1 00:00:05,790 --> 00:00:15,030 Hi, Malika Boma, and you're listening to a podcast hosted by the Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents Hub, 2 00:00:15,030 --> 00:00:19,740 hosted by Oxford University and the University of Cape Town. 3 00:00:19,740 --> 00:00:32,370 This podcast was recorded as part of a series in Oxford in November 2019 to discuss the theme of understanding adolescence in African contexts. 4 00:00:32,370 --> 00:00:54,570 Thanks for listening! I'm Alex Beaumont and I am on work package three within the acceleration hub, working in particular on narrative and identity. 5 00:00:54,570 --> 00:01:03,450 And I'm myself a writer and think a lot about storytelling. 6 00:01:03,450 --> 00:01:09,750 I'm honoured to judge a couple who I'm professor of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics at King's College London. 7 00:01:09,750 --> 00:01:18,840 I'm very interested in connexions links between the communication practises and young people's identities, 8 00:01:18,840 --> 00:01:28,670 and I have developed small stories research, which is a paradigm for analysing everyday life stories. 9 00:01:28,670 --> 00:01:38,190 And they did. I'm a new Mahali, I am from the Education and Skills Development Programme at the Human Sciences Research Council, 10 00:01:38,190 --> 00:01:44,580 and I am interested in the youth broadly, in particular youth expressions. 11 00:01:44,580 --> 00:01:53,100 I'm interested in methodologies, creative methodologies that elevate young people's voices, 12 00:01:53,100 --> 00:02:04,210 particularly around civic education, around sociopolitical navigation, around activism. 13 00:02:04,210 --> 00:02:06,520 An uncle born or a deal? 14 00:02:06,520 --> 00:02:19,870 I am the University of South Africa and the South African Medical Research Council, amongst other interest I have is young man. 15 00:02:19,870 --> 00:02:24,760 Along with that. I'm interested in boys. 16 00:02:24,760 --> 00:02:34,300 I have just brought out a book which is relevant to this about theorising from Africa, psychological theory from Africa. 17 00:02:34,300 --> 00:02:39,890 It's called the well, looks like this from here. Thoughts on Africans centred psychology. 18 00:02:39,890 --> 00:02:47,140 African psychology. Thanks. Thanks thanks to you to all three of you. 19 00:02:47,140 --> 00:02:54,280 So just to kind of kick us off from I don't know if this is to kind of as in 20 00:02:54,280 --> 00:03:02,440 general or but it might just get us talking from your different perspectives. 21 00:03:02,440 --> 00:03:06,520 How does performance work, do you think? 22 00:03:06,520 --> 00:03:11,980 To help us understand what adolescents are going through in their lives? 23 00:03:11,980 --> 00:03:15,070 Do you think that are ways in which they perform their identities, 24 00:03:15,070 --> 00:03:25,420 maybe on social media or maybe in classrooms or on the streets in different ways that might give us some sense of their lives? 25 00:03:25,420 --> 00:03:31,690 How do they use performance in their lives? I think young people say they want to speak. 26 00:03:31,690 --> 00:03:35,500 They want to be heard. They want to be able to express themselves. 27 00:03:35,500 --> 00:03:42,640 And they particularly drawn, I think, to creative expression, to media, to music, to social media, 28 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:53,860 to blogging, to dance, to any kind of physical, vocal or emotional kind of expression. 29 00:03:53,860 --> 00:03:59,180 And I think those are the kinds of we should harness those kinds of. 30 00:03:59,180 --> 00:04:07,450 Methods in the in our interventions, because I think, yeah, the young people are drawn to those kinds of things, 31 00:04:07,450 --> 00:04:20,210 I think they're freeing because a lot of them aren't so reliant on language or on authority or kind of destabilises that power dynamic. 32 00:04:20,210 --> 00:04:33,110 And so for me, I've really seen a sense of ownership from using film documentary, especially having them be the, 33 00:04:33,110 --> 00:04:40,580 you know, be on the other side of of capturing those kinds of images, sounds, words. 34 00:04:40,580 --> 00:04:46,700 So just just to pick out your the word freeing that you use the media. 35 00:04:46,700 --> 00:04:50,830 How does that freeing actually work? I mean, what? 36 00:04:50,830 --> 00:04:57,960 What is what is freeing about a performance and that it comes from south. 37 00:04:57,960 --> 00:05:02,840 It isn't directive and there's no there's no wrong or right. 38 00:05:02,840 --> 00:05:07,520 There's no there's no way it should be. 39 00:05:07,520 --> 00:05:11,390 It just is. Mm-Hmm. 40 00:05:11,390 --> 00:05:23,840 I mean, if we look at it, performance has had strong links seen in different bodies of tradition, both with identities and with storytelling. 41 00:05:23,840 --> 00:05:38,330 So in terms of performance and identities, performance has been very often associated with a play with possibilities and experimentation. 42 00:05:38,330 --> 00:05:49,220 And if even if we look at Judith Butler's work, performance is about an iterative rehearsed, 43 00:05:49,220 --> 00:05:56,630 putting on or off of positions of identities puts it all may be taking off. 44 00:05:56,630 --> 00:06:04,080 But actually, that's how over time, across space for different individuals, 45 00:06:04,080 --> 00:06:18,110 a kind of notion of perhaps a little more settled identities and identifications come into being through various types of play and experimentation, 46 00:06:18,110 --> 00:06:32,390 which if we move now to stories and storytelling storytelling affords quite specific and unique types of play and experimentation, 47 00:06:32,390 --> 00:06:42,920 particularly because we can modulate distance and proximity between our here and now with communicators. 48 00:06:42,920 --> 00:06:47,930 The experience we're reporting we can play with different sides of our self. 49 00:06:47,930 --> 00:06:55,400 Government talked about the production format and self lamination, and he's he's he's interaction. 50 00:06:55,400 --> 00:07:00,740 All the work has been used a lot in terms of looking at performance and storytelling. 51 00:07:00,740 --> 00:07:16,850 So we can we can explore possibilities through storytelling by positioning ourselves as as characters in our tales, 52 00:07:16,850 --> 00:07:28,370 by putting words into other characters, mouths, by positioning ourselves as as hearing now communicators. 53 00:07:28,370 --> 00:07:47,600 So those are distinct possibilities, which especially during adolescence, where we know that sharing stories in in in the context of socialisation, 54 00:07:47,600 --> 00:07:53,930 especially within the peer group, is a very important mode of communicating. 55 00:07:53,930 --> 00:08:03,860 And we also know that people experiment quite a lot with identities. 56 00:08:03,860 --> 00:08:07,160 So performance has a key role to play. 57 00:08:07,160 --> 00:08:19,790 And in fact, on on on social media, we see that that young people are kind of interpolated as well as performers, 58 00:08:19,790 --> 00:08:28,190 and they're kind of being asked to perform in more public environments than before, 59 00:08:28,190 --> 00:08:38,000 and they are asked to perform ultimately their everyday life stories and think of Instagram Stories, 60 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:49,540 Snapchat Stories, essentially, you know, young people are kind of old for it now facilities to to perform the mundane as we wear 61 00:08:49,540 --> 00:08:56,570 to my ordinary life and turn it into a performance in a kind of a 24-7 type of thing. 62 00:08:56,570 --> 00:09:01,720 So opportunities are. Rated for performance amongst young people. 63 00:09:01,720 --> 00:09:10,070 Yeah. And I just want to link that to some of those work with boys and young men. 64 00:09:10,070 --> 00:09:17,800 Um, does this performance of the mundane every day playing with distance and proximity in different identities? 65 00:09:17,800 --> 00:09:30,340 Does that do you think that kind of works with some of the the characters that you that you're dealing with? 66 00:09:30,340 --> 00:09:42,700 Can I say a little bit further back? Yeah. You know, like most academics and researchers in my everyday life and work, I write in a particular way. 67 00:09:42,700 --> 00:09:51,430 I discipline to think in a particular way. So you write a journal article or even a book chapter or a book, you write it within a format and style. 68 00:09:51,430 --> 00:09:57,880 Some guidelines, literally they give you a guideline is to say you should. You should write. 69 00:09:57,880 --> 00:10:05,530 And it seems I have forgotten something quite ordinary really about about a life that I used to live, 70 00:10:05,530 --> 00:10:12,730 that young men and women in in places where I come from, live, how they they act, 71 00:10:12,730 --> 00:10:20,000 how they perform, how they perform, the mundane in the I listen to a lot of music and a lot of black music from around the world, 72 00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:23,170 but other kinds of music, but black music in particular. 73 00:10:23,170 --> 00:10:33,580 So hip hop in South Africa, there's a new new genre, a couple of new drummers, but one is called amongst piano and the other one is called Bom. 74 00:10:33,580 --> 00:10:38,890 And of course, there's hip hop. Further back, you go to a wider. 75 00:10:38,890 --> 00:10:46,450 So these are, you know, genres of music. But also there's a lot of dancing group in South Africa called. 76 00:10:46,450 --> 00:10:54,390 And it all goes quiet. Just keep the families of the America's Got Talent and all of that, and you can see them performing on stage. 77 00:10:54,390 --> 00:11:04,510 All of this is to say in the last few years and again, with the inspiration of how young people in townships, 78 00:11:04,510 --> 00:11:11,620 in particular, how they walk, literally, how they just walk young men in particular, they do something with their bodies. 79 00:11:11,620 --> 00:11:15,830 They stylised, they walking is a performance. Walking is an art. 80 00:11:15,830 --> 00:11:27,310 So the very act of living in this place that just wants to weighs you down and lifting yourself and walking, you see that this is an art form. 81 00:11:27,310 --> 00:11:28,660 Walking is an art form. 82 00:11:28,660 --> 00:11:36,850 Obama walks in a particular way, but you can see how he moderates it, and we can see how he walks and the young men do that all the time. 83 00:11:36,850 --> 00:11:40,810 So when you were watching MTV or you watching MTV Base, 84 00:11:40,810 --> 00:11:47,620 when you were watching Channel or in South Africa and across Africa and you can see blackness performed, 85 00:11:47,620 --> 00:11:52,720 there's connexions between between the U.S. and and in Europe and in Africa. 86 00:11:52,720 --> 00:11:56,800 You can see how young people do something with their bodies on videos, right? 87 00:11:56,800 --> 00:12:01,600 A way they hold their hands, but also how young women across Africa and the dancing is. 88 00:12:01,600 --> 00:12:02,270 It's incredible. 89 00:12:02,270 --> 00:12:11,380 I mean, so from the walking and you can see the music, I've taken it into the into my right and gives us a particular kind of freedom. 90 00:12:11,380 --> 00:12:17,500 So I'm taking a lot more risks in my writing right now about I want to perform, I want to perform, 91 00:12:17,500 --> 00:12:24,630 and it's incredible that I'm learning this from young people with some of them I teach about. 92 00:12:24,630 --> 00:12:26,740 And of course, there's a double nest of this, right? 93 00:12:26,740 --> 00:12:34,540 So in one sense, I used to teach them to write in and to get a piece to a master's in graduate degree. 94 00:12:34,540 --> 00:12:38,350 You have to write in a particular way and then suddenly realise I have to. 95 00:12:38,350 --> 00:12:42,310 I have to go back and learn from them about freedom can perform performed, 96 00:12:42,310 --> 00:12:47,920 blackness can be performed and put that on the page, and it's been really liberating for me. 97 00:12:47,920 --> 00:12:54,460 It's been incredibly liberating, but also they kind of just the love I'm getting from young people and they say, 98 00:12:54,460 --> 00:13:01,510 So you had to you had to get to this point to say to [INAUDIBLE] with it. 99 00:13:01,510 --> 00:13:05,920 Yeah, that's terrible. But I've forgotten something as ordinary as that. 100 00:13:05,920 --> 00:13:15,790 And to be free, you have to you have to express a certain being in the world, the way you walk, the way you speak. 101 00:13:15,790 --> 00:13:25,390 And so just be undisciplined. BCT In that sentence, you create a new and new repertoire of of body movements of sorts. 102 00:13:25,390 --> 00:13:27,040 It's it's been incredible for me, 103 00:13:27,040 --> 00:13:37,090 so I'm learning from young people before young men perform their lives and young women in the way they danced it just to write about it, right? 104 00:13:37,090 --> 00:13:44,950 Basically. I'm really glad you're bringing the of the the the concept of embodiment and performance, 105 00:13:44,950 --> 00:13:52,780 and I come from a kind of a local centric area which traditionally has privileged 106 00:13:52,780 --> 00:13:57,370 other communicative resources and obviously language in storytelling and performance. 107 00:13:57,370 --> 00:14:04,540 But. We are now increasingly acknowledging and factoring in how storytelling performances are, 108 00:14:04,540 --> 00:14:10,330 in fact multi synoptic and the body plays a very important role in that. 109 00:14:10,330 --> 00:14:19,600 I think another point that I'm thinking about as a as I'm hearing what you're saying is, is this idea of definitely this idea of, you know, 110 00:14:19,600 --> 00:14:27,460 experimentation and obviously improvisation around performance, but also the idea of activities as well, 111 00:14:27,460 --> 00:14:31,840 which can be really dangerous and also restrictive and create barriers. 112 00:14:31,840 --> 00:14:36,290 And yeah, I mean, as you were talking about that, I was thinking of all those, 113 00:14:36,290 --> 00:14:38,800 you know, the wonderful kind of inspiration, magic or from young people. 114 00:14:38,800 --> 00:14:42,880 I was thinking about the negative of that, the performing especially, you know, 115 00:14:42,880 --> 00:14:51,100 when you have such a public gaze of reproducing kind of negative sensation or, you know, or even what. 116 00:14:51,100 --> 00:14:58,210 Yeah, or even what masculinity or femininity is or looks like how it's performed. 117 00:14:58,210 --> 00:15:03,770 Yeah, yeah. They were tilting to the negative because he reproduced in these stereotypes. 118 00:15:03,770 --> 00:15:09,640 Yes. And yeah, so I'm I'm quite aware about that, but in my head. 119 00:15:09,640 --> 00:15:16,450 Well, yesterday the image that came I don't know from, you know, because I've been thinking about this quite a lot about people, 120 00:15:16,450 --> 00:15:22,600 young young men and women from blackness and black muscular ageism and more staff came into my head. 121 00:15:22,600 --> 00:15:29,940 I don't know what Brooke brought him was there was another African American Muslim performer in the bag. 122 00:15:29,940 --> 00:15:33,460 Yes, it was. It was in South Africa. But it wasn't. 123 00:15:33,460 --> 00:15:37,270 Not when we told you, I'm thinking, I'm thinking about the nasty C. 124 00:15:37,270 --> 00:15:41,830 Nasty C has got a new song. It's getting a lot of airplay. 125 00:15:41,830 --> 00:15:48,470 It's a really cool song. I mean, it's just that. The terrible thing about is that Africa, because you, you know, you might. 126 00:15:48,470 --> 00:15:52,840 We're learning the phrase the term called, well, class, right? 127 00:15:52,840 --> 00:16:00,850 That like this could be anywhere. Nasty C could be anywhere in the world because the beats that flow, that just teaser is amazing. 128 00:16:00,850 --> 00:16:06,790 So I'm thinking about how he's in this media, his way from the way he's dressed there, 129 00:16:06,790 --> 00:16:12,670 but he's performing a certain musketeers, and the song is about love and about working in answering calls and all of that. 130 00:16:12,670 --> 00:16:20,020 And I'm making money, you know, basically do the hustle. And in one sense, you could tilt and reproduce it. 131 00:16:20,020 --> 00:16:23,590 But I'm getting that is his expression. It's performance. But and I take it. 132 00:16:23,590 --> 00:16:29,410 I put it on a page in my life who created my own shirts, but also literally re learning that, 133 00:16:29,410 --> 00:16:33,160 you know, there's a freedom in in in in what the what they do. 134 00:16:33,160 --> 00:16:36,940 Sometimes they use this freedom to refer to certain things. But I'm taking it. 135 00:16:36,940 --> 00:16:43,960 I'm saying we could move this along about making Africa and African adolescents and 136 00:16:43,960 --> 00:16:50,620 young people have multiple models of of of thinking of acting or being in the world. 137 00:16:50,620 --> 00:16:56,980 Yes, exactly. And of course, every time you reproduce, you ultimately recontextualized and infuse it with new meanings. 138 00:16:56,980 --> 00:17:03,120 So we shouldn't see reproduction is a completely, you know, passive that either. 139 00:17:03,120 --> 00:17:09,830 Mm hmm. Yeah. The question of context coming back in and conduct, you said, What space is there? 140 00:17:09,830 --> 00:17:16,360 You know what? What is the what? What I mean? It's partly safe spaces, but you know, a lot of these performances. 141 00:17:16,360 --> 00:17:20,290 I think that component was talked about were sort of public performances walking, 142 00:17:20,290 --> 00:17:25,210 walking down the street, you know, but as we say, in certain contexts, that's not possible. 143 00:17:25,210 --> 00:17:31,180 So, yeah. Oop. Look to continue this theme, then what? 144 00:17:31,180 --> 00:17:39,980 What, what, what has happened? And I'm then like, I'm kicking myself every day about how long this took me too long. 145 00:17:39,980 --> 00:17:49,870 I mean, because I'd forgotten precisely this idea of of a freedom of of risk-taking in the sense we were talking about earlier, 146 00:17:49,870 --> 00:17:58,510 about performance as an ordinary fact of life. Just making making your life into something beautiful into an art piece. 147 00:17:58,510 --> 00:18:03,490 Some two examples. One is what it has done. 148 00:18:03,490 --> 00:18:11,170 What has happened now is, I am, I guess, talking about how they have my mind be thinking about some of these things. 149 00:18:11,170 --> 00:18:17,800 Is, Is I right with the young people I supervise? But in a different way, altogether different. 150 00:18:17,800 --> 00:18:22,810 So what are we doing with quality? I don't think is a good quality, corrective writing. 151 00:18:22,810 --> 00:18:26,290 So we say, well, let's ask each other questions in a room. 152 00:18:26,290 --> 00:18:34,630 It works well in the same room. We do some of my students all over the world, but I think we ask each other questions. 153 00:18:34,630 --> 00:18:45,130 And one person starts writing a paragraph and we pass it on and the other person rewrites the paragraph and ask the next question. 154 00:18:45,130 --> 00:18:52,090 So it keeps on moving. In the end, what you end up is something that doesn't belong to any one person it belongs to. 155 00:18:52,090 --> 00:18:57,900 It's something that just emerges out of the group. We go away. And then, you know, we. 156 00:18:57,900 --> 00:18:59,510 After a week, we'll be right to this thing, 157 00:18:59,510 --> 00:19:07,800 what it does is is get a little less is like a collaboration is like a dance basically between amongst ourselves. 158 00:19:07,800 --> 00:19:15,960 But other things that we've been doing and we just did this thing with this with Katie right now is a photo voice, right? 159 00:19:15,960 --> 00:19:23,520 A lot of my students are using this for the voice, basically giving kids cameras in their hands, training them into photography. 160 00:19:23,520 --> 00:19:33,090 They photograph something interactive when you give them a question to give them a topic cool, photograph queerness in public life and they will. 161 00:19:33,090 --> 00:19:42,150 And just they don't only photograph bodies of people, they they the photograph clothes, they photograph spaces and then they come and talk to them. 162 00:19:42,150 --> 00:19:49,920 I mean, this is easy to spread that methodology. We don't do that in Egypt, in Zambia and Ghana, in South Africa, in Mozambique. 163 00:19:49,920 --> 00:19:55,770 We ask them to photograph places. They consider risky behaviour, they consider all the people. 164 00:19:55,770 --> 00:20:02,280 And yet the interpretation is so different. And then the discussion and the discussion about the collaboration with your friends. 165 00:20:02,280 --> 00:20:08,730 I think those interactions in those spaces to really unpack and challenge and agree and disagree. 166 00:20:08,730 --> 00:20:10,410 Absolutely. They disagree. 167 00:20:10,410 --> 00:20:18,390 So one of the skills that is facilitation right about, you know, she said this, you said this, you know, this is what comes out. 168 00:20:18,390 --> 00:20:24,570 Don't be too precious about it. Don't let it go. Eat together, walk together to stretch and then come back and write again. 169 00:20:24,570 --> 00:20:32,910 But the photographer in particular, this this photo voice is also does something else, right, both in themselves to the students, 170 00:20:32,910 --> 00:20:37,440 but also in the kids that we teach these young people that we teach because it gives them 171 00:20:37,440 --> 00:20:42,510 a simple skill to photograph things because they get to train them about how to focus, 172 00:20:42,510 --> 00:20:46,290 what the focus on better on foreground light and all of that. 173 00:20:46,290 --> 00:20:54,120 And then they get to talk about their pictures is basically the portrait. So this is this is there's no wrong or right foot photograph. 174 00:20:54,120 --> 00:20:56,490 This is the image you took. Just tell us about it. 175 00:20:56,490 --> 00:21:01,740 And then other people get, you know, treated in positive ways about what the photographs, what you see in the photograph. 176 00:21:01,740 --> 00:21:02,940 So these are special cameras. 177 00:21:02,940 --> 00:21:11,870 I just want to understand this part of, you know what, if I told you about how you started way back when it was the full moon? 178 00:21:11,870 --> 00:21:20,310 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not they use the cell phones and pictures about queer life in this space, and they come and then I print them out. 179 00:21:20,310 --> 00:21:29,100 I mean, I love this way through which you actually get young people to produce and co-produce. 180 00:21:29,100 --> 00:21:29,400 I mean, 181 00:21:29,400 --> 00:21:37,800 the ethnographer in me and something that I'm doing on a very small scale with my students as part of a module language discourse on social media 182 00:21:37,800 --> 00:21:47,840 that's not often me says that young people are all already producing lots of stories and they've got lots of performative spaces on social media. 183 00:21:47,840 --> 00:22:01,120 And and so that they've already got kind of a lot of output, self kind of generated output and some exploit the way. 184 00:22:01,120 --> 00:22:05,190 I mean, channelling no one, actually. 185 00:22:05,190 --> 00:22:15,240 For me, it's kind of a more reflexive type of exercise, but it's so, so in a way, it's it's a matter of emphasis. 186 00:22:15,240 --> 00:22:19,320 Does the story come first or does it come last in the journey? 187 00:22:19,320 --> 00:22:27,820 Because one of the things that our students are doing is is actually go back to their posts and social media, 188 00:22:27,820 --> 00:22:34,200 go back to their social media engagements and keep some kind of it may be reflexive diary 189 00:22:34,200 --> 00:22:43,740 and beginning to unpick the sorts of performative self-presentation displays they do there. 190 00:22:43,740 --> 00:22:53,910 What they mean for them, what has gone well, what has gone wrong, and that is another way of kind of getting them to to reflect. 191 00:22:53,910 --> 00:22:57,900 So the resources that they will really create is what I want. 192 00:22:57,900 --> 00:23:02,310 I mean, this is an ongoing project about how to do how to harness this creativity. 193 00:23:02,310 --> 00:23:10,380 That's real. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, yeah, which is a terrible thing because even when I'm trying to run away from discipline, 194 00:23:10,380 --> 00:23:13,230 I am disciplined in their work because I want to produce it, 195 00:23:13,230 --> 00:23:19,770 because I'm an academic, I want to produce this is in books I want to produce as in chapters in general, but also we are creating. 196 00:23:19,770 --> 00:23:25,920 We can go to our YouTube channel. We're creating little tiny movies or every little bit that we do. 197 00:23:25,920 --> 00:23:29,970 We just can. We put the camera and show us how this works? 198 00:23:29,970 --> 00:23:33,330 What do we do with that? And we train with that. 199 00:23:33,330 --> 00:23:38,950 We have begun this two years of just producing and putting this on. But he has the creativity is always ready, right? 200 00:23:38,950 --> 00:23:45,320 And don't you find that they are experts as well, all these multi-modal multimedia? 201 00:23:45,320 --> 00:23:49,260 I mean, it is about podcasts, the poetry. 202 00:23:49,260 --> 00:23:57,490 Did you see this post? I didn't know about this, but yeah, I know this. This is the bit of this and of course, how social media works. 203 00:23:57,490 --> 00:24:00,820 About. Yes. Don't write. Just too long. 204 00:24:00,820 --> 00:24:11,320 They don't do that. Yes. Yes. And how basically to craft a media or a social media story could could put somebody there from them. 205 00:24:11,320 --> 00:24:22,120 Yeah, I mean, there's a keyword for me in terms of where performance and storytelling is that right now amongst young people crafting. 206 00:24:22,120 --> 00:24:29,620 They say they are very used to crafting themselves and kind of putting themselves 207 00:24:29,620 --> 00:24:37,250 up for all kinds of scrutiny and display in their lives and their everyday lives. 208 00:24:37,250 --> 00:24:40,850 Yeah, I just want to mention that. 209 00:24:40,850 --> 00:24:48,550 I mean, it isn't just social media, right? Because there are many young people who don't access it at all. 210 00:24:48,550 --> 00:24:53,770 And that performance is about in a rural village. 211 00:24:53,770 --> 00:25:04,560 It's about physical contact, it's about how they perform in groups and friendship groups and families. 212 00:25:04,560 --> 00:25:08,780 Yeah, just to throw it out there. Yeah, sure. I mean, this woman's happened, so. 213 00:25:08,780 --> 00:25:12,700 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we're talking about remediation. 214 00:25:12,700 --> 00:25:22,300 Then again, if those articles that I'm reading are right and you guys tell me, I'm reading about a kind of a high, 215 00:25:22,300 --> 00:25:29,350 high penetration of social media in rural South Africa, for instance, amongst young people on many platforms. 216 00:25:29,350 --> 00:25:33,770 I think maybe that's a clarification, because would you say WhatsApp was social evil? 217 00:25:33,770 --> 00:25:46,090 Yes. OK. It is called social media realise that interestingly, the platforms that is that are very popular amongst young people in the global north, 218 00:25:46,090 --> 00:25:54,680 as aware also come out as really popular in surveys amongst young people in different countries in Africa. 219 00:25:54,680 --> 00:25:58,540 And, you know, Instagram, for instance, Snapchat and WhatsApp, 220 00:25:58,540 --> 00:26:09,360 which has kind of ultimately become a type of social media group having started as a messaging service delivery ubiquitous. 221 00:26:09,360 --> 00:26:15,620 Yeah, I mean, I'm surprised by Instagram. I'm surprised by anything that uses a lot of data to get on this. 222 00:26:15,620 --> 00:26:19,540 WhatsApp doesn't. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's correct. I mean, that's gardens. 223 00:26:19,540 --> 00:26:27,130 I mean, you know, ethnographers, this thing about, uh, I am from a discipline that doesn't do ethnography. 224 00:26:27,130 --> 00:26:38,230 So psychology doesn't do a lot. But of course. So, you know, psychological anthropologist or a psychological ethnographers, if, if you will. 225 00:26:38,230 --> 00:26:48,670 What I'm I'm learning right now, I'm on my own and with some of my students is to do ethnography on watching people basically for this, 226 00:26:48,670 --> 00:26:54,420 this off line physical interaction. I mean, some of the didn't that I knew, but it didn't fascinate me. 227 00:26:54,420 --> 00:26:58,600 Hope young black women talk. I mean, how they yeah, how they just talk. 228 00:26:58,600 --> 00:27:05,380 I'm thinking, I am. I am such a it feels it was like I'm intruding because no, I'm watching them closely. 229 00:27:05,380 --> 00:27:12,850 But what are they doing? What what you do this with, with your hands on your head, throwing your back with me? 230 00:27:12,850 --> 00:27:19,100 But that is it's a performance, right? It's a it's a performance that, of course, is performative, right? 231 00:27:19,100 --> 00:27:21,160 They're performing to each other. They're performing. 232 00:27:21,160 --> 00:27:28,610 And it's it's an art form above because there's this moments of freedom to be creative, you know, offline amongst themselves. 233 00:27:28,610 --> 00:27:30,640 I'm thinking, you know, 234 00:27:30,640 --> 00:27:40,210 one of the thing that colonialism did does a puppet did is to really try to to to crush the spirit of of of young black people or black people. 235 00:27:40,210 --> 00:27:46,430 But when you watch them, for me right now is this beauty that I want to take them and put it on video on pages on. 236 00:27:46,430 --> 00:27:50,590 This is this is this is here and I don't understand why. 237 00:27:50,590 --> 00:27:58,900 Why you wouldn't use this. I guess you'd be interested how, how we can't use this lifted up and spread. 238 00:27:58,900 --> 00:28:05,860 And then that's been a theme over the last two days about, yeah, the hope and those small stories of joy. 239 00:28:05,860 --> 00:28:11,320 I guess we were talking about the two processes and their readings of the two stories, and someone made a comment. 240 00:28:11,320 --> 00:28:15,310 Why isn't this the story that we hear that stories everywhere? 241 00:28:15,310 --> 00:28:21,250 It's learnt it's quality, colonial joy, but it's been a long time. 242 00:28:21,250 --> 00:28:26,440 Yes, and it's also about shared ness because sometimes when we talk about performance and storytelling, 243 00:28:26,440 --> 00:28:32,170 we maybe stress the individuality a little bit too much. 244 00:28:32,170 --> 00:28:42,880 But these are kind of co-productions, and it's about signalling all kinds of group membership and people coming together. 245 00:28:42,880 --> 00:28:49,660 So any final thoughts on empowerment, energy reflection? 246 00:28:49,660 --> 00:28:56,750 I do. Actually, I have one. I mean, one of the things that that's that I had headed the first morning we got here, 247 00:28:56,750 --> 00:29:08,290 I thought this should be central to this, but I think it's it's again, how can we do this thing as researchers? 248 00:29:08,290 --> 00:29:12,490 So the way it was mentioned was there's a youth advisory group, right? 249 00:29:12,490 --> 00:29:17,950 Remember that and somebody mentioned that and I thought, You know, this is it. 250 00:29:17,950 --> 00:29:23,020 This should be at the centre of the project, but don't don't make it a youth advisory group. 251 00:29:23,020 --> 00:29:30,100 You have to, you know, work on African adolescents, make them at the centre, don't make them bring them into the room. 252 00:29:30,100 --> 00:29:37,780 And so what you're going to do then, is harness their creativity to tell you what would work, what doesn't work. 253 00:29:37,780 --> 00:29:43,870 And at that very moment, all over the places where you working with you, they're in the room about, does this work? 254 00:29:43,870 --> 00:29:48,290 So it's not just data, it's not just a vibe that they're giving you the. 255 00:29:48,290 --> 00:29:52,490 Part of shaping how the project works, in particular localities. 256 00:29:52,490 --> 00:29:59,660 When you if you do it this way becomes adolescent centric work, right? Because then the they show you, you don't just say, OK, we have a project. 257 00:29:59,660 --> 00:30:04,790 This is how we work, but they show you how their lives are being performed, how they are being enacted. 258 00:30:04,790 --> 00:30:09,050 I mean, you've summarised and I think there's no need to add any more. 259 00:30:09,050 --> 00:30:13,520 That's just the word I kept repeating over the last two days as ownership. Yeah. 260 00:30:13,520 --> 00:30:21,230 And that's emancipation. Yes. Make young people stakeholders in their research process as well. 261 00:30:21,230 --> 00:30:25,990 Yeah. Thank you so much. Every day coupon. 262 00:30:25,990 --> 00:30:38,900 And Alex, thanks very much. Thank. Thanks very much for listening to this podcast. 263 00:30:38,900 --> 00:30:53,466 Do you have a listen to the others in this series on understanding adolescence in African contexts?