The Praxis Project

Funded by Irish Aid, and housed at the Centre for Global Development (CGD) at University College Cork (UCC), The Praxis Project aims to incorporate  ‘Global Citizenship and Development Education’ (GCDE) into pedagogy, research and activities across the university. GCDE is an educational framework that empowers individuals to critically examine global issues such as inequality, social justice, human rights, and environmental sustainability. It promotes a commitment to active, informed, and transformative global citizenship, and aims to address critical local and global challenges through collaborative research, education, and community engagement.

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In early 2025, in response to a call in support of collaborative projects for interdisciplinary teams to engage in research which aligns with the principles of GCDE, I began working with Professor Manfred Schewe and Fionn Woodhouse from the University of Cork to explore Performative Approaches to Democracy & Citizenship. We partnered with Yalgaar Sanskrutik Kala Manch, a Mumbai-based collective of musicians and performers. The members of Yalgaar identify as Dalit, people who belong to the scheduled castes or the lowest castes in the hierarchy of the Indian caste system. They situate themselves in the writings Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who drafted the constitution of India, and in the tradition of lok-shahirs or people's poets. They describe their work as engaging in cultural activism, and as a way of creating alternate forms of collective mobilisation.

 

Here's a link to one of their many videos on YouTube which gives some idea of what they do.​

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Three or four years ago, Yalgaar rented a small studio space in east Mumbai, called the Nirmik Cultural Centre, where they began engaging with the community through the performing arts to investigate questions of social justice, democracy and social transformation. Early in 2025 they started a community theatre program with the aim of developing a devised performance around these themes over a 6-month period of workshops and rehearsals. The questions that Yalgaar were asking themselves were - how to develop modes of facilitation relevant to the community? How to tackle issues of justice, democracy, participation, and rights in an atmosphere which is increasingly restrictive? In what sorts of ways to draw upon traditions of folk performance?

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We attempted to unpack these questions in a workshop over a 3-day period in June of 2025 at the Nirmik Cultural Centre in Mumbai. The workshop began with theatre games and simple improvisation exercises after which three questions were posed to the group:

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1. What does Democracy mean to you?
2. What is your experience of Democracy?
3. What should be the questions we should be asking about Democracy?

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which were explored through through performative modes, a combination of still images and improvisation. Much of what was showed violence, and a lack of agency. But there was also hope. Expressed symbolically in the form of a blooming flower.

 

In the next phase of the project we shall attempt to formulate the questions we should be asking about Democracy, as well as develop a system of work for facilitators who want to engage with this question through performative approaches. And what sort of performative approaches?

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To paraphrase Augusto Boal:

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"The kind of performative approaches which develop, in their most archaic sense, our capacity to observe ourselves in action. We are able to see ourselves seeing! This possibility of our being simultaneously protagonist and principal spectator of our actions, affords us the further possibility of thinking virtualities, of imagining possibilities, of combining memory and imagination — two indissociable psychic processes — to reinvent the past and to invent the future. Therein resides the immense power with which performance is endowed."

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#Research #Praxis #Workshops #Facilitation #Education