AHEC Seminar - Changing the Story: Youth-led development, Accountability and Voice
Professor Paul Cooke, Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds
Thursday, 01 June 2023, 11am to 12pm
This will be a hybrid seminar in the Big Data Institute, Lower Ground Seminar Room 0, and on Zoom (see registration link below).
This is an Arts, Health and Ethics Collective (AHEC) seminar
Abstract
In this talk, I’ll give an overview of some of the work carried out by the AHRC/GCRF Network Plus programme Changing the Story: building civil society with and for young people in conflict-affected settings (https://changingthestory.leeds.ac.uk/). This was a 5 year project working in 12 conflict affected settings that sought to explore the efficacy of youth-led development programmes run in partnership with a wide variety of civil society organisations. In the process I’ll explore a range of issues that emerged from this work, highlighting the limits of, and challenges to, youth-led project design in many development settings, as well as the role of participatory arts-based methods in this work. I’ll discuss the extent to which such practices can, on the one hand, provide a useful space to question extant power structures, thereby amplifying the voices of the young people involved. Yet on the other, they can also play into these same structures, potentially emphasising the marginal position of young people in such settings, preventing them from either speaking or being listened to.