Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Most critical discussions of Arts for Social Change practices focus on the impact of the intervention for the marginalized community in which it was undertaken. This presentation foregrounds the transformational potential of participating in an Arts for Change project for third year Undergraduate students at a private art school in Karachi, Pakistan. As part of a Liberal Arts elective that I teach, students worked with participants from a women and girls’ community-center in a low-income neighborhood to collect oral histories and life narratives of the women who inspired them. Being led by a socially and economically disadvantaged collaborator to find inspiring narratives, developing friendships with young women whose challenges were vastly different from their own and sharing their interviewing, photography and story-telling skills with them helped students revaluate many of their preconceived notions about safety, empowerment and gestures of every-day feminist resistance. The project was conceived on the lines of early feminist consciousness raising practices, Freirean notions of reforming the oppressor and the oppressed and ideas of agency and “power within” articulated by Naila Kabeer. In weekly visits over three weeks, the students’ community-based collaborators identified the women that inspired them, worked with the students to develop and roll out semi-structured interviews and created instagram stories about them which were featured on the community center’s social media platforms. This presentation reflects on the transformation students’ experienced through an analysis of their field journals, subsequent in-class discussions and my own observations of their interactions with their collaborators over the three weeks.