Communication and Creativity: An Arts-Based Study Focusing on Marginalised East African Communities in Kenya, Uganda and the United Kingdom

This project is concerned with communication and creativity, seeing the two as linked and essential to fully human development. It builds on seven years of work with marginalised communities in western Kenya and eastern Uganda where a series of linked projects looking at issues of environment, sexual and reproductive health, gender relations and creativity (See McQuaid & Plastow, 2017 Plastow & Elliott, 2020, Plastow,2021), were consistent in finding has that all these issues are persistently, negatively, impacted by very poor interpersonal communication. Moreover, communities recognise this problem and have asked for support in addressing it. In the UK we will be working with migrant communities of East Africans in Lincoln Green, Leeds, to understand how issues of communication and creativity apply when translated to a British context.

The project will work over three years in three locations; in the slum district of Walukuba/Masese in Jinja, in six rural villages in Kisumu County in western Kenya, and in Lincoln Green in Leeds, one of the most deprived areas of the UK with the highest population of African descent in the city. It will work at three levels: among families (36 in each location) in schools in the study area and with community groups. The work will draw on an arts-based methodology for both research and subsequent communication of findings within communities and to stakeholder and national arts communities, in relation to the schools and community programmes, building on expertise and positive impact created in preceding related projects. This approach will also foster the creativity and imagination so essential to fully human development and to the conceiving of alternative futures, which current educational and cultural approaches in all three contexts tend to marginalise. In the family-centred work we will focus on facilitating communication through the medium of monthly supported family dining over a two-year period, enabling families to build conversation and meaningful communication in an enabling environment.

The project will have four stages. In all areas and among all participant co-researchers the primary research question in Year One will be: 'What are the barriers to good interpersonal communication?' In Year Two participants will move on to seeking to find ways to positively address the identified barriers through two interventions. The first will see participants coming together to creatively exchange shared understandings of barriers while the second will move into Action Research mode taking creative interventions to stakeholder groups identified in the research stage (possibly teachers, religious leaders, local government officials, police, etc). In Year Three the focus will be on a major community performance production, asserting identity, creativity and strategies for good communication at all levels of society to be performed by and for the community, in the associated city and to national audiences, exploring if and how creativity may assist in combatting the sense of inferiority widely experienced by marginalised peoples which plays a significant part in their disempowerment.

There is relatively little writing and research into problems of poor communication and how these impact on the lives of impoverished people in East Africa. It has only been as a result of a sustained, multi-faceted engagement with the target communities by the PI and members of her research team, that the debilitating and pernicious effect of isolation and of poor communication strategies on very many aspects of peoples' lives has become clear. This research will seek first to understand, and then to work with participating communities on strategies to overcome such isolation, moving towards the obverse situation as we celebrate these lives through performance art and meaningful dialogue.