Peacebuilding Students Experiment with Creative Play
As Peace Studies Masters students at the University of Bradford in the UK, inspired by the work on The Moral Imagination by J.P. Lederach, we have been exploring metaphors – metaphors that can symbolise aspects of conflict engagement and/or peacebuilding. Sara, Arts Lab’s director (currently enrolled on the course), chose play. Her contribution to an afternoon of student exhibits and presentations, was a 10 minite pop-up workshop or ‘game’ for fellow students to consider:
- Play in the process of how the ‘game’ was conceived and put together. In groups of 3, the ‘playing’ cards were to be assembled into ‘harmonious’ compositions on large sheets of paper – intentionally organic and incongruous in shape and hand-cut and painted by previous Arts Lab workshop participants (prisoners, students of art, primary school children, adults suffering mental health difficulties).
- Play with participant engagement – their approach to the challenge; how they experience it or think and feel about it.
- Play too in how this shared experience of collaborative game-playing might encourage the act of playfulness in all of us, whilst also shedding light on good practice as a peacebuilder.
The 30 students comprising over 14 different nationalities came up with both beautiful visual compositions and words or phrases that the process evoked in the context of peacebuilding. Most commonly arrived at were concepts such as ‘unity in diversity’, ‘co-operation’, ‘interconnectedness’, ‘community’, ‘beauty in chaos’, ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘different perspectives’, ‘collaboration’, ‘observation’ and ‘attentiveness’.
Further reading and images – see UK Peacebuilding Students Learn from Play project page.
