Exploring Resilience in South Sudan through an Arts Based Curriculum

South Sudan is a country internationally characterised by its humanitarian crisis. 7 million people are in need of aid, and in March 2018, 5.3 million people - nearly half the population - were estimated to now face hunger. According to Mercy Corp (2018) 1 million people are facing emergency levels of food insecurity. Compared with the same time last year, this number reflects a 40 percent increase in the population facing severe food insecurity in the post-harvest season. South Sudan is among the highest internationally for prevalence of sexual violence towards women and girls. Whilst conflict has intensified violence against women from non partners, levels of intimate partner abuse has also risen sharply. Therefore the impact of the conflict needs to be understood as gendered.

This image of starving, abused masses set against a backdrop of corruption and political violence dominates outsider perceptions and prompts the usual external 'western expert' driven response. The international development community in Juba is highly visible to such an extent that local forms of expression and activism are almost completely silenced. Yet Juba hosts in June its third film festive in which the country's rich artistic and cultural heritage will be on show under the headline 'Keeping Hope Alive'. Post development critiques of development evidence over and over how the mistakes of the past just reproduce themselves particularly at times of acute crisis. More space must be given to new innovative, creative ways of understanding what resilience means in the South Sudan context. Art communities in South Sudan have been channeling their creativity into dialogues exploring critical concepts such as peace, resilience and sustainability. However, as it currently stands these narratives have not been captured in research and do not feed into humanitarian discourses.

This problematic context will be, at least partly addressed, by the creation of a new network that brings humanitarian actors into dialogue with university students and artists who specialise in verbal arts.

The University of Juba currently has 10,000 students. University education in South Sudan as a colonial enterprise has not integrated local cultures into the curriculum at all. A prior oral history project coordinated by the Co-I (RL) revealed a great disconnect between "local cultures" / mother tongue education and the function of a university education in this setting. The workshop model we propose to develop through this network will represent a decolonialised alternative to explore the core concepts of humanitarianism, namely security, peace and resilience. This network will use the teaching of story telling as its core activity. Artist mentors will facilitate workshops with university students and humanitarian actors who will be encouraged to use this medium to reflect on what resilience means at different levels and for different groups of the population including the most vulnerable (women, children and the disabled). Network members will create their own stories based on their experiences of working and living in South Sudan. Additionally the story-tellers will contribute narratives from historical and community heritage. These stories will be placed into a digital archive and analysed for what they reveal about the different positions held by network members.

We believe that this new network will be the beginning of addressing glaring gaps, silences and paradoxes at various levels; academic and humanitarian discussions on what resilience really means and make a vibrant, relevant contribution to the learning of university students. It will also support intercultural sharing and forms of peace building utilising new capacity that will be left by the network in students. Lastly, it will offer the humanitarian community a bridge into understanding the deep rooted experiences of conflict endured by South Sudanese people particularly the most vulnerable.

The network has four impact goals: 1. To open up a conversation about what a decolonialised education might look like in South Sudan and the place of verbal art in shaping it 2. To have generated original research into how resilience is conceptualised through verbal art genres which will impact on new conversations around how to link this knowledge into peacebuilding and an arts based curricula 3. To support the ambitions of DFID's Humanitarian Assistance and Resilience programme (HARISS) in building more sensitive dialogues about resilience. 4. To build lasting links between currently disparate groups of people; humanitarian sector-university-artists-local communities and organisations

As a network we are very well placed to deliver significant impact. Forcier Consulting and the University of Portsmouth are part of the consortium coordinating DFID's Evidence Learning Facility South Sudan (ELFSS). Co-I Brendan Tuttle is the Research Lead and the PI Tamsin Bradley is the gender-inclusion lead. The facility operates in parallel to DFID's Humanitarian Assistance and Resilience Programme in South Sudan (HARISS). The value of HARISS is in the region of up to £443 million and will run until 2020. In DFID's business case for HARISS it stated that a new approach to supporting the most vulnerable citizens of South Sudan was needed. DFID argued that it was proposing a significant change in the delivery of humanitarian aid. DFID stated that its approach "will not only save lives, but also build the capacity of people to recover and cope better with shocks. This will ultimately contribute towards greater resilience, with the express aim of contributing to move South Sudan out of the vicious cycle of aid dependency." This is a highly ambitious goal and one arguably held back because of the tendency to approach humanitarianism through top down expert driven models (see summary and case for support). This research network will utilise the stakeholder network and communication platforms and channels created by ELFSS and that feed into HARISS. As stated in the objectives and case for support this network seeks to offer a more locally rooted way of promoting peace and resilience through the use of indigenous art forms and building on the capacity present in university students. This research network will leave a legacy through a committed network of artists and students who as a result will be better positioned to communicate with key donors and humanitarian stakeholders. In turn new creative approaches to community engagement and resilience building will emerge. Whilst there may be no magic solutions to the ongoing crises in South Sudan this network will respond to DFID's pledge to do things differently and push the boundaries of what, as a key donor, it might understand this to mean.

The network will make significant impact at the level of higher education. The network intends to influence new directions in the country's educational strategy which is currently being redesigned at government and institutional levels (see case for support). Drawing on the lessons from the African Philosophy of education the network will create new resources and design part of a curriculum that will reflect and reclaim aspects of the diverse cultural heritage of South Sudan

Currently in SS there thousands of university graduates unable to move into employment due to the grave economic situation. Yet at the same time HARISS is looking to grow in country peace keeping capacity. The proposed arts based approach will teach students to promote and foster healthy positive dialogues at community level that could then form the basis for peace and reconciliation and bring them into a network with humanitarian and development professionals demonstrating the untapped capacity they represent.