Experimental Encounters: collaborating for small-scale change

For the first time, students from EUC’s Understanding Politics course and from WdKA’s Transformation Design major will collaborate in small groups to, first, discuss a contemporary societal issue and a corresponding civil society actor of their choice. Next, we will ask you to identify:           

1. the organization’s main cause
2. the target audience of the organization
3. The blind audience of the organization, i.e. which people remain out of reach?

Workshop Programme

This workshop is available only to EUC students from the Understanding Politics course and WdKA students majoring in Transformation Design.

For additional information, resources and requirements, download the Information leaflet below.

Background

Based on this identification exercise, we will then challenge you to set up a small-scale intervention (performance/street interviews/public manifestation) that stimulates dialogue about the societal issue covered by the partner organization, preferably targeting an audience that remains mostly out of reach of that organization’s initiatives.

This three-step approach is geared towards designing the best language (i.e. words / slogans / visuals / performance/…) to raise awareness among those not yet enlisted for the cause of the organization. The intervention is not meant as an advertisement of the organization, but rather as an exercise in reaching out to others and engaging them on a contemporary issue. That process of interaction is the main inspiration for your video.

The underlying idea is to offer this activity as another layer of our respective course curriculum where students not only study politics or design but where they also actively experience what it means to engage people on political issues and transforming social reality. This activity therefore offers an opportunity to apply knowledge in practice and let it contribute to change locally; this requires students to use their academic skills as critical world citizens in a real-life setting.

Although both institutions are only a few steps away from the Rotterdam Markthal, very few students and staff have actually visited each other’s premises, even less have our learning communities interacted. With this initiative, we deepen existing links between Erasmus University College and Willem de Kooning Academy to explore what and how we can learn from our respective approaches, i.e. more applied at WdKA, more theoretical at EUC. Crucially, we do this in interaction with local stakeholders working for social change in Rotterdam.

We are asking all groups to produce an edited video (maximum 1 minute) or a self-generated GIF documenting the process of each group’s intervention. The outcome and student productions will be made available via a link one week after the workshop. These videos will be shared for internal use only. The participating organizations (see table below) will receive a copy of the video for their internal use too.

NOTE: send your edited video (max 1 minute) or GIF to Sebastian Pappalardo (please submit only .mov or .mp4 format) before 1 October (23:59). We will update this blogpost with a LINK for participants to view all interventions. 

We are looking forward to meeting you!