PhotoVoice as an educational tool for intercultural learning and peacebuilding between Forcefully Displaced Populations and Host community youth

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Global numbers of Forcefully Displaced Persons (FDPs) is rising, with the majority being hosted by Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC), which can exacerbate the economic and social challenges these countries face while compounding tensions between FDPs and the host communities as they have to share scarce resources. Efforts to reduce conflict center largely on providing humanitarian aid, vocational training, and expanding the provision of welfare services, underplaying the importance of promoting peace, dialogue and intercultural learning between the groups. This network aims to address this challenge by using photography as an educational tool and photograph artefacts as a teaching and learning resource to evaluate the potential of photovoice and visual story telling as an informal learning platform for fostering peaceful relations between the communities and easing sustainable integration of FDPs. The overarching aim is to understand how visual arts and photography training can have a redistributive effect in reducing inequalities perpetuated by intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, language, sexuality, and nationality and in mitigating tensions for peace-building through comparative research in South Africa, Turkey and Uganda. These countries host millions of FDPs. The consortium of these countries provides an enriching multi-sited context to explore the role of photography as an educational tool and the participatory methodology as an informal learning space for establishing a culture of peace, exchange of cultural knowledge, and intercultural learning. The participatory and bottom up programs that could foster capacity building, reconciliation and societal transformation between FDPs and host communities are often ignored for the sake of economic concerns. The central aim of the network is to bring researchers, policy makers, NGOs, local actors, photographers, practitioners, FDPs and host community members to discuss photography and arts based participatory methods in providing an informal learning education opportunity for peace that could be enhanced through policy and practice. The network assembles expertise in education, photography, conflict and forced migration. The co-applicants in each country have a track record in policy-relevant research and are well networked nationally and regionally with academic, and policy actors. The network will interact through a mix of virtual and face-to-face means. Our hypothesis is that arts training and activities conducted in an informal setting can be used for community building, and learning to live together can make important contribution to the welfare of both FDPs and host communities. To assess whether and how such benefits may be occurring and what are the best visual arts practices of adopting such a methodology, the co-applicants first have to map existing data and literature in order to gain a much clearer picture of the dynamics of FDPs and host communities and ways of improving dialogue and participatory methodologies. The outcome will be the use of visual arts as a medium to learning to live together, understand cultural diversity, ways of preventing discrimination and inequalities. We will develop a series of collaborative bids to GCRF and other funders. The network will innovate by dialogue and photography based participatory action research and academic and practitioner networks to meet the learning needs FDPs and host communities as well as local actors who engage with them. Theoretically, the network recognizes that visual arts are a powerful tool for promoting human development, equipping people with necessary learning and capabilities to access sustainable livelihood assets that go beyond income generation. It can also include non-material aspects of education such as: well-being, support peace-building, self-development, equity, social relations based on respect and equality, and positive and negative freedoms for a life with dignity.