UWI's Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) and the UK's University of Leicester are coming together to study how gender-based violence (GBV) is portrayed in the arts, focusing on poetry, drama, spoken word and popular music.

Researchers at UWI’s St Augustine and Mona campuses have partnered with researchers at the Leicester university on the project. The principal investigator is Leicester’s Dr Lucy Evans and the co-investigators are UWI's St Augustine, senior lecturer at IGDS Dr Gabrielle Hosein, also a Newsday columnist, and UWI Mona's Dr Sonjah Stanley Niaah.

In the Caribbean, the research teams include the IGDS, St Augustine campus and the Institute of Caribbean Studies and Reggae Studies Unit, Mona campus, Jamaica. UWI St Augustine’s Amilcar Sanatan is also part of the research team.

The team has also partnered with Jamaica's Tribe Sankofa and TT's the Roots Foundation and Bocas Lit Fest.

In e-mail responses to Newsday, Hosein said in TT, the project aims to produce a spoken word or rapso-based script and play which will focus on GBV and reflect the perspectives and experiences of teenagers.

“The script will be combined with a facilitation guide which would allow drama groups or theatre clubs in schools to learn the script but also have guided conversations about the play’s characters and plot – helping adolescents to reflect on the causes and consequences of GBV, how it manifests in young people’s lives and the solutions such as transformation of our current social and gender norms,” she said.

Work has just started on the script, Hosein said. The project, expected to last for 20 months, started in September and will run until May 2023.

Hosein added that the script will first be performed and improved on based on youth responses from three workshops, two in April and one in August. The script and facilitation guide won’t be finalised until the final workshop in August.

The team has partnered with the Roots Foundation to produce the play, Hosein said.

"Roots Foundation has a long history of using the oral traditions as part of building youth leadership and empowerment."

Mtima Solwazi, its founder, said, “We use oral tradition as a catalyst for social change by creating safe spaces for expressions.”

The foundation runs three year-long programmes to drive social change: Cascadoo Spoken Word International Festival, Abyssinia: A Journey of Change (a programme for gang intervention) and its media outreach, Beyond the Lens.

He said Hosein contacted the group for International Men’s Day and for 16 days of activism against GBV. For Solwazi, GBV is not a women’s issue: he said while it largely affects women and girls, most of the perpetrators were men. For this reason, it was a gender issue and men need to be allies, he said. This is how the foundation became involved.

[caption id="attachment_929687" align="alignnone" width="683"] Gabrielle Hosein[/caption]

He said the organisation can help in the fight against GBV through its work and its access to various communities.

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