InterACTions in Crisis: The drama of saving our own lives

Drawing on bell hook’s Teaching to Transgress, this talk demonstrates how youth artists in Liberia leverage their proximity to international opportunity to amplify a new narrative about Liberians and African people more broadly. This digital ethnography explores how, in the context of virtual theatre-making, youth engage in original research which inspires their demands for redress as activist artists. By teaching other young people in the Global Youth Arts Collaborative, a virtual program consisting primarily of young Black people from the global North US context, they transgress dominant narratives of African lack and open the door for more organic, relational ways of understanding diasporic difference. The development of transnational African-diaspora relationality is a form of redress as it centers the restoration of kinship bonds long undermined by media distortions of both groups. This study lifts the potential of theatre-based interventions for the dissemination of critical public health messaging, its promise for multidirectional cultural formation with audiences, and the role of affect in advancing civic and political visions. It also presents an example of how peer-to-peer instruction may be used to set in motion new ways to amplify the subjugated knowledges of global Africa youth, shifting between conceptions of center and periphery through dialogue about political trust, civic efficacy, and ideas for expanding democratic participation.

Speaker

• JASMINE L. BLANKS JONES Johns Hopkins University, Postdoctoral Fellow

Jasmine L. Blanks Jones is a dynamic theatre nonprofit leader, award-winning educator, and has earned a dual Ph.D. in Education and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research on theatrical performance as a civic engagement praxis illuminates global race-based inequities in education and health, lifting the potential of knowledge co-creation through the arts. As founder of Burning Barriers Building Bridges Youth Theatre (B4YT), a cultural performance company dedicated to radical community empowerment through the arts, she has more than twenty years of experience in youth development in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Having developed a track record of leadership in arts and advocacy in communities of color globally, in 2018 Jasmine extended the scope of B4YT to include a consulting practice, Creating Brave Stages, which provides support and guidance for advocacy organizations looking to integrate the arts into their movements and artists aspiring to create positive change through their performances. She holds a MPP from the University of Minnesota and BS in Music Education from Florida A&M University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at the Johns Hopkins University.