Hetty Blades

Straight after the end of the second stage of fieldwork, the research team travelled from Batticaloa to Colombo where we hosted a roundtable event at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) to discuss our research activities and share some preliminary findings. (We chose ICES for the event because of the strong research and advocacy they do on disability rights: http://ices.lk/category/projects/diversity-and-social-inclusion/.) We were joined by 25 practitioners and academics working in human rights, disability rights, dance, art and research. We were all really pleased to have the opportunity to share our work with people from such a wide range of backgrounds.

We started by introducing the aims of the research and then VisAbility talked about their practice. We heard from Mahesh about how his experiences as a dancer and working in his local community inspired him to work with people with disabilities. Gerda talked about the aims of the workshops, the types of exercises they include and how they draw connections between the principles of ‘mixed-abled’ dance and human rights. Helena and Nirma then disussed the rights workshops, including the information the participants are given and the modes of delivery. This was followed by a screening of VisAbility’s new film about their work, which can be viewed here:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbmhx28eCDg&feature=youtu.be

We then turned our attention to sharing the preliminary findings. The timing of the event, just two days after the end of fieldwork, meant that we were only at the beginning of analysing the data we have collected. However, from our interviews and observations we were already able to report some interesting changes in the participants’ feelings and behaviours. Encouragingly, we also have multiple examples of cases where participants have used what they have learnt in terms of both human rights and confidence to assert their rights, demonstrating greater legal empowerment.

After discussing the initial findings, we introduced a draft version of a resource that we have been developing to help support and stimulate practitioners who want to explore the relationship between dance and human rights. This is going to be a key outcome of the project and we are looking forward to continuing to develop it over the coming weeks and months.

We then opened the floor and received some very useful questions, spanning topics including; gender, age, sustainability, methods, ethics, intersectionality, notions of empowerment, the recruitment of participants and the future of the research. Thinking through some of these questions is really important as we move into analysing the data and writing up the findings.

In general, we found the response at the roundtable to be very positive. There seemed to be interest in the project from many people across different sectors and some promising ideas about how the findings might relate to the work that they do. This is really encouraging as we are starting to see how effective the combination of dance and human rights education can be for helping people to develop legal empowerment and hope that some of the thinking and findings from this project can underpin future work in this area.

Sri Lanka feels a long way away from where I write now, in cold, grey London, but I have kept hold of the optimism about the future of this work that I felt after the roundtable and feel motivated to find ways to support its continuation. In the meantime, we hope to share with you a recording of the event and a draft version of our resource before long. Watch this space!