An arts-based collaborative intervention to promote medical male circumcision as a South African HIV and AIDS prevention strategy
- Authors: Berman, Kim
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: Medical Male Circumcision , Advocacy campaign , Action research , Murals , Arts-based tools
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6007 , ISSN 2221-4070 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/8827
- Description: This article addresses the extent to and ways in which an arts-based learning intervention can be regarded as transformative specifically with regard to the quality of student learning across the domains of academic enhancement, civic learning, personal growth, and through engaging with social advocacy. This article focuses on a collaborative project between Artist Proof Studio, a community art centre, and Sonke Gender Justice, a gender advocacy organisation, in a series of HIV prevention and advocacy interventions. The project addresses the question: “ Can an advocacy campaign for Medical Male Circumcision (MMC), with its complex messaging, be effective in communicating with South African young men?” This article however, responds to the question “How can the visual arts be used to develop a communication strategy for the promotion of MMC and what influence does this have on the students involved in the project and their uptakeof MMC as an HIV prevention strategy?” The article contends the the 'visual voice' expressed by the students as 'change agents' led to self-reflection and behaviour change with some of the student participants undergoing MMC. It also highlights the value of art-based methods as a catalysing and empowering strategy for social communication.
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Visual graphics for human rights, social justice, democracy and the public good
- Authors: Nanackchand, Vedant , Berman, Kim
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: Democracy , Human rights , Social justice , Visual graphics
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6006 , ISSN 2076-3433 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/8826
- Description: The value of human rights in a democratic South Africa is constantly threatened and often waived for nefarious reasons. We contend that the use of visual graphics among incoming university visual art students provides a mode of engagement that helps to inculcate awareness of human rights, social responsibility, and the public good in South African higher education. Visual graphics, the subject of the research project which forms a key component of a Masters dissertation by one of the authors, provides an opportunity to counter a noticeable decline in the students’ response and sensitivity to the freedoms entrenched in the South African Bill of Rights. The article presents a study using an action research approach in the classroom between 2005–2010, in order to inculcate awareness of human rights among participating students and deepen their understanding of social responsibility. The method used involved an introduction to specific visual art curricular intervention projects which required incoming first-year students to develop visual responses to address selected human rights violations and, in their second year, to develop their visual voice in order to promote human rights advocacy through civic engagement. The critical outcomes impact positively on the use of graphic images in the curriculum as a visual methodology to re-insert the discourse of human rights as a basic tenet of constitutional democracy in higher education.
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Cultural action for change : a case for cross-cultural, multidisciplinary collaborations
- Authors: Berman, Kim
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Visual methodologies , Participatory action research , Community engagement , HIV/AIDS awareness
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6264 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/8828
- Description: Cultural Action for Change began in 2000 as a joining of artists, educators, and student-researchers to assess sustainability and address the impact of HIV within Phumani Paper; a government-funded poverty alleviation program, establishing hand papermaking and craft enterprises across South Africa. Inspired by ideals of empowerment and self-determination, a series of qualitative, Participatory Action Research (PAR) interventions for HIV awareness and action were introduced at six Phumani papermaking workshop sites. Student researchers and participants, with the collaboration of academics from the University of Michigan, were trained in Photovoice methodology to document with photographs and personal narrative the participants’ struggles for economic independence. Through iterative processes of reflection and sharing, participants identified shared social action objectives. Cultural Action for Change (also termed AIDS Action) consisted of arts-based, multi-disciplinary community interventions conducted over five years, and adopted a PAR framework as an approach that seeks to enhance the lives of the participants. The goal of the AIDS Action Intervention was to provide support to, and increase the agency of, participants of the Phumani Paper craft enterprises affected by the HIV pandemic. The aim was to enable the participants to break the silence, to confront the fear and stigma of HIV, and to seek voluntary counselling and testing (VCT), thereby contributing to reducing the number of deaths in their projects and communities. An additional objective was to achieve an increase in productivity and income for the enterprises as a result of greater group trust, information, networking and agency. The creative strategies that the research teams used for the AIDS Action intervention were Photovoice and Paper Prayers. The impact assessment conducted revealed that members of the Phumani Paper groups see themselves as individuals who have acquired skills that can transform waste into objects of beauty and have understood their own sense of agency to effect personal and organizational change.
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