Kessi, Shose
(2010)
Shooting horizons: a study of youth empowerment and social
change in Tanzania and South Africa.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This thesis is a social psychological approach to youth empowerment and social change in
urban African contexts. Over a period of 22 months, 39 young people from Dar es Salaam
and Soweto participated in a community‐based initiative called Shooting Horizons. The aim
of the project was to engage young people in a process of critical consciousness and social
action to represent themselves and their communities through their own words and images
using Photovoice methodology. Six Photovoice workshops, involving a total of 23 young
women and 16 young men, took place in multiple sites, two youth centres in Dar es Salaam
and one in Soweto. The data was collected through multiple methods, including a series of
37 photo‐stories, 6 focus groups on development and social change, a record of daily
discussion groups, and 1 focus group and 10 individual interviews post‐project. Emerging
from the narrative positions of the participants, the project affirms the different directions
for living envisaged by young people and promotes alternatives to the stigmatization of
young people and their communities by the grand discourses and practices of development.
Through a social psychological lens, I explore the impact that stigmatizing representations
of development have on individual and social identities in order to make sense of the
contradictions and ambiguities that it presents for enacting social change. I argue that a
community empowerment framework, supported by an agenda of resistance to the
exclusionary discourses and practices of development, can overcome some of the complex
mechanisms of power that lead to oppressive social stratifications. The analysis observes
the politics of knowledge and recognition in constructing social identities and building
social capital to open up spaces for alternatives within the limitations of these particular
contexts. The findings of this study consistently refer to how ‘difference’ is imbued in the
narratives of young people and the need to address the gendered and racialized beliefs that
contribute to participants’ internalized and victimising perspectives and that constrain
processes of social change. Recommendations include practical, concrete, and innovative
methods for urban African youth to engage in initiatives that suit their own development
interests within a social psychological approach to empowerment that redefines
community as a space of inbetweens,
a citizenry of people sharing common interests and
different agendas.
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