GCRF GlobalGRACE (Global Gender and Cultures of Equality)

In recent years there have been significant advances made internationally to raise awareness about gender inequalities. International organisations including the United Nations have also sought to ensure that the creation of more equitable futures for women and men are at the heart of global change and sustainable development. Despite those advances, gender inequalities persist in myriad forms and negatively affect the health and wellbeing of people the world over in a variety of ways, from constraining access to opportunities and resources to fostering gender based violence. We recognise the importance of both international bodies and national states and governments in agenda setting, enacting progressive legislation and adopting gender positive policies, as well as the work of those political activists who are at the forefront of pressing for these changes. However, this project is focused on the way that cultures of equality are being built and created from the ground up. We do so by investigating the creative ways that people and organisations in developing countries respond to and seek to address existing inequalities and enhance the wellbeing of people marginalised as a result of those. Our aim is disclose the ways that those everyday responses not only address harms, but also become opportunities for broader societal impact through creating new and alternative cultures of equality. How and in what ways does the proposed research use art, curation, literature and performance to address these challenges? Our answer, following the novelist Jeanette Winterson, is that, 'Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves'. By that Winterson means that so long as we remain capable of telling different stories about our own and other lives, there is the possibility of creating more equitable and sustainable futures for all of us. That is our understanding of what cultures of equality are about: working with and alongside people both to disclose the situations of inequality and the bodily and mental impacts of that on them and the people they care for, and to begin to tell different stories about what their lives ought and could be. As scholars working across the humanities and social sciences we think there are considerable advantages to using different arts based practice including creative writing, dance, exhibitions, music, theatre, performance or social media in this process. These different multisensory methods enable people to share things about their lives that may be too sensitive and threatening to talk about directly. They also create opportunities not just to tell different stories but also to tell them in new and different sorts of ways. Our project draws together and creates new partnerships between people and organisations from across the world in and beyond the academy. In so doing we will share expertise and learn from each other about how we can best use these arts based research practices, both to enable us to better hear and understand the stories people tell, and to find better ways of using those stories to create the conditions that underpin and will enhance the economic development and welfare of all people.