Localizing Environmental Peacebuilding: Leveraging the Power of Artistic Infrastructure for Digital Inclusion

Ann Le, University of California, Irvine (United States)
Jochen Schubert, University of California, Irvine (United States)

Artistic community collaboratives create avenues for community building, cooperation, and diverse skill-building opportunities for the world’s most disadvantaged populations. This proposed project seeks to understand how the infrastructure – both social and physical – of community artistic networks, and their benefits, can be leveraged to further orient populations in peacebuilding contexts at the center of data generation, information management, and resource planning to improve interlinked environmental, livelihood, health, and food security outcomes. For this project, we intend to work closely with the Playing for Change Foundation and the refugee-led NGO Sina Loketa (SINAL), to develop a spatial information technologies training course for a diverse group of refugees, including youths, women, and persons connected to SINAL’s Salam Music Program in Uganda’s Bidibidi Refugee Settlement – where dwindling humanitarian assistance, unpredictable weather, and constrained resources have prompted calls for innovative approaches to sustaining immediate and long-term camp habitability. This research will illuminate the potential for localized networks of artistic production to provide opportunities – as well as mitigate potential risks – in the dissemination of digital technologies to support locally-led peacebuilding strategies in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.