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Paper short abstract:

Looking back at our exploration of how people's engrained social norms and beliefs hinder their participation in social innovation, we now look forward to fostering people's Futures Literacy so they can reveal, refrain, rethink their assumptions and start imagine alternatives futures outside the box

Paper long abstract:

I will share the third phase of a multi-stage larger project I have been engaged with two community leaders in Kinangop, Kenya. We built on the outcomes of two focus groups we held with women and smallholder farmers in Kinangop, where we explored the perceived enablers and constraints that they face to engage in a social innovation project aimed at enhancing the dairy industry. With these outcomes, we realised the importance of grappling with people's engrained social norms and belief systems that could hinder their participation in such innovation. Fostering people's futures literacies could help to achieve that. We partnered with 3 Kenyan futures literacy experts to design and run a Futures Literacy Lab (FLL) to grapple with and shape these engrained and constraining social structures.

Futures Literacy is an action-based methodology developed by UNESCO for building capacity, i.e. futures literacies capability. It supports people in revealing, reframing, and rethinking the assumptions and beliefs they use when imagining the future. Our version of the lab builds on UNESCO's work (Miller, 2018); however, it questions some features and attempts to expand its epistemological and ontological assumptions to include cosmologies. It also departs from the very 'Western' and 'Universal' understanding of Futures and Literacy by exploring what it means to decolonise these two constructs and localising their meaning. In doing so, it aligns with a call to provincialising' futures literacies', fostering reflexivity and curiosity (Facer and Sriprakash, 2021; Myers et al., 2020).

Why does this matter for the community of Kinangop, and more broadly for other rural communities, and for the HDC community? As the call for proposals rightly points out, the immediate and visible fallout from crises may exacerbate existing inequalities in capabilities, leading to loss of income and employment, inequity, food insecurity, and malnutrition. With the projected increase in food demand by 50 per cent or more by 2050 (Food and Agriculture Organisation), and the intensifying race to find new resources in the face of unpredictable climate change, it is crucial to start envisioning a better future for those at the margins. Our project, rooted in the hopes and fears of the community, aims to build new imaginaries that nurture the capabilities needed to address the polycrisis.

Keywords: Futures Literacy, participatory methodology, community, social innovation

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Paper short abstract:

With Rudy Estela Posada (campesina leader, river guardian, and human rights activist from rural Colombia), we present our use of story-based theatre for communities in resistance to a hydroelectric mega-project that has decimated their lands and lives, to access, name and mobilize capabilities.

Paper long abstract:

Carolina Osorio Gil and Rudy Estela Posada Mazo discuss the collaborative Participatory Action Research (PAR) study with and about Movimiento Ríos Vivos Colombia (MRV/Living Rivers Movement), a campesina/o (“peasant”) movement are in resistance to the largest hydroelectric dam in the canyon of the Cauca River in Colombia, which has been built on their ancestral homelands on the river that they have depended on for generations. Cañonera/os (people of the canyon) have a particular way of understanding the world that is being enacted right now in their resistance and with their river. A pillar of their movement is that their river is alive and that they, as ancestral gold panners, fisher-men and -women and farmers, are experts on the river better know what is appropriate for this region than those who own and manage the dam, which has led to an environmental and socio-cultural crisis.

For the past 2.5 years, for this PAR project, MRV and Osorio Gil have been propelled by MRV’s question: How will cañonera/os move forward with their lives, whether or not their resistance movement is successful in closing down the dam? Our project utilises participatory story-based theatre methodology for MRV members to identify their capabilities and knowledges, in order to assign value to how those individual and collective capabilities can help them build collective futures.

Posada Mazo is the president of Amarúd, a campesino/a women’s group in defense of water and life, and one of the 14 regional grassroots organisations from four regions of Northern Antioquia that make up MRV. A victim of the armed conflict in Colombia and re-victimised by the megaproject, she is a human rights defender and guardian of the Cauca River. She has been displaced by armed groups 11 times, and forcefully displaced 5 times by EPM, the company that owns and operates the dam.

Drawing on Story Circle methodology from the Free Southern Theatre of the US Civil Rights Moment and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Osorio Gil has used story-based theatre with rural communities in Colombia and Mexico, to access and co-create land-based knowledges and capabilities. The methodology attempts to operationalize Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach in the context of Latin American resistance movements to large-scale development projects.

UNESCO describes futures literacy as “the competency that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do”. Story-based theatre is a can help do just that – enact collaboratively created visions of what the future might look and feel like by trying it out in a safe and creative performance space. This novel methodology for accessing knowledges and capabilities based on each other’s lived experiences, allows participants to collaboratively create re-presentations of each other’s past memories, of their common present struggles with the dam, and, eventually, of co-imagined futures. In the words of Boal (1992), “Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should be and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, instead of just waiting for it”.

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Paper short abstract:

The presentation will focus on the connections between my use of ethno-mimesis, collaborative meaning-making, and other aspects of performance studies with the capabilities approach. This participatory praxis method of intimate sharing helps build a sense of community in creative art making.

Paper long abstract:

I will share my work with rural women outside of Kolkata, India, and will present an excerpt of a current project. In this presentation, I will focus on the connections between my use of ethno-mimesis, collaborative meaning-making, and other aspects of performance studies with the capabilities approach. Ethno-mimesis involves embodied practices (may be collective) like walking, talking, and eating that allow for reflection on the more-than-rational, a sensory meeting of the inner and outer worlds—for instance, what kinds of moments, sensibilities, and memories are produced or invoked by an incident, a time of the day, a smell, an object, the intensity of a place, and other elements available to the senses. This participatory praxis method of intimate sharing, of working together through narratives and differences helps build a sense of community in the process of creative art making.

My presentation will begin as an ongoing conversation between my long-time collaborator Rosalie and me, centring around our intercultural process of developing ‘Nothing Happens in Women’s Literature’ -a series of interconnected movement-theatre pieces that address intercultural interactions between women at the most intimate levels. In this discussion, I will share a set of emerging methods of intercultural dramaturgy co-created and co-articulated by Rosalie and me, hinged on our lived experiences, intergenerational memory, oral narratives, and our personal artistic practice.

In the process of developing our intercultural work, we embrace and accept the border as method, and surrender to the (sur)reality of transit/migration as a (dis)organizing principle of performance. The methods that we have developed may be used as principles to talk about lived experiences, coping mechanisms, affect and interiority. Though we do not ascribe a strictly feminist interpretation of these principles, they do validate gendered experiences particularly pertaining to women's experiences of borders. Our research seeks to delve into the interface between performance and social sciences to focus on the knowledge of the everyday that is activated through 'performativity ' of these experiences. It largely draws upon the method of ethno-mimesis which brings together ethnographic material , a sensuous way of understanding the world around and presenting them in a hybrid performative space. It prioritises the domain of the 'unsayable' as Adorno explains and thereby activates knowledge of the everyday. We have worked through this methodology with women in urban settings, with student communities as well as with community of rural women.

I will also mention the work of Disha - a group of rural women I am working with, who live in a far flung village in the Sundarbans (mangrove and riverine area). They are building resistance and are working towards development of women's education, prohibition of women's trafficking and modes of developing self-sustenance for women within their community. It might be helpful to their narratives and find ways of meaningful collaboration with this women's group if we bring principles of ethno-mimesis to interact with their social development project. I would like to present voices of Disha as part of this panel to focus on possibilities of finding interface between performance and social work.