Democratic Theatre Practice in Donor-funded Projects: Challenges and Interventions

Karachi, Pakistan is a mosaic of marginalized communities belonging to diverse ethnicities with distinct yet overlapping histories. Set against a backdrop of gang warfare and extremism, the city’s development sector has endeavoured to channelize the energies of at-risk youth toward educational and creative outlets. This chapter will explore if, and how, theatre projects restricted by specific attitudinal goals of countering violent extremism can organically foster more basic values of deliberative democracy within the logistical and temporal constraints of a donor-supervised project. In a divisive climate of struggling institutional democracy and governance, can a grass-roots theatre practice emerge that inculcates collective goodwill and critical generosity in the community while meeting official goals of countering violent extremism and growing even after the project period ends? Using Stephani Etheridge Woodson’s Community Cultural Development as a guiding theoretical framework, this chapter will explore the possibilities, challenges, roadblocks and opportunities of using Theatre for Youth Third Space, within the parameters of said project, to transcend the goals of Counter Violent Extremism (CVE). The project was carried out with 42 youth groups in six districts of Karachi over a period of eleven months, divided into two 18-week cycles, each culminating in youth-devised Social Action Projects (SAPs) that directly or indirectly address violent extremism.

Community Cultural Development for Social Change: Developing Critical Praxis

A growing number of writers in community psychology have called for re-claiming the radical impetus that inspired the development of the field. In this article we describe a program of work facilitated by a community cultural development agency that uses community arts practice to create, promote and improve opportunities for participation, network development, and empowerment in rural Western Australian communities. The program of work we describe in this article sits within a broader systematic effort aimed at social change in a specific geographic region of Western Australia, and reflects a particular commitment to challenging the continuing social exclusion of Aboriginal people in postcolonizing Australia. Informed by writing within community and liberation psychologies, we discuss three community arts projects and highlight the key concepts of participation, power/empowerment and situated knowing in our examination of community cultural development as participatory methodology. We emphasize the iterative and generative nature of arts practice and argue that community cultural development practice is often aimed at both instrumental as well as transformative outcomes. We suggest that the transformative dimensions require a critical theoretical lens to help explicate the operations of power and coloniality in the micro settings of community practice.