Hi, Malika Boma, and you're listening to a podcast hosted by the Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents Hub,
hosted by Oxford University and the University of Cape Town.
This podcast was recorded as part of a series in Oxford in November 2019 to discuss the theme of understanding adolescence in African contexts.
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.
And I'm myself a writer and think a lot about storytelling.
I'm honoured to judge a couple who I'm professor of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics at King's College London.
I'm very interested in connexions links between the communication practises and young people's identities,
and I have developed small stories research, which is a paradigm for analysing everyday life stories.
And they did. I'm a new Mahali, I am from the Education and Skills Development Programme at the Human Sciences Research Council,
and I am interested in the youth broadly, in particular youth expressions.
I'm interested in methodologies, creative methodologies that elevate young people's voices,
particularly around civic education, around sociopolitical navigation, around activism.
An uncle born or a deal?
I am the University of South Africa and the South African Medical Research Council, amongst other interest I have is young man.
Along with that. I'm interested in boys.
I have just brought out a book which is relevant to this about theorising from Africa, psychological theory from Africa.
It's called the well, looks like this from here. Thoughts on Africans centred psychology.
African psychology. Thanks. Thanks thanks to you to all three of you.
So just to kind of kick us off from I don't know if this is to kind of as in
general or but it might just get us talking from your different perspectives.
How does performance work, do you think?
To help us understand what adolescents are going through in their lives?
Do you think that are ways in which they perform their identities,
maybe on social media or maybe in classrooms or on the streets in different ways that might give us some sense of their lives?
How do they use performance in their lives? I think young people say they want to speak.
They want to be heard. They want to be able to express themselves.
And they particularly drawn, I think, to creative expression, to media, to music, to social media,
to blogging, to dance, to any kind of physical, vocal or emotional kind of expression.
And I think those are the kinds of we should harness those kinds of.
Methods in the in our interventions, because I think, yeah, the young people are drawn to those kinds of things,
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.
And so for me, I've really seen a sense of ownership from using film documentary, especially having them be the,
you know, be on the other side of of capturing those kinds of images, sounds, words.
So just just to pick out your the word freeing that you use the media.
How does that freeing actually work? I mean, what?
What is what is freeing about a performance and that it comes from south.
It isn't directive and there's no there's no wrong or right.
There's no there's no way it should be.
It just is. Mm-Hmm.
I mean, if we look at it, performance has had strong links seen in different bodies of tradition, both with identities and with storytelling.
So in terms of performance and identities, performance has been very often associated with a play with possibilities and experimentation.
And if even if we look at Judith Butler's work, performance is about an iterative rehearsed,
putting on or off of positions of identities puts it all may be taking off.
But actually, that's how over time, across space for different individuals,
a kind of notion of perhaps a little more settled identities and identifications come into being through various types of play and experimentation,
which if we move now to stories and storytelling storytelling affords quite specific and unique types of play and experimentation,
particularly because we can modulate distance and proximity between our here and now with communicators.
The experience we're reporting we can play with different sides of our self.
Government talked about the production format and self lamination, and he's he's he's interaction.
All the work has been used a lot in terms of looking at performance and storytelling.
So we can we can explore possibilities through storytelling by positioning ourselves as as characters in our tales,
by putting words into other characters, mouths, by positioning ourselves as as hearing now communicators.
So those are distinct possibilities, which especially during adolescence, where we know that sharing stories in in in the context of socialisation,
especially within the peer group, is a very important mode of communicating.
And we also know that people experiment quite a lot with identities.
So performance has a key role to play.
And in fact, on on on social media, we see that that young people are kind of interpolated as well as performers,
and they're kind of being asked to perform in more public environments than before,
and they are asked to perform ultimately their everyday life stories and think of Instagram Stories,
Snapchat Stories, essentially, you know, young people are kind of old for it now facilities to to perform the mundane as we wear
to my ordinary life and turn it into a performance in a kind of a 24-7 type of thing.
So opportunities are. Rated for performance amongst young people.
Yeah. And I just want to link that to some of those work with boys and young men.
Um, does this performance of the mundane every day playing with distance and proximity in different identities?
Does that do you think that kind of works with some of the the characters that you that you're dealing with?
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.
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.
Some guidelines, literally they give you a guideline is to say you should. You should write.
And it seems I have forgotten something quite ordinary really about about a life that I used to live,
that young men and women in in places where I come from, live, how they they act,
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,
but other kinds of music, but black music in particular.
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.
And of course, there's hip hop. Further back, you go to a wider.
So these are, you know, genres of music. But also there's a lot of dancing group in South Africa called.
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.
All of this is to say in the last few years and again, with the inspiration of how young people in townships,
in particular, how they walk, literally, how they just walk young men in particular, they do something with their bodies.
They stylised, they walking is a performance. Walking is an art.
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.
Walking is an art form.
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.
So when you were watching MTV or you watching MTV Base,
when you were watching Channel or in South Africa and across Africa and you can see blackness performed,
there's connexions between between the U.S. and and in Europe and in Africa.
You can see how young people do something with their bodies on videos, right?
A way they hold their hands, but also how young women across Africa and the dancing is.
It's incredible.
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.
So I'm taking a lot more risks in my writing right now about I want to perform, I want to perform,
and it's incredible that I'm learning this from young people with some of them I teach about.
And of course, there's a double nest of this, right?
So in one sense, I used to teach them to write in and to get a piece to a master's in graduate degree.
You have to write in a particular way and then suddenly realise I have to.
I have to go back and learn from them about freedom can perform performed,
blackness can be performed and put that on the page, and it's been really liberating for me.
It's been incredibly liberating, but also they kind of just the love I'm getting from young people and they say,
So you had to you had to get to this point to say to [INAUDIBLE] with it.
Yeah, that's terrible. But I've forgotten something as ordinary as that.
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.
And so just be undisciplined. BCT In that sentence, you create a new and new repertoire of of body movements of sorts.
It's it's been incredible for me,
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?
Basically. I'm really glad you're bringing the of the the the concept of embodiment and performance,
and I come from a kind of a local centric area which traditionally has privileged
other communicative resources and obviously language in storytelling and performance.
But. We are now increasingly acknowledging and factoring in how storytelling performances are,
in fact multi synoptic and the body plays a very important role in that.
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,
experimentation and obviously improvisation around performance, but also the idea of activities as well,
which can be really dangerous and also restrictive and create barriers.
And yeah, I mean, as you were talking about that, I was thinking of all those,
you know, the wonderful kind of inspiration, magic or from young people.
I was thinking about the negative of that, the performing especially, you know,
when you have such a public gaze of reproducing kind of negative sensation or, you know, or even what.
Yeah, or even what masculinity or femininity is or looks like how it's performed.
Yeah, yeah. They were tilting to the negative because he reproduced in these stereotypes.
Yes. And yeah, so I'm I'm quite aware about that, but in my head.
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,
young young men and women from blackness and black muscular ageism and more staff came into my head.
I don't know what Brooke brought him was there was another African American Muslim performer in the bag.
Yes, it was. It was in South Africa. But it wasn't.
Not when we told you, I'm thinking, I'm thinking about the nasty C.
Nasty C has got a new song. It's getting a lot of airplay.
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.
We're learning the phrase the term called, well, class, right?
That like this could be anywhere. Nasty C could be anywhere in the world because the beats that flow, that just teaser is amazing.
So I'm thinking about how he's in this media, his way from the way he's dressed there,
but he's performing a certain musketeers, and the song is about love and about working in answering calls and all of that.
And I'm making money, you know, basically do the hustle. And in one sense, you could tilt and reproduce it.
But I'm getting that is his expression. It's performance. But and I take it.
I put it on a page in my life who created my own shirts, but also literally re learning that,
you know, there's a freedom in in in in what the what they do.
Sometimes they use this freedom to refer to certain things. But I'm taking it.
I'm saying we could move this along about making Africa and African adolescents and
young people have multiple models of of of thinking of acting or being in the world.
Yes, exactly. And of course, every time you reproduce, you ultimately recontextualized and infuse it with new meanings.
So we shouldn't see reproduction is a completely, you know, passive that either.
Mm hmm. Yeah. The question of context coming back in and conduct, you said, What space is there?
You know what? What is the what? What I mean? It's partly safe spaces, but you know, a lot of these performances.
I think that component was talked about were sort of public performances walking,
walking down the street, you know, but as we say, in certain contexts, that's not possible.
So, yeah. Oop. Look to continue this theme, then what?
What, what, what has happened? And I'm then like, I'm kicking myself every day about how long this took me too long.
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,
about performance as an ordinary fact of life. Just making making your life into something beautiful into an art piece.
Some two examples. One is what it has done.
What has happened now is, I am, I guess, talking about how they have my mind be thinking about some of these things.
Is, Is I right with the young people I supervise? But in a different way, altogether different.
So what are we doing with quality? I don't think is a good quality, corrective writing.
So we say, well, let's ask each other questions in a room.
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.
And one person starts writing a paragraph and we pass it on and the other person rewrites the paragraph and ask the next question.
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.
It's something that just emerges out of the group. We go away. And then, you know, we.
After a week, we'll be right to this thing,
what it does is is get a little less is like a collaboration is like a dance basically between amongst ourselves.
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?
A lot of my students are using this for the voice, basically giving kids cameras in their hands, training them into photography.
They photograph something interactive when you give them a question to give them a topic cool, photograph queerness in public life and they will.
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.
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.
We ask them to photograph places. They consider risky behaviour, they consider all the people.
And yet the interpretation is so different. And then the discussion and the discussion about the collaboration with your friends.
I think those interactions in those spaces to really unpack and challenge and agree and disagree.
Absolutely. They disagree.
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.
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.
But the photographer in particular, this this photo voice is also does something else, right, both in themselves to the students,
but also in the kids that we teach these young people that we teach because it gives them
a simple skill to photograph things because they get to train them about how to focus,
what the focus on better on foreground light and all of that.
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.
This is the image you took. Just tell us about it.
And then other people get, you know, treated in positive ways about what the photographs, what you see in the photograph.
So these are special cameras.
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?
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.
I mean, I love this way through which you actually get young people to produce and co-produce.
I mean,
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
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.
And and so that they've already got kind of a lot of output, self kind of generated output and some exploit the way.
I mean, channelling no one, actually.
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.
Does the story come first or does it come last in the journey?
Because one of the things that our students are doing is is actually go back to their posts and social media,
go back to their social media engagements and keep some kind of it may be reflexive diary
and beginning to unpick the sorts of performative self-presentation displays they do there.
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.
So the resources that they will really create is what I want.
I mean, this is an ongoing project about how to do how to harness this creativity.
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,
I am disciplined in their work because I want to produce it,
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.
We can go to our YouTube channel. We're creating little tiny movies or every little bit that we do.
We just can. We put the camera and show us how this works?
What do we do with that? And we train with that.
We have begun this two years of just producing and putting this on. But he has the creativity is always ready, right?
And don't you find that they are experts as well, all these multi-modal multimedia?
I mean, it is about podcasts, the poetry.
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.
About. Yes. Don't write. Just too long.
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.
Yeah, I mean, there's a keyword for me in terms of where performance and storytelling is that right now amongst young people crafting.
They say they are very used to crafting themselves and kind of putting themselves
up for all kinds of scrutiny and display in their lives and their everyday lives.
Yeah, I just want to mention that.
I mean, it isn't just social media, right? Because there are many young people who don't access it at all.
And that performance is about in a rural village.
It's about physical contact, it's about how they perform in groups and friendship groups and families.
Yeah, just to throw it out there. Yeah, sure. I mean, this woman's happened, so.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we're talking about remediation.
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,
high penetration of social media in rural South Africa, for instance, amongst young people on many platforms.
I think maybe that's a clarification, because would you say WhatsApp was social evil?
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,
as aware also come out as really popular in surveys amongst young people in different countries in Africa.
And, you know, Instagram, for instance, Snapchat and WhatsApp,
which has kind of ultimately become a type of social media group having started as a messaging service delivery ubiquitous.
Yeah, I mean, I'm surprised by Instagram. I'm surprised by anything that uses a lot of data to get on this.
WhatsApp doesn't. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's correct. I mean, that's gardens.
I mean, you know, ethnographers, this thing about, uh, I am from a discipline that doesn't do ethnography.
So psychology doesn't do a lot. But of course. So, you know, psychological anthropologist or a psychological ethnographers, if, if you will.
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,
this off line physical interaction. I mean, some of the didn't that I knew, but it didn't fascinate me.
Hope young black women talk. I mean, how they yeah, how they just talk.
I'm thinking, I am. I am such a it feels it was like I'm intruding because no, I'm watching them closely.
But what are they doing? What what you do this with, with your hands on your head, throwing your back with me?
But that is it's a performance, right? It's a it's a performance that, of course, is performative, right?
They're performing to each other. They're performing.
And it's it's an art form above because there's this moments of freedom to be creative, you know, offline amongst themselves.
I'm thinking, you know,
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.
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.
This is this is this is here and I don't understand why.
Why you wouldn't use this. I guess you'd be interested how, how we can't use this lifted up and spread.
And then that's been a theme over the last two days about, yeah, the hope and those small stories of joy.
I guess we were talking about the two processes and their readings of the two stories, and someone made a comment.
Why isn't this the story that we hear that stories everywhere?
It's learnt it's quality, colonial joy, but it's been a long time.
Yes, and it's also about shared ness because sometimes when we talk about performance and storytelling,
we maybe stress the individuality a little bit too much.
But these are kind of co-productions, and it's about signalling all kinds of group membership and people coming together.
So any final thoughts on empowerment, energy reflection?
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,
I thought this should be central to this, but I think it's it's again, how can we do this thing as researchers?
So the way it was mentioned was there's a youth advisory group, right?
Remember that and somebody mentioned that and I thought, You know, this is it.
This should be at the centre of the project, but don't don't make it a youth advisory group.
You have to, you know, work on African adolescents, make them at the centre, don't make them bring them into the room.
And so what you're going to do then, is harness their creativity to tell you what would work, what doesn't work.
And at that very moment, all over the places where you working with you, they're in the room about, does this work?
So it's not just data, it's not just a vibe that they're giving you the.
Part of shaping how the project works, in particular localities.
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.
This is how we work, but they show you how their lives are being performed, how they are being enacted.
I mean, you've summarised and I think there's no need to add any more.
That's just the word I kept repeating over the last two days as ownership. Yeah.
And that's emancipation. Yes. Make young people stakeholders in their research process as well.
Yeah. Thank you so much. Every day coupon.
And Alex, thanks very much. Thank. Thanks very much for listening to this podcast.
Do you have a listen to the others in this series on understanding adolescence in African contexts?