ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how art-based participatory projects can, and have been, incorporated into, or used alongside formal education systems to create spaces for reflection in which the ‘unsayable’ can emerge. This process can generate opportunities for young people to redefine their position within the educational system and society more broadly. Once again, we see how participatory arts can provide spaces for transrational articulations of voice and Freire’s ‘conscientisation’, that can, in turn, help to create ecologies of and for (at least potentially) sustainable action. We argue that this is particularly important in the context of conflict-affected societies, where young people can feel excluded not only because of the socio-economic constraints they face but also because of their temporal relationship to past conflicts. While events such as the Cambodian genocide orchestrated by Khmer Rouge in the 1970s might have taken place long before a young person living in Phnom Penh today was born, it might well continue to shape their everyday experience of life in a variety of ways that they do not fully understand. Without a full understanding of the legacy of past traumas, young people do not always have the ability to negotiate the present, and so to exercise their right to epistemic justice.
