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.

Contribution short abstract

I argue how the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) present reflexive globalisation through Climate Change litigations, to renegotiate development, by: visiblising and resetting the terms of myopic-capitalist development; and focus-shifting fron the developmental discourse.

Contribution long abstract

Reflexive globalisation has the potential to reveal the capitalist-imperialist substratum of Globalisation. ‘Globalisation’ sedimented the Developed-developing dichotomy, and helped in replacing (and mimicking) the civilised-uncivilised scale, thereby pushing the States to a developmental race. The compromises on Climate were easy to make in the name of ‘development’. The Cartesian detachment had already created a detached view of humans toward their environment, making these compromises with the environment easier. But the recent Climate Change litigations—domestic, regional and international—have revised the landscape of Globalisation, and shown Reflexive globalisation in praxis. In this work, I argue that the Small Island Developing States (SIDS), as a subset of post-colonial developmental States, present reflexive globalisation through recent Climate Change litigation across the globe, to reset the terms of negotiating development. These litigations are significant in: first, visiblising and resetting the terms of the myopic-capitalist development; second, focus-shifting of the developmental discourse to Climate Change (replacing the diametric opposite popular ideas of Climate being attuned to the needs of development).

To set the context, I briefly introduce and refer to two things: first, the artificially constructed dichotomy of developed-developing/underdeveloped; and second, the capitalist-imperial discounts of the Climate (starting with the predatory practices of farming introduced in the colonial era to the establishment of numerous factories in the developing/underdeveloped States). I then contrast these two elements with the recent Climate Change litigation at various courts to weigh their (legal and symbolic) significance as reflexive globalisation praxis and a form of renegotiating development.

Contribution short abstract

Using Quayson’s notion of Interdiscursivity, the paper aims to analyse how Cliff’s Abeng and Obioma’s The Fishermen, by focalisinng indigenous resources, construct alternative narratives to resist dominant developmental frameworks and engender authentic sustainable development.

Contribution long abstract

The dominance of elite-established and formal developmental frameworks, systems and structures within Global South societies like Nigeria and Jamaica is progressively coming under intense scrutiny. This is especially with the decoloniality project and its advocacy for the centering of the largely underrepresented indigenous knowledges. By resisting dominant blueprints, indigenous groups are practically reconceptualizing and reframing their identity, history, future, and purpose. Consequently, alternative routes towards the type of sustainable development that rehumanizes, and engenders justice and systemic balance, are being consciously constructed. The observed development is perhaps more lucidly articulated in Literature. For instance, Michelle Cliff and Chigozie Obioma, transform the novels Abeng and The Fishermen into intellectual territories of resistance and alternative knowledge-creation by amplifying indigenous voices/perspectives and local actions, using informal players like Mma Ali. Thus, guided by Ato Quayson’s 1997 notion of interdiscursivity, the proposed paper aims to examine how the novelists, by exploiting indigenous resources, resist hegemonic chronicles, construct dissenting realities and lived experiences of their Jamaican and Nigerian settings, and reinterpret development. Specifically, the paper intends to examine how textualisations of indigenous traditions, collective memories, and orality provide other means of knowing/being, reconstruct history and identity, power and development. In addition, it means to explain how such focalisations interrogate and disrupt dominant power structures and its (scripted) textual authority, facilitate inclusion, equality and equity, engender authentic sustainable development.

Key Words: Dominance, development, indigenous/alternative knowledge, and orality

Contribution long abstract

While some view informal communities as an environmental and health nuisance, research suggests they are centres of resilience and local agency capable of developing community-led solutions in the absence of government support. This paper explores the transformative potential of women-led water and sanitation committees as drivers of governance reform and social enterprise within Lagos’s informal settlements. Drawing from the research project Informal Settlements as Spaces of Transformative Agency: A Community-Based Approach to WASH Infrastructure in Lagos, Nigeria, the study situates gendered leadership within broader debates on equity, governance, and sustainable urban development. It challenges the conventional framing of informal settlements as sites of deprivation and instead positions them as spaces of innovation where community agency redefines citizenship and resilience. Okerube, a densely populated informal settlement of nearly 900,000 residents, reflects the magnitude of Nigeria’s WASH crisis. Only two public boreholes serve the entire settlement, while sanitation facilities are severely limited. Top-down interventions have not achieved sustainable outcomes. This research advances a community-led social enterprise model that embeds collective ownership, fee-based management, and gender-inclusive governance to ensure the longevity of local infrastructure. Central to this transformation are women-led water and sanitation committees, which function as governance anchors within the community. Through targeted training in plumbing, financial literacy, health education, and leadership, women are empowered to oversee water systems, manage finances, and advocate for equitable access. Findings indicate that women’s collective organizing enhances access to water and sanitation while deepening democratic participation and transparency, demonstrating that sustainability must emerge from community-rooted action.

Contribution short abstract

In this paper, I argue that indigenous knowledges produce a subversive critique and diachronic agency to normative modern development discourse and practice

Contribution long abstract

One of the fundamental challenges facing modern/colonial discourse and practice of development today is the challenge of imagining another way of thinking and doing development that does not reproduce many the challenges that are compromising the life-chances of future generations. Thus, the challenge of failing to develop and/or recognize options and alternatives to the modern/colonial development discourse and praxis has led to the development of cosmetic solutions such as those found in the idea of sustainable development—an idea that has so far proven to be entrapped within the same modern/colonial discourse of development that it seeks to challenge. In this paper, I argue that a subversive critique to modern/colonial development discourse and practice cannot be found in the very epistemology in which the current modern/colonial thinking about development is steeped but in knowledges of the indigenous peoples of the global South have been displaced, peripherised and delegitimised.

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 contribution will be presented as an empirically grounded, paper-style intervention drawing on field experiences in the last ten years, policy analysis and local governance practices from India. It also reflects on observations of street theatre, community dramas and indigenous and local art forms used to educate people about rights and responsibilities. These practices function as tools of community capacity building, translating democratic ideas into shared public knowledge and strengthening grassroots agency.

We are also open to engaging with the workshop through interactive discussion or participatory reflection.

Contribution short abstract

This paper analyses youth‑led narrative journalism and poetry from Nigeria’s EndSARS movement as extra‑institutional development practice, examining how cultural writing functions as grassroots agency to document violence, contest dominant narratives and articulate alternative civic futures.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines youth‑led cultural writing as a form of grassroots agency in development contexts marked by state violence and institutional failure. Focusing on Nigeria’s 2020 EndSARS movement, it analyses how narrative journalism and poetry function as extra‑institutional development practice through which communities document harm, contest dominant paradigms and articulate alternative futures.

The paper draws on a qualitative case study of two interconnected sites of cultural production: The Republic, a literary‑cultural magazine that documented the EndSARS protests and the Lekki Toll Gate killings, and Sọ̀rọ̀sókè: An #EndSARS Anthology, a poetry collection produced in response to the same events. Using documentary analysis of published texts alongside semi‑structured interviews with editors and writers, the study examines writing as a form of collective knowledge production embedded within social movement mobilisation.

The analysis identifies three ways in which writing operates as development agency beyond formal institutions. First, narrative essays and poems create civilian‑led archives that resist erasure and assert claims to accountability. Second, they enable civic dialogue by situating episodes of violence within longer histories of repression and exclusion, challenging development narratives centred on stability and growth. Third, as youth‑produced cultural forms, they shape how political violence is remembered and transmitted across generations, contributing to future‑oriented civic imaginaries grounded in dignity and justice.

By positioning cultural writing as an agent of development rather than a representational by‑product, the paper aligns with calls to reimagine development from the ground up and to recognise alternative knowledge systems produced by movements navigating uncertainty and repression.

Contribution short abstract

Acholi storytelling (ododo) is presented as a performative method of community repair and future-making. Through a brief staged demonstration, I show how ododo functioned as social infrastructure, revealing embodied forms of justice and agency beyond institutional processes.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reframes Acholi storytelling (ododo) not as an object of analysis but as a performative research method through which communities in northern Uganda generated forms of justice, cohesion, and futurity during periods of violence (1986–2006). Instead of offering a conventional paper, I will stage elements of this practice to demonstrate how ododo functioned as emergency social infrastructure, enabling communities to rebuild trust, negotiate harm, and collectively imagine social futures when institutional justice mechanisms—such as the ICC and state-led transitional justice schemes—remained distant or insufficient.

Drawing on performance studies, Theatre of the Oppressed, and decolonial approaches to knowledge, the session will illustrate how embodied practices carry analytic power: they reveal how communities define justice beyond legal closure, mobilise cultural knowledge systems, and enact forms of agency unavailable to bureaucratic frameworks. Through a short micro-performance and participatory exercise, I will show how storytelling operates as a live method of social inquiry, allowing participants to feel how communities navigate violence, repair, and moral imagination.

By shifting analysis into embodied demonstration, this contribution aligns with the panel’s call to centre community agency, alternative epistemologies, and speculative futures. It offers a tangible example of how performance can serve as both method and infrastructure for reimagining development from the ground up.

Contribution short abstract

This paper 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 ongoing conflict and tension, the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities remain polarised, and Cyprus continues to be a divided island. The limited success of traditional, top-down diplomatic approaches has made the need for alternative, more community-led forms of reconciliation increasingly apparent.

This essay investigates how grassroots cultural initiatives contribute to social cohesion and reconciliation in post-conflict Cyprus, focusing on the role of bi-communal cultural organisations as bottom-up actors in development and peacebuilding. In particular, it examines how these initiatives challenge dominant, institutionally driven understandings of development by prioritising local agency, everyday interaction, and non-economic forms of value creation. The analysis centres on a case study of the Home for Cooperation, a cultural organisation located in the UN Buffer Zone in Nicosia.

A qualitative approach was employed, including fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with members of the Home for Cooperation, to assess the organisation’s practices, challenges, and broader significance.

The essay highlights the potential of grassroots cultural practice to function as an alternative development pathway, complementing formal peace processes while reconfiguring power relations at the local level. At the same time, it underscores the importance of inclusive, multilingual, and decentralised approaches if community-led initiatives are to contribute meaningfully to reconciliation and to the imagining of alternative futures in post-conflict contexts.

Contribution short abstract

This paper demonstrates how systems thinking methodology centers marginalized voices in GBV research, revealing how communities actively challenge top-down intervention models and assert agency in defining both the problems and solutions.

Contribution long abstract

Traditional gender-based violence interventions reflect top-down development paradigms that position communities as passive recipients rather than active agents of change. This paper applies systems thinking as a methodological framework that centers grassroots perspectives and reveals community agency in addressing GBV.

Drawing on systems analysis conducted with communities in Kenya, this paper demonstrates how boundary critique methodology makes visible the power dynamics, knowledge systems, and decision-making structures that typically exclude those most affected by violence. The framework examines who defines GBV as a problem, who designs interventions, whose knowledge counts as legitimate, and whose voices remain marginalized in dominant approaches.

The paper argues that systems thinking reveals three critical dimensions of grassroots agency. First, it illuminates how communities already possess sophisticated understandings of the interconnected factors such as employment, and education, that enable violence. Second, it identifies community-led strategies and informal networks that operate alongside or in resistance to formal interventions. Third, it demonstrates how centering lived experience challenges technical-expert paradigms and reconfigures power in research partnerships.

This methodological contribution addresses calls for development approaches that recognize communities as knowledge producers and active shapers of alternative futures. The paper concludes by reflecting on how systems thinking can support genuinely participatory research that privileges community agency over external expertise, moving beyond extractive research models toward partnerships that reimagine who holds power in defining both problems and pathways toward justice.

Contribution long abstract

Engaging the DSA2026 focus on grassroots agency and alternative futures, this paper examines how a classical women’s performance tradition becomes a site of bottom-up ecological resistance. It analyses Prakruti, an experimental Nangiarkoothu performance by Kalamandalam Sangeetha, created in response to the environmental and public-health crises caused by the Ossein factory at Kathikudam, Thrissur, Kerala, India. Rooted in Nangiarkoothu, an ancient women-performed Sanskrit dance-drama tradition, Prakruti mobilises embodied knowledge, local ecological memory, and affective labour to articulate community concerns that remain marginal within formal development discourse.

Challenging views of tradition as culturally static or politically inert, the paper argues that Prakruti functions as an informal grassroots intervention that contests top-down development paradigms privileging industrial growth over ecological sustainability and bodily well-being. By foregrounding polluted landscapes, gendered labour, and corporeal vulnerability, the performance reframes “development” through lived experience rather than economic metrics. The paper also examines the ambivalent reception of such experiments, which are often tolerated only when disavowed as legitimate Nangiarkoothu, revealing the limits imposed on gendered and community agency within classical cultural frameworks.

Situating Prakruti at the intersection of environmental justice, cultural practice, and informal activism, the paper demonstrates how embodied performance can contribute to alternative futures already being imagined and enacted at the grassroots. In doing so, it expands how development, agency, and resistance may be understood beyond policy-oriented and economistic models.