Young Roots
Street art and performance company Emergency Exit Arts (EEA) facilitated this project.
Recognising that many young people disengage with politics and the concept of citizenship, EEA saw the opportunity to make these issues relevant to the lives of Greater London’s multicultural young people, and through this, to help them to become more active citizens.
To achieve this, EEA and the young people partnered with the Bishopsgate Institute and their recently acquired archive of the Mondcivitan Republic (World Citizens) movement, a pacifist group founded in 1956 by Nobel Prize-winner Hugh J Schonfield. The movement aimed to express the unity of the human race through transnational co-operation following the Second World War.
Through the Radical Citizenship project, a core group of 20 young people (18-25 years) investigated world citizenship through this archival collection. By building a range of skills and experience they were then able to provoke peers to think about and discuss what citizenship means to them and explore the history and imaginings of citizenship in the UK and further afield from the 1950s.
Find out more on the EEA website.