Collaborative Social Challenge Project

This week we have been tasked to engage with our groups and continue to produce our final digital artefacts. After a group meeting, myself, Nneka, Ruwail and Rohit decided our project should have a direct focus on SDG number 3, 'Good-health and Well-being'. We thought this would work better than focusing our time on trying to link two together. Instead, we all found a common desire to use this project as a tool for opening up a conversation about the global mental health stigma through art. As I've mentioned before, I feel strongly about the damaging connotations of SDG 3, as having 'Good-health' in the same category as 'Well-being' only contributes to the stigma surrounding mental health, suggesting its merely an extension of good physical health.  In our meeting we decided what our 3 artefacts were going to be and how they would each interlink. After some debate we decided on hosting an event at the university showcasing our take on projection mapping and ...

For this weeks task we were asked to produce some examples of culture jamming, looking at our chosen SDGs. One of the key SDGs our group is looking to focus on is goal number 3, 'Good-health and well-being'. I want my main focus for this project to be about protesting against the global mental health stigma. This relates to the understanding of mental health as merely an extension of our physical health, something to be ashamed and suppressed. The absence of mental health on the list poses a huge problem. Its absence only adds to its stigma, as an extension of our 'good' physical health. Therefore, the broad nature of goal 3 risks oppressing the action towards universal notions of health. For this task I've found culture jamming an appropriate way to begin to think about how this stigma can be challenged and combatted. Typically, according to Mark Dery, culture jamming, a form of artistic protest, targets the 'status-quo' as a form of anti-capitalist politic...

This weeks class we focused on the second chapter of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In talking about the chapter, this weeks conversation was drawn mainly to discussing the complex relationship between oppressed individuals and oppressive systems. Ironically, this got everyone thinking about the traditional education system and the relationship between the student and educator. Freire suggests the educator inhabits the role of oppressor through 'narrative education'. In his words, ' narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorise mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into 'containers', into 'receptacles' to be 'filled' by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are'.  The concept of narration education got me thinking particularly about secondary scho...