Reimagining voice for transrational peace education through participatory arts with South African youth

This article reports on a co-produced project based in South Africa which aimed to support the development of youth committees in Safe Parks operating across Ekurhuleni municipality, by building young people’s capacity to claim greater voice within their communities through participatory arts practices. Drawing on recent perspectives in the field of peace education, our analysis engages a transrational onto-epistemology to examine how voice might be understood through participatory arts in this context. To do so, we critique the prevailing modernist, post-Enlightenment perspective on dialogue and voice in critical peace education, and offer a philosophical framework which moves closer to an acknowledgement of the material, embodied, and collective dimensions of voice. We then use the concept of voice to narrate our inquiry, drawing on data from the project alongside theoretical perspectives from new materialism, language and literary studies, and singing studies, to support and structure our different insights into voice as these emerged. From this analysis we present a conceptualisation of voice as both individually uttered and collectively produced, which acknowledges and accounts for the complexity of learning and knowing as a process inseparable from being-in-the-world. We conclude with a consideration of the decolonising potential of transrational approaches.