Recently, activist athletes have challenged expectations of how players should conduct themselves. While we love to see athletes with big personalities and flashy lifestyles, the response can be less enthusiastic when athletes make bold political statements. The articles in this volume show how common activist athletes truly are. Some use their platform to speak on social conflict, while others fight to improve their working conditions. Some LGBTQ athletes take action by simply being themselves. Through reading about players past and present who stood up for their beliefs, we gain a new appreciation for the role professional sports can play in our lives. Media literacy questions and terms are included to help readers further analyze news coverage and reporting styles.
This book explores the lives of young people through the lens of storytelling. Using extensive qualitative and empirical data from young people’s conversations following storytelling performances in secondary schools in the UK, the author considers the benefits of stories and storytelling for learning and the subsequent emotional, behavioural and social connections to story and other genres of narrative. Storytelling has both global and transnational relevance in education, as it allows individuals to compare their experiences to others: young people learn through discussion that their opinions matter, that they are both similar to and different from their peers. This in turn can facilitate the development of critical thinking skills as well as encouraging social learning, co-operation and cohesion. Drawing upon folklore and literary studies as well as sociology, philosophy, youth studies and theatre, this volume explores how storytelling can shape the lives of young people through storytelling projects. This reflective and creative volume will appeal to students and scholars of storytelling, youth studies and folklore.
Oral history gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making. Oral history and life stories help to create a truer picture of the past and the changing present, documenting the lives and feelings of all kinds of people, many otherwise hidden from history. It explores personal and family relationships and uncovers the secret cultures of work. It connects public and private experience, and it highlights the experiences of migrating between cultures. At the same time it can bring courage to the old, meaning to communities, and contact between generations. Sometimes it can offer a path for healing divided communities and those with traumatic memories. Without it the history and sociology of our time would be poor and narrow. In this fourth edition of his pioneering work, fully revised with Joanna Bornat, Paul Thompson challenges the accepted myths of historical scholarship. He discusses the reliability of oral evidence in comparison with other sources and considers the social context of its development. He looks at the relationship between memory, the self and identity. He traces oral history through its own past and weighs up the recent achievements of a movement which has become international, with notably strong developments in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, South Africa and the Far East, despite resistance from more conservative academics. This new edition combines the classic text of The Voice of the Past with many new sections, including especially the worldwide development of different forms of oral history and the parallel memory boom, as well as discussions of theory in oral history and of memory, trauma and reconciliation. It offers a deep social and historical interpretation along with succinct practical advice on designing and carrying out a project, The Voice of the Past remains an invaluable tool for anyone setting out to use oral history and life stories to construct a more authentic and balanced record of the past and the present.
Music has long played a prominent role in cultural diplomacy, but until now no resource has comparatively examined policies that shape how non-western countries use music for international relations. Ethnomusicology and Cultural Diplomacy, edited by scholars David G. Hebert and Jonathan McCollum, demonstrates music's role in international relations worldwide. Specifically, this book offers "insider" views from expert contributors writing about music as a part of cultural diplomacy initiatives in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Syria, Japan, China, India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Nigeria. Unique features include the book’s emphasis on diverse legal frameworks, decolonial perspectives, and cultural policies that serve as a basis for how nations outside “the west” use music in their relationships with Europe and North America.
This is a non-fiction book written as fiction, an harrowing task; the description of events are laid out differently than they happened; words and speeches have been changed to colourful words, meaning the same thing uttered by the non-actors inmates, words put into their mouths for effectiveness. All incidents, situations, conditions and confrontations are recognizable to inmates. The book Robben Island is not about geography or science; it is about struggle emotions, about how some could forgo the pleasures of a limited life, throw everything and answer the call for service, sacrifice and suffering for the liberation of mankind, to be cooped in Robben Island. A Sobukwe adage tells of a very lean hungry fox coming across a well-fed dog and ask asks something like this: dog where do we catch something to eat; the dog replied well I have plenty to eat where I come from, I am fed, come along with me. Along the way the fox notices a belt around the dogs neck and ask what this is on your neck? The dog replied I am being tied to a pole where I leave most times. Wow! the fox exclaimed: better hungry and free than plenty in bondage. By Robben Island we refer to the penal colony island where anti-colonial struggle heroes were imprisoned, from Makana the left-handed (Full name Makanda Nxele 1818) to Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1963 after serving 3 years from 1960). Robben Island more pronounced prisoner was Nelson Mandela. But most sad is fact that Robben Island held unsung heroes of the PAC who spent full life sentences in a bid to free South Africa from apartheid colonialism and racism. Prominent were Jafta Masemola, Ike Mthimunye, Philemon Tefo, Samuel ChipsChibane, John Nkosi, Dimake Pro Malepe. A 20 year full term is also Life sentence that happened to Johnson Mlambo. We lament the names of those others we could not mention here because the design for the unsung heroes is that is that their names disappear out of mind. Robben Island is now a tourist attraction whose design was to help ex-Robben Island prisoners out of poverty and settle back in society in the manner Americans take care of their veterans, and a trust was formed called Makana Trust; but endemic corruption prevents the Makana Trust from fulfilling that duty, as tourism in Robben island makes millions of money. And corruption or politics of the Makana Trust, whichever, prevented help from them republishing this book that was hailed by the late Eskia Mphahlele as the best to come out of Robben Island. And why not, I was a small fry in that conundrum.
During the Apartheid years in South Africa, a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was smuggled around the prison on Robben Island. The book's significance resides in the fact that the book's owner, Sonny Venkatratham, passed it to a number of his fellow political prisoners in the single cells, including Nelson Mandela, asking them to mark their favourite passages with a signature and date. Informally known as "the Robben Island Bible", numerous prisoners selected the speeches that meant the most to them and their experience as political prisoners. In 2008 and 2010, playwright and scholar Matthew Hahn conducted interviews with eight former political prisoners in South Africa. Offering a vivid and startling account of the experience of these political prisoners during Apartheid, this extraordinary verbatim play weaves Shakespeare's words together with first-hand accounts from these men. They offer their reflections on their time as Liberation activists and, twenty years later, on the costs, consequences and whether or not it was all worth it. The play is published alongside a preface by Sonny Venkatrathnam and an introduction by South African actor, director , playwright and cultural activist John Kani.
This book takes a new, exciting and important approach to art. It shows how children and older students can use art to explore personal, social and cultural issues that touch their lives. The book covers new ground, responding as it does to the increasingly diverse nature of cities and to recent government initiatives worldwide to foster social inclusion and equality of opportunity and support active citizenship. The contributors are art educators. They write about their ways of engaging with contemporary art practice in their particular fields so as to encourage young people to acquire critical understanding. They also challenge the pedagogies that perpetuate long-established forms of art practice. Tim Rollins writes about his work with disaffected youths in the Bronx and John Johnston describes work in art to bring communities together in Northern Ireland. Other contributors include Toby Jackson, head of interpretation at Tate Modern, Diedre Prinz, curator of the Robben Island museum in South Africa, the 198 Gallery in south London, and Viv Golding who works in museums and gallery education. Sinath Bannerjee explores socio-cultural issues in comic novels in India and Sue Lok explores identities through art practices. Educators at each level also contribute to this groundbreaking book. Andy Gower describes his innovative art practice in a secondary school, and children of Room 13 - in a Scottish primary school - report on their organization of their own focus for art. Lesley Burgess and Nick Addison give an account of their development of critical and social practices in art education at London''s Institute of Education. The book is for all those working in art education, in museums and galleries, schools and communities. Contributor information : Tim Rollins work in New York with Kids of Survival (KOS) has achieved world-wide acclaim. Beginning in the 1980s Rollins taught a highly disaffected group of teenagers in the Bronx and together they established an art workshop where members of the group produced challenging conceptual art work. Subsequently work was sold and is now held in major galleries around the world. Through their visual practices many members of the group overcame feelings of rejection and alienation and developed self assurance and confidence. John Johnston works with the Protestant communities in Belfast and through the use of visual practices he has been working with young people in a variety of community sites to explore issues of identity. This is a difficult educational challenge given the history of Northern Ireland. Recently he has been invited to work in Lebanon at a human rights summer school. He has been working with young people there to explore themes of ''home'' and ''belonging'' through visual practices. Room 13 consists of a highly creative group of children at Caol Primary School near Fort William in Scotland. The children are producing contemporary art which has received much interest and acclaim nationally and internationally. The children run Room 13 as an entirely self-funding business, independent from the school. Rob Fairley and Claire Gibb are the only adults involved, they offer advice but they are not the children''s teachers. An elected committee of children makes all decisions about the work and the business. Viv Golding is a lecturer in museum studies at Leicester University. She uses the concept of ''museum clearing'' to counter the discourses of lack, often a self-fulfilling prophecy that frequently permeates much discussion of Black children and their under-achievement in UK schools today. The practical value of her critique is illustrated through a fieldwork project involving imaginative art and literacy school and museum work in south London with early years children. Deidre Prins and her team work as education officers at Robben Island Museum in South Africa. They provide some background to the work of the museum and introduce readers briefly to the legacy of creative forms used in the maximum security prison between 1960s and 1991 and the role it played in creating a process of ''normalization'' under conditions that were repressive and alienating. A large part of the audiences of Robben Island Museum are children and youth. All of them have no memory or experience of the colonial period in RSA history and very few of them have a memory or experience of apartheid. These are two defining periods in the lives of all South Africans, with the scars, benefits and joys of a new democracy. To create a dynamic learning environment in which children and youth can engage with a legacy which is at once painful and liberatory, requires a process of ''making memory'', speaking about the past, doing the past and understanding the past. Their engagement with this past in turn creates their own memories and leaves its mark on Robben Island, which is a living museum. The theme of ''memory making'' will be described through the production of a photographic collage which is part of the annual Spring School activities. 198 Gallery :The team at the 198 Gallery write about their work on he Urban Visions scheme which is an outreach programme that deals with disaffected youth in south London. Lucy Davies the chief administrator and other gallery staff will write about how their program has impacted on the learning experience of children from this diverse urban environmen. Many are excluded from schools or have learning difficulties which schools find difficult to address. The gallery in its work across a range of media, but more especially electronic media, has earned the respect of many in educational and fine art circles both in this country and in mainland Europe. Sue Lok is a an artist and lecturer at Middlesex University. She has a particular interest in the experience of Chinese British artists and young people. Her work will explore themes central to their experience alongside issues emanating from her own experience as an artist and researcher. Lesley Burgess and Nick Addison are art educators at the Institute of Education in London. They have a nation-wide reputation for their seminal publication Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School. They have carried out further research in the arena of teacher education for this book. Andy Gower is head of art at a north London comprehensive school. He and his team have devised a way of teaching which is unique but very successful within the state system. Their issues-based approach extends across the year groups and encourages responses which address issues of personal, social, cultural and political concern. The idea is not to focus greatly on the development of traditional skills in making art but in fostering a creative thinking environment in which children respond imaginatively and personally to issues which impact on their lives. Sarnath is a comic artist: he address issues through the graphic medium of comic imagery. His work explores relationships and issues of exclusion, both physical and psychological. The ways in which his pieces unfurl encourage different interpretations and readings of what is being said. It is an extraordinarily intense and challenging comic style which demands constant revisiting and re-reading. His chapter invites us to enter the world of a south Asian man whose thoughts drift in and out of different points of experience. It takes us on a physical and psychological journey and depositis us in a space that begs more questions about identity and belonging. Sarnath Banerjee has initiated a scheme in the south Asian community of Tower Hamlets in east London which will see Bengali women make comics about their lives and thoughts. He is developing a similar scheme among a number of minority ethnic communities in the Brixton area of south London. He is shortl
Examining children's rights from a global perspective, Mary John considers how children experience power, being powerful and the transformation of power relationships. She explores this issue objectively yet compassionately, comparing the situation of children to that of powerless minority groups and asking why children are rarely included in debates on social accountability, freedom and autonomy. Examining children's rights in relation to current thinking about the nature of power, the role of competence within this, and how perception of power is determined by culture and economics, she presents discussion of issues and movements affecting children around the world uncovered in her research, including: · the Children's Parliament in India · the rise in violence among Japanese schoolchildren · child soldiers in Africa · democratic schooling in Albany, USA. She argues that democracies are not only sought in the public sphere, they are created within the emotional intimacies of private social worlds, presenting the child with new challenges for the recognition and realization of their rightful autonomy and agency. With in-depth research and thought-provoking discussion, this book supplies a wealth of information for policy makers, social workers and academics, articulated in a compelling and lively style.
