Dr Min Tang, Mr Anuj Daga, and Dr Ying Cheng
Funding period: 1 July 2024 – 31 August 2025
Type of funding:
Other Grants
This grant was awarded as a follow-up to Youth on the Move: performing urban space in the Global South.
Youth On the Move: of Storytelling and Popular Mapping is a rising initiative to create an Asia-Africa network with the goal of producing grounded knowledge. It includes a set of research and actions that look into how young people’s moving and waiting practices indicate their space-making, time-making, and meaning-making performance across radically changing urban spaces in Africa and Asia. The project will last one year, beginning in July 2024.
The first phase included an artistic workshop in Lagos, Nigeria, 10 online lectures with worldwide participants, and a methodological workshop for early career scholars in Shanghai, China. These events brought together valuable knowledge and led to a wealth of discussion within the newly formed Asia-Africa network. An exhibition and roundtable will be held in Surabaya, Indonesia, as well as a mapping workshop will be held in Colombo, Sri Lanka. These events of the second phase will bring the aforementioned views and stories to the public’s attention and strengthen the Asia-Africa network.
Youth on the Move (YOTM) investigates urbanities that youth produce on the move in/across these radically transforming spaces. It aims to decolonise knowledge production by:
(1) unpacking youth’s socio-spatial practices and meaning-making through embodied politics of performance in urban Africa and Asia;
(2) explicitly promoting South-South collaboration amongst researchers, and practitioners.
During the first phase (2023-2024), “Performing Urban Space in the Global South” gathered diverse knowledge and established new networks among Asian and African actors. The second phase (2024-2025), focusing on “Storytelling and Popular Mapping,” aims to strengthen these networks, convert collective knowledge into non-academic mediums, and develop innovative methods of knowledge dissemination, enhancing accessibility to the public. This phase includes an exhibition and roundtable based on the “50 stories of YOTM” (July 2024) in Indonesia and a “Critical Mapping” workshop (Winter 2025) in Sri Lanka, co-produced by partners from Asia and Africa.
In broadening the curatorial and methodological ambit of YOTM towards bridging the gaps between seminar halls and streets and fostering South- South dialogues, we ask:
– What are the alternative ways of producing and archiving knowledge beyond academic publishing, and how can we make these approaches more visible?
– How to engage with and acknowledge local communities in knowledge production and theoretical thinking?
– Through which platforms and mediums, can academic research be translated into languages accessible to the public?
Under USF’s Knowledge Mobilisation Awards, YOTM aims to foreground these questions through action of diversifying knowledge production and consolidating the South-South research network for further long-term impacts.