Embedding and Enabling Creative Economy in Marginalised Societies: Creative Skills for Peace

The UN International Year of the Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021 highlights the importance of promoting sustainable and inclusive economic growth through providing opportunities, benefits and empowerment for all, promoting networking and sharing best practices and experiences. This project addresses these stipulated goals and vision by enhancing human resource capacity through upskilling young people and by developing teaching materials to embed into undergraduate modules offered in South Africa and Zimbabwe Universities to tackle the challenges of the creative economy.
The rationale of this project departs from the demand and need to engage with our past and current AHRC projects on youth, peace education, and arts. Our previous AHRC projects showed a strong demand for using indigenous arts and cultural heritage for creating sustainable economic livelihoods for the communities as well as the need to embed the arts and art resources available in local communities into the teaching of peace. One such example from South Africa, for instance, focused on the use of sound productions to identify spaces and sounds of conflict and how these can be seen early on to allow for timely intervention in spaces of conflict and then used to build a framework that can inform the learning design of peace education. Drawing on the gap of linking up peace education with creative economy and the socio-economic aspects of peace, this project aims to i) consolidate learning from previous AHRC projects and establish and strengthen channels of engagement between youth, artists, local communities, art organisations, NGOs, and other stakeholders in South Africa, UK and Zimbabwe and ii) support and enable the key impact activity of current ODA-cut affected Decolonising Peace Education in Africa project by producing 4 (to 6) weeks of educational materials. Thus, the project aims to leave a legacy by depositing these educational materials for the youth to enable the use of tangible and intangible cultural heritages in South Africa and Zimbabwe. These training materials will be made available through an OER and a guidebook, and they will be embedded in the training of next generation of art and heritage subject teachers in Zimbabwe and undergraduate students in the Business school at UNISA by reaching out to at least 330 students every year. In doing so, the project has several interlinked objectives to deepen engagement and impact. These are upskilling young people with artists in marginalised communities to establish more inclusive societies; ensuring that young people reach out to the art trainings and local, regional and international knowledge-sharing networks that provide local solutions to the global challenges they face, and developing synergies between culture and education by developing and depositing art and entrepreneurship training to meet the demands of cultural labour markets. We expect these goals will support socio-economic aspects of peace by using local and cultural heritage as an economic route to reduce structural inequalities in these communities. Most of the existing projects and activities have focused on established artists but there are few initiatives that focus on marginalised communities and their own arts in the creative economy strategy. Therefore, we address this gap by working with highly talented young people in arts who do not have the opportunities to reach out to art trainings and other related marketing, entrepreneurship and touring skills essential for creative economy.
The project will deliver at least 3 journal articles, 1 co-edited interdisciplinary book. The arts and humanities methods will be showcased through exhibitions, performances and workshops. The project will also create a visible network of researchers, policymakers and community organisations that work together to offer new meaningful knowledges, pedagogies and teaching materials to promote creative economy as well as peace economy.