EVENT POSTPONED (Re)imagining creative practice in adolescent sexual and reproductive health: Interactive Workshop

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE THIS EVENT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR UPDATES

(Re)imagining creative practice in adolescent sexual and reproductive health:

Interactive Workshop

11.00-17.30, 24^th September 2019, University of Leeds, Room TBC

Concept Note

Much adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) education is developed with little input or engagement from young people themselves, limiting its potential for positive behaviour change. It further tends to disaggregate young people by gender, frequently placing women and girls at the centre of conversations about sexual health. Interventions rarely actively include adolescent boys, and tend to focus solely upon health factors and behaviours rather than underlying gender and structural inequalities that perpetuate risky and inequitable behaviours. In this workshop we seek to (re)imagine the scope and efficacy of ASRH education and tools through foregrounding the potential of creative practice to deliver effective youth-led interventions.

This workshop builds on our learnings from two GCRF-funded projects in Uganda, Malawi and India (2017-2019). We worked collaboratively with primary and secondary school students, teachers and public health practitioners to create new models of youth-led ASRH through the use of innovative research-led and arts-based methodologies. Working over the course of 6-12 months in each site, we used creative tools to enable male and female youth (separately and then together) to explore, critically reflect and challenge local masculinities, femininities, behaviours, expectations, roles and relationships; before co-creating arts-led tools for promoting knowledge and behaviour change among their families, communities and fellow students.

This workshop will begin with multi-media presentations of our findings before a series of interactive roundtable discussions that bring together interdisciplinary perspectives from across research and practice. These roundtables will explore how we can pursue new and sustainable models of youth-led behaviour change in the fields of ASRH and gender equality. Questions will include: how to bring male and female youth together to explore masculinities and femininities within the same intervention; how to tackle the tension between meaningful community engagement and upscaling the impact of interventions; how to successfully ground interventions in local contexts; and the potential challenges and successes of combining arts- and research-led approaches across multiple cultural contexts.

 

Draft Programme

11.00-11.30: Welcome remarks (intro to event, announcements, our project, posing questions)

11.30-12.30: Multi-media keynote – ‘Promoting sexual and reproductive health education among adolescents through creative and youth-led practice in India, Malawi and Uganda’

12.30: Light lunch & screening of short films & exhibition of photographs (posters, poems, impact quotes & radio script excerpts)

13.30-15.00: Roundtable 1 (6 x 5 min. lightning talks). Engaging masculinities and femininities: How to bring male and female youth together to deliver effective youth-led sexual and reproductive health interventions

15.00: Coffee break

15.15-16.45: Roundtable 2 (6 x 5 min. lightning talks). Policy and scale: Interrogating the tension between meaningful community engagement and upscaling impact

16.45: Coffee break

17.00-17.30: Closing remarks & key learnings: (Re)imagining youth-led ASRH