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Contribution short abstract

The use of performance art as a tool for disclosure in service of social and protest movements has grown during the last 30 years. Pedagogically approaching this trend allows us to examine the processes of collective reframing that it activates and promotes, as well as his potential for change.

Contribution long abstract

In recent decades, social movements have increasingly incorporated performing arts into their repertoires of contention, transforming protest into an aesthetic, embodied, and relational practice. Performative artivism functions not merely as a symbolic language but as a pedagogical dispositif that produces learning through bodies, affects, and imagination. Rather than transmitting information in a didactic manner, it activates cognitive, sensory, and empathetic engagement, reshaping perceptions of social and political issues.

Drawing on John Dewey’s theory of experience, learning is understood as emerging from the continuous interaction between individuals and their environment. Protest performances operate within this experiential space, mobilising memories, values, and lived experiences to generate new meanings. Participants and spectators are thus involved in experiential processes that foster reflexivity and cognitive transformation, rather than receiving explicit lessons.

Such dynamics are evident in recent mobilisations, including climate justice protests, youth-led movements of the 2020s, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations across Europe, where choreographed actions, symbolic gestures, and embodied rituals have played a central role in articulating political claims and forging collective identities. At the collective level, artivism intersects with processes of Collective Action Framing, reconfiguring shared interpretive frameworks. Central to this is prefiguration: the enactment in the present of the social relations and values movements seek to realise in the future (Maeckelbergh, 2011). Performative actions thus function as temporary laboratories in which political imaginaries are materially and symbolically staged.

Within this framework, the artivist assumes a hybrid role—performer, educator, and facilitator—expanding the transformative and political potential of performative art within contemporary social movements.

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Contribution short abstract

This contribution explores local governments in India as a lived site of grassroots agency. It examines delayed local elections, decentralization, reservations, climate struggles and the role of street theatre and local art forms in building community capacity and alternative futures.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution emerges from practice rather than prescription. It approaches local governments in India not as a fixed institution but as a lived and contested space where community agency is produced, disrupted and reclaimed. Drawing from our experience as practitioners of local governance, it reflects on how decentralization and people’s participation can open pathways toward alternative development futures.

Across India, national and state elections are conducted regularly, while local government elections are frequently delayed or disrupted. This is not merely a procedural lapse; it significantly weakens grassroots agency, particularly for marginalized communities. Local governments remain the most inclusive democratic spaces, with constitutional reservations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women. However, these democratic openings are often hollowed out by political centralisation, administrative apathy/neglect and the gradual erosion of local democratic practice.

The contribution also challenges the separation of climate justice from local governance, arguing that environmental struggles gain political strength and accountability only when embedded within local democratic institutions.

The research paper will be presented as a monologue (mono acting) in the conference, drawing on field experiences from the past ten years, policy analysis and local governance practices in India. It also reflects on why art forms such as street theatre, community drama, and indigenous and local performance traditions are important for educating people about their rights and responsibilities. These practices serve as powerful tools for community capacity building, translating democratic ideas into shared public knowledge and strengthening grassroots agency.

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Contribution short abstract

Acholi storytelling (ododo) is presented as a performative method of relational repair and future-making. Through a staged demonstration, I explore how ododo functions as social infrastructure, revealing embodied forms of justice, agency, and repair often overlooked by transitional justice.

Contribution long abstract

Following Asante's (2026) contention that indigenous performance traditions are independent systems of knowledge production, and drawing on indigenous methodological approaches that understand storytelling as a mode of knowledge generation rather than merely representation, this paper approaches Acholi ododo (storytelling) as a performative method of inquiry through which communities explore relational repair, negotiate social obligations, and imagine collective futures. Instead of offering a conventional paper, I present a staged conversational talk-story demonstration inspired by ododo. Through this embodied method, the paper examines how community-based forms of inquiry reveal understandings of repair, responsibility, and future possibility that are often overlooked when responses to violence are framed primarily through legal and institutional mechanisms.

Drawing on performance studies and African epistemologies, the session demonstrates how embodied practices may offer analytic access to relationships, responsibilities, and shared possibilities that tend to remain marginal within legal and institutional transitional justice frameworks. Through a short micro-performance and participatory exercise, I demonstrate how a conversational talk-story method, informed by ododo, functions as a live mode of social inquiry, inviting participants to reflect on the ongoing work of repair and the negotiation of more just futures.

By shifting analysis into embodied demonstration, this paper contributes to debates on decolonial futures, community-centred development, and transitional justice. It suggests that performance can function as a methodological and social infrastructure through which communities imagine, negotiate, and rehearse forms of justice and relational repair while violence and its legacies remain ongoing.

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Contribution short abstract

This reseach explores how grassroots cultural initiatives support reconciliation in post-conflict Cyprus. Focusing on the bi-communal Home for Cooperation, it examines community-led practices as alternatives to top-down diplomatic approaches and their role in fostering dialogue and social cohesion.

Contribution long abstract

After decades of conflict, Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities remain polarised, and Cyprus continues to be a divided island. Top-down diplomatic approaches have repeatedly failed, most recently in 2017 and again in 2025, making the case for community-led, alternative pathways to reconciliation increasingly urgent.

This research examines how grassroots cultural initiatives contribute to social cohesion and reconciliation in post-conflict Cyprus, focusing on bi-communal cultural organisations as informal actors reconfiguring power at the local level. It asks how these initiatives define value beyond economic metrics, prioritising local agency and everyday human contact over the optics that drive formal diplomacy. The analysis centres on the Home for Cooperation, a cultural organisation in the UN Buffer Zone in Nicosia, drawing on three months of fieldwork, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with core staff.

The findings are deliberately not celebratory. The Buffer Zone's neutrality generates a form of everyday contact diplomacy cannot manufacture. But the same fieldwork reveals who is, and is not, mobilised by this alternative knowledge system: participants are largely self-selected among those already sympathetic to reconciliation, and internal contradictions around language and memory complicate the organisation's own bottom-up claims. The research argues that grassroots cultural practice offers a genuine alternative development pathway, but one that must confront its own limits on inclusion if it is to build the resilient, decentralised networks the panel calls for.