Full Description
This book demonstrates how participatory arts-based approaches can help children and youth contribute to peacebuilding within post-conflict contexts and to their communities.
Cultural forms of storytelling through visual arts, drama, music, and dance can help to enhance post-conflict community well-being, social cohesion, and conflict prevention. However, in the planning and implementation of these arts-based projects, children and youth are often marginalised in decision-making processes. Drawing on cases from Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia, and Nepal, this book demonstrates the benefits of participatory action research with children and youth to inform education curricula and policies for sustaining peace. Showing how artforms can be adapted to meet the needs of children and youth, the book emphasises the need to scale up arts-based peacebuilding initiatives and leverage for greater policy enactment from the bottom up. It is also an excellent example of South-South learning, advocating for a local approach to engage with arts-based methodologies and peacebuilding. This book will be of interest to researchers across the applied arts, sociology, anthropology, political science, peacebuilding, and international development.
Practitioners and policymakers would also benefit from the book's recommendations for the implementation of successful arts-based research projects and interventions.
Contents
1 Introduction; 2 Contesting constructions of childhood and youth in policy and practice for peacebuilding; 3 Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP): creating arts-based communication structures between young people and policymakers from local to national levels; 4 Youth engagement in peacebuilding: arts-based approaches in Kyrgyzstan; 5 Cultural arts and participatory peacebuilding for inclusion and social justice in Nepal; 6 Developing a space and voice in peacebuilding: a case study on children's engagement with policymakers in Kyrgyzstan and Nepal; 7 Arts as platforms for peace: youth participation in art-making process; 8 Studying participatory arts-based psychosocial support and peacebuilding at a distance through a topological lens: the case of MAP at Home project in Rwanda; 9 Arts-based peacebuilding as a social innovation empowerment process: utilising social impact measurement to promote epistemic justice; 10 Youth advisory: what does Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) mean to young people?; 11 Conclusion
