Workshop by Wisaal Abrahams and Britt van Duijvenvoorde: Leadership Archetypes present in (affected) Community Projects
Increasing exchanges between academic, heritage, and community sectors and needs point to the promise for more applied practices in our knowledge production. Still, though demands for concrete practices following our knowledge production from (affected) communities have been constant, it remains hard to envision durable exchanges between communities and heritage and academic work (which are not mutually exclusive domains).
In the face of contemporary political and economic attacks on academic as well as heritage work, it is all the more important to organize alternative gatherings for people who want to educate themselves and each other about how to translate commonly segregated (decolonial) academic thinking into concrete decolonial practices to address issues that create further division.
Therefore, we are happy to invite you to a workshop regarding leadership and organization related to (affected) communities. This (informal) workshop is meant, first and foremost, to provide a space in which discussion and dialogue can be nourished with and for all of those who are engaged in (or would like to engage in) methods of community organization, citizen science, forms of “applied knowledge” and decolonization. Doing so, we want to make possible an encounter in which people from varying parts of the world, cultural/political contexts, and trajectories - all with different resources at hand - can share their best-practices, idea(l), plans, and experiences. During these discussions, Wisaal Abrahams (ManVrou Collective) will share her own experiences regarding community organizing, coaching, and decolonizing in relation to the Cape Malay people from South-Africa—which will hopefully find echo in the many incredible approaches and projects set up on your side.
Questions that would guide the workshop:
- What research or heritage work have you engaged with in the field of colonial and social history, and of what importance is the exchange with specific societal groups or communities for this work?
- What are the Power dynamics present that we need to navigate in order to do our work justice?
- What are your goals or plans when it comes to engaging with/in communities and citizen science?
- What are your experiences when it comes to applied knowledge and community engagement?
- Which issues and challenges do we share when it comes to community impact, engagement, and participation, and how do we forward from here to construct better futures?
Practical
Date 30 May
Time 15-17
Place Framer Framed, Oranje-Vrijstaatkade 71, 1093 KS, Amsterdam
Entrance Free entrance, but please register via manvroucollective@gmail.com. Please join whenever and wherever you can. It is always possible to join at a later time or leave earlier.
Wisaal Abrahams is a coach and visual artist who specialises in the intersectionality - how spirit meets cause in a post-colonial reality. Her latest piece of work adopted from her coaching curriculum called “The School of Pressure” is currently being developed as a virtual reality application and a textbook in the form of a startup and a research thesis by educational expert Scott Unwin. Her work has also been included in various academic colloquiums hosted by scholars from Kings College London, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and participated in numerous seminars on Gender and Islam at UCT. She began her career early and was selected to attend the UN Sustainable Development Goals Conference as a South African Youth Representative in 2010. From 2011 – 2013 she resided in Gothenburg Sweden where she worked in early child development, theatre and film. In 2015 she addressed the EU Permanent Mission in Brussels as part of a peace delegation led by Global NGOS regarding Islamophobia and Extremism. Her work in her own community, the Cape Malay Community, has been to showcase the Nierderlands Liedjies to the larger cultural fabric of our beautiful port city in Cape Town. In 2018 she co-produced a documentary called The Art of Fallism with a team from Norway, about the infamous FeesMustFall movement, focusing on the lens of young local artists who were creating works based on those challenging events; the film travelled to various international film festivals including HotDocs, Cinema Du Reel and Durban International Film Festival. Her latest collaborative art piece (Nardstar/Faheem Rhoda Jackson/ was commissioned by Afrikaans100, the recently contested language centennial and is a public mural located in the national heritage area of the Bokaap in Cape Town called “Afrikaans: The Origin”. She is currently completing an MA in Visual Art at Stellenbosch University and is a Global Fellow at IISG on Slavery.
Britt van Duijvenvoorde is a PhD Researcher at the International Institute of Social History. She obtained a Master’s degree in Philosophy at Radboud University (cum laude) and in History at Leiden University (cum laude). Her PhD is part of the Vidi project Resisting Enslavement: A Global Historical Approach to Slavery in the Dutch Atlantic and Asian Empire (1620-1815), where she focusses on the dialectic between resistance and enslavement.
