The Arts of Inclusion (TAI): Examining the Role of Performing Arts for Peace Education in Conflict. A UK-Latin American Countries Network.

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This interdisciplinary network of academics (education and performing arts) and peace education advocates will critically explore the contribution made by the performing arts in developing peace education with - and the welfare of - individuals affected by violent conflict, beginning with Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. Beyond the benefits that the network will have for participants from these three countries and eventually the countries surrounding them (Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia), the network activities will benefit practitioners and NGOs working with conflict-affected individuals as well as local communities by helping to develop research-informed practices.Examples of social arts programmes abound, but developers in conflict settings do not appear to comparatively and systematically study how and under which conditions individuals benefit from participation. This network will begin to address this gap. The proposal emerged through a collaboration between academic and non-academic colleagues in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and the UK facilitated with an ESRC Impact Acceleration award that explored the participants' research needs. The network's initial theoretical framework is based on previous international research by the PI that investigated the uses of preforming arts for inclusion in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, the network will allow participants to identify key areas for further collaboration, research and capacity building to address the needs of individuals affected by conflict in their own countries. The three overlapping phases of activity during the 24-months time-frame focus on relationship building (through links among collaborators); capacity strengthening (through critically co-evaluating and sharing best practices and policies), and international development and outreach (through KE links with potential partners in other ODA countries).The connections between academic and non-academic collaborators will be strengthened over the course of a series of 2-day workshops in Bogota, Chihuahua and Glasgow, where participants will share best practices, theories, and methodologies to support peace education activities built around the use of performing arts. The links created during these workshops will be further sustained through wide-access social media such as a dedicated Blog and Twitter. The network will expand its outreach through sharing a suite of multimedia resources developed throughout the project. These resources will include recorded practices of using performing arts for peace education, discussions and key presentations conducted during the workshops along with images of practices in situ, one policy briefing (from comparatively scoping the literature) and one practice briefing (from 9-month critical ethnographies conducted in the three countries, which will become an edited book). These resources will be shared with potential partners in other ODA countries identified through network participants, academic partners and advisory board members who already have links in these countries. To address the issue of access to resources, the materials will be available in a number of formats: video recordings via YouTube (key workshop videos will have subtitles in English and Spanish), press releases, blog posts, and through the high-visibility webpages of our collaborators, as well as through our own website. We will broadcast some of the KE activities developed during the network events and will also develop short toolkits (such as "How to" mini-tutorials and "Top 5 Strategies") for high circulation and visibility across the social media sites mentioned above. A professional media company will be commissioned to prepare a short film of network highlights for BBC pitch as an idea for a primetime documentary.