COMMUNITY awareness and calls to action as part of cultural life in Mukuru , including the Hood2Hood festival . This project has also provided the means to produce music videos .
A powerful ( and extremely catchy ) example of this work is Mazingira , a music video about the importance of a clean environment filmed within Mukuru .
“ Successfully meeting climate change action is often indistinguishable from meeting seemingly unrelated crises , like air , land and water pollution from plastics dumped in the global south ,” Dr Bowyer says .
“ Getting at these problems is not readily achievable with a top-down approach and that ’ s where a different way to understand the problem and engage with it becomes essential .”
Dr Bowyer ’ s expertise lies in enabling precisely this kind of science-evidenced change . She works as a Senior Research Fellow for Revolution Plastics within Portsmouth ’ s Faculty of Science and Health and Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries . It is a bridging role she comes to naturally , having an atypical background as both a cancer researcher and , before that , a member of the provocative charttopping group The KLF in the 1990s .
Her focus , alongside colleague Dr Louis Netter , is on developing engagement methods in which art is the language for community-based participatory action research . It has proven a useful expertise to include in humanitarian development projects internationally . Without it , researchers have found that aid projects can flounder so badly that they fail to have any impact .
“ What has been missing are the bottomup conversations and engagements that are framed around local social and
Participatory mapping for STEPP at Mukuru Youth Initiative . ( Far right ) Mukuru , informal settlement in Nairobi .
PHOTO : JULIUS WAINAINA PHOTO : DENNIS WECHE
28 REVOLUTION PLASTICS / 2023