.

The role of the Youth Advisory Board (YAB) engaging with youth researchers has been part of a considered process that allow children and young people to lead the MAP research work and drive impact. The YAB meets monthly outside of school hours and is led by the children and young people, with facilitation from research teams and in-country adult advocates. The YAB has worked to deliver education and training to children and young people around research methods, ethics, and peacebuilding. Further, the children and young people have worked to develop and co-produce research outputs for the project, including supporting data gathering, research papers, infographic and media-based outputs (i.e. video, animations, songs). The children and young people on the YAB have also supported dissemination activities and will be named authors or acknowledged (as appropriate) on research outputs produced from the project. The intention is for the YAB to continue to function beyond the life of the project, led by the children and young people, so that they continue to own their journey.

MAP has significantly informed curriculum, mental health provision, and the engagement of decision-makers with children and young people through the arts-based methods and outputs. This has led to continued sustainability and the legacy of MAP through the creation of researcher clubs, the implementation of arts-based curriculum into teaching and learning, the training of health care services, and changes in policy-making bodies in terms of creating ongoing platforms for arts-based dialogues with and for children and young people.

1. Young people: The impact on the young people who led the delivery of projects was significant, both in terms of skills and softer outcomes such as well-being. Specifically:

a. Upskilling: young people were supported to develop core skills that will have educational, employability and general life benefits for them. Namely, confidence-building, social and communication skills, and developing expertise in arts-based and digital methods. This enhanced their creativity and ability to function in a team to effectively deliver projects.

b. Reducing trauma: The projects helped to reduce trauma in young people, by enabling them to express their feelings and emotions through arts-based methods in safe spaces alongside their peers. This enabled them to process their past experiences, build empathy with peers around their past experiences, and learn how to effectively communicate this to others in the community.

c. Mental health: The follow-on to this reduction in the effects of trauma was to also build the mental well-being of young people. Young people discussed feeling better emotionally, less anxious and happier in life.

2. Teachers/schools: The projects brought benefits to teacher and schools, through the upskilling of teachers, enhanced learning materials and the building of networks. Specifically:

a. Providing new practice and teaching materials: The projects promoted new practices to teachers/adults that could be applied in their work and built understanding around social problems and how to solve them. It also provided new teaching materials for schools (including those not directly involved in MAP) for use with young people across the four countries.

b. Alternative educational provision: Following on from the above, the use of arts-based materials for peacebuilding in schools, youth clubs and communities provides alternative educational provision, not just for the young people, but for all those in the community who engage with the projects and their outputs. In this way, the projects acted like community education programmes, but with innovative, easy-to-understand and communicate methods.

c. Links to community: The projects created links between schools/youth clubs and the communities, especially parents, local decision-makers and NGOs.

3. Community: As was noted above, the projects acted like community education programmes, raising awareness of social problems, promoting dialogue between stakeholder groups and building empathy. Specifically:

a. Community education and awareness-raising: The projects essentially acted as an amplifier for awareness of and discussions around the social problems within communities. It enabled dialogue between different stakeholder groups and brought understanding of the underlying causes (and possible solutions) to these social problems.

b. Community cohesion: This building of dialogue, creation of networks, development of empathy and coproduction of possible solutions, also enhanced community cohesion.

4. Youth co-produced policy impact: Most of the projects funded across the four countries produced policy briefs, designed to be easily accessible and engaging, which were disseminated to communities, decision-makers, key public officials and across social media. This enabled strong impact and the commitment to do more through institutions to solve problems, including through funding streams being enabled. The young people were also enabled to meet with and disseminate their work to key international stakeholders from UNESCO. This not only disseminated the work completed and its impacts, but also empowered the young people and demonstrated to them that they could influence and drive change even in large, transnational organisations such as the United Nations. The way that MAP enables young people to safely engage through arts-based methods with community leaders, local policy-makers and international partners presents a unique element of the programme. Indeed, it offers many learning opportunities for individuals and organisations working in the peacebuilding (and wider international development) areas, of how to empower and support young people’s voices to be heard.

5. Power of arts-based methods: Ultimately, the strength of the projects rested in their use of arts-based methods, which across the funded projects repeatedly demonstrated their power and value in helping to develop community understanding of problems, build empathy and cohesion and drive wider impact through policy. Indeed, the use of arts-based methods and infographic policy briefs arguably had more impact on changing policies than an academic policy paper could have ever achieved. In engaging the wider communities, the projects also ensured that they built a groundswell of support for the solutions developed.

For more information about MAP, please go to: https://map.lincoln.ac.uk.

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (AH/T008164/1).

Professor Ananda Breed – Professor in Theatre

Professor Ananda Breed has worked as a consultant for IREX and UNICEF in Kyrgyzstan on issues concerning conflict prevention and conducted applied arts workshops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Indonesia, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Palestine, Rwanda and Turkey. She is currently Principal Investigator of Arts and Humanities (AHRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP): Informing the National Curriculum and Youth Policy for Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia and Nepal (2020-2024).