Amplifying Global Majority Youth Voices Through Creating Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces: The Theatre of Climate Action (ToCA) Project

Abstract

Youth make up a fifth of the world’s population and will suffer the consequences of the climate catastrophe to differing extents depending on their social and geographical locations. The climate crisis is thus a matter of both intergenerational and racial/imperial injustice. Intersectional and interdisciplinary climate justice approaches are growing in the field of youth climate activism and, more often, these are necessarily engaging with collaborative methods to platform the voices of marginalised youth and those who live the colonial difference. Our paper provides early reflections from a youth climate activism artistic research project titled ‘Theatre of Climate Action: Amplifying Youth Voices for Climate Justice in Guadeloupe and South Africa’ (ToCA). In this project, sixteen young people aged 18-30 from South Africa and Guadeloupe collaborate to design, produce, and create theatre performances that reflect their exploration of climate justice through their lived experiences using artistic research methods. Specifically, we examine the opportunities and challenges in using the framework of Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces to support collaborative and emancipatory art-making practices that allow youth to become co-creators in this project. Insights revealed that an intentional embrace of safety, bravery, and risk as an ethico-political basis for art making was critical to cultivate a sense of community, trust, and belonging for youth co-creators.

1. Introduction

The world is home to approximately 1.2 billion young people aged 15 to 24 years old—and this number is only projected to grow in the future (United Nations, 2024). Young people are—now and in the future—carrying the heaviest climate burdens (Skillington, 2019), especially those in countries which have contributed the least historical carbon emissions across Africa and the Caribbean (UNCTAD, 2021). Decolonial thought draws attention to the long history of extractivism, possession, and dispossession that mark these geographic spaces and that continue to feed racialised inequalities within and between countries today (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 159). The urgency of climate change is thus a matter of intersectional, intergenerational, and racial/imperial injustice.

In 2024, we came together as a group of five artists and academics living and working across Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean to respond to these complex issues of intersectional, intergenerational, and racial/imperial climate injustice. Our focus was ‘Global South(s)’ as spaces from which to think and act against dominant narratives, colonial legacies, and practices which re/produce inequities. This led to our interdisciplinary project ‘Theatre of Climate Action: Amplifying Youth Voices for Climate Justice in Guadeloupe and South Africa’ (ToCA). Acknowledging that artistic practices constitute ways of knowing, the project aligns with the propositions of decolonial, Indigenous, Black, and feminist scholarship—all of which offer ethical and political grounds from which to challenge hegemonic relations. Part of this work demands a deeper listening to and platforming of the marginalised voices, histories, and experiences of those who live the colonial difference.

We invited sixteen young people aged 18-30 from South Africa and Guadeloupe into an artistic research process to explore their lived experiences of and generate knowledge around climate (in)justice through collaborative theatre-making. While each group (in South Africa and Guadeloupe) works independently, the project invites both formal and informal dialogue among participants, fostering transnational knowledge exchange, creating a community of practice, and enabling them to learn from each other’s experiences of climate injustice and platform their own narratives. In turn, as researchers and creative practitioners, we are learning from the collaborations, with the goal of developing meaningful practices of knowledge creation and transformative dialogue with and for Global Majority1 youth.

The purpose of this article is to provide key methodological reflections emerging from the early stages of our collaborative project. This project follows an artistic research methodology and uses collaborative theatre-making as a democratic, agentic, and relational process to source and create performance material. In this paper, we turn specifically to our use of ‘Safe(r)’, ‘Brave(r)’, and ‘Riskier’ Spaces as a grounding ethos and politics for the project. We examine the opportunities and challenges of entering a collaborative artistic process that seeks to speak directly to the experiences of young people at the frontlines of climate change and environmental degradation.

Our use of the ‘Safe(r)’, ‘Brave(r)’, and ‘Riskier’ Spaces framework is informed by the work of Bustamante Duarte et al. (2019) on Safe(r) Spaces and Rikard and Villarreal (2023) on Brave(r) and Riskier (acceptable risk) Spaces. We frame our use of ‘Safe(r)’, ‘Brave(r)’, and ‘Riskier’ Spaces as important, complementary tools, which can animate and facilitate collaborative arts research that responds to issues of climate in/justice. Using these frameworks, we have been exploring how aspiring to such spaces supports youth co-creators to develop a sense of belonging, ownership, and agency within a collaborative climate justice project. We draw on these frameworks to support youth agency as a key driver of the necessary (inevitable, even) futures of climate justice that cultivate creativity, care, compassion, and collaboration across differences. We further offer that this frame draws on the interdisciplinary concerns of decolonial, Black, Indigenous, and feminist studies by emphasising relationality. In the context of decolonial discourse specifically, relationality means attending to local histories, embodied conceptions and practices, contesting universalising and totalising claims, and acknowledging the interdependence of all living beings (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 1). This is underscored in the African philosophical concept of ubuntu, which emphasises not only the relatedness between humans but also between human beings and the more/other-than-human world. Subjectivity, in the philosophy of ubuntu, is understood not as individual but as ecological (Le Grange, 2021, p. 17). Ubuntu has been similarly articulated in Guadeloupe, especially in relation to Caribbean perspectives on climate justice (Ferdinand, 2019).

ToCA hinges on collaborative theatre-making as an artistic research process, which supports young people to become researchers and knowledge creators in their communities to create social change and enable activism/social and political transformation (Wright, 2020). In this sense, ToCA’s methodology shares aspects of Participatory Action Research and Youth Participatory Action Research. It enhances youth agency and supports young people to be on an equal footing in research that is often about them rather than developed with or by them (Swartz & Nyamnjoh, 2018). In this collaborative creative process, the youth participants are not the objects of the research. Rather, they are contributors to an unscripted artistic process. The data in this project is shaped through the conversations and reflections that are shared in workshops and rehearsals, but equally through movement, song, and play.

Our overarching research questions might be framed as follows: How do young people interpret what it means to build Brave(r)/Safe(r)/Riskier spaces together in a collaborative theatre-making process? How can Brave(r)/Safe(r)/Riskier spaces inform an ethos and politics for a shared artistic process? To what extent does the articulation of their/our collaborative work support these projects to unfold in more equitable and generative ways? How can Brave(r)/Safe(r)/Riskier spaces contribute to co-constructing ‘other’ (as opposed to dominant or hegemonic) ways of knowing in climate justice activism? Existing research currently focuses disproportionately on high-profile, White, and higher socio-economic-status youth climate activists. This has resulted in the under-representation of those who experience the intersecting inequalities of climate change, especially those from racially minoritised and Global Majority communities. The ToCA project seeks to counter hegemonic narratives around climate action by platforming youth voices in South Africa and Guadeloupe on these issues. This discussion focuses on our use of Safe(r)/Brave(r)/Riskier Spaces frameworks as an ethico-political basis from which to support this work. Insights shared with us by our youth co-creators offer some initial reflections on how these frameworks have shaped the process and outputs of our own activities. Specifically, we reflect on and analyse recorded oral, written, and illustrated reflections produced by our young co-creators during activities co-facilitated by the ToCA university/artist teams in early workshops with them. These insights from the young people form the basis for our analysis and insights presented below. Using this data, the contribution of this article is to offer insights to enrich scholarly understandings of the Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Space frameworks that we used to achieve our project’s aims.

This article is organised as follows: In the first part, we provide a brief background on the context of the project. Next, we provide a brief review of the literature on artistic research methodologies and collaborative theatre-making approaches for addressing climate justice, with a focus on the role of safety, acceptable risk, and bravery as an ethos for such research. Then, we give a brief outline of the methods supporting this research project. The section that follows draws on findings from the ToCA project to discuss and reflect on the youth perspectives of feeling safe and brave in our collaborative theatre-making spaces for climate justice. Finally, the concluding section will pull together the various strands explored throughout the discussion to open up some further questions for future, much-needed collaborative research projects, which focus on climate justice, particularly in the context of the Global South(s).

2. Contextualising Theatre of Climate Action (ToCA): A Decolonial Youth Project

ToCA is an experimental transnational pilot project animated by interdisciplinary teams based in South Africa and Guadeloupe. The latter, a small Caribbean Island controlled by the French state, is already experiencing the harmful effects of the climate crisis. This includes rising temperatures, changes in rainfall, and the prospect of rising sea levels and intensified hurricanes (Van Meerbeeck et al., 2021). Additionally, the island has been affected by environmental scandals at the hands of the French state and private companies—particularly around the use of toxic chemicals in banana plantations, which can be found in the bloodstreams of more than 90% of the island’s population today (Resiere et al., 2023). Civil society has responded with resistance and protest action, connecting these issues to histories of colonialism, reproductive rights, and climate justice (Ferdinand, 2019). Our youth co-creators are extremely conscious of these environmental and climate changes, which form the landscapes in which they live, work, and play. In the remainder of this section, we draw on the youth perspectives we gathered through our research as we continue to contextualise our project.

In the eyes of our youth co-creators, collaborating through theatre making proves a powerful and urgent response. The environment is deeply important to them, as it is to us. It can and should be addressed, theorised, and politicised through youth agency:

“I would like to play my part to raise consciousness in the face of climate change”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

The issues of a changing climate and degraded ecologies in Guadeloupe matter to our youth co-creators in several ways. In their own perspectives, the issues of ecological and social in/justice are so all-encompassing that they even shape features as fundamental as their heritage, culture, and even overarching history and shared narratives that reunite the island:

“…the Chlordecone scandal is part of our inheritance, and now part of the island’s story/history.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

The young people describe a personal connection to these issues as Guadeloupean islanders whose lives are touched by these issues. Moreover, this personal connection invites a wider conversation, one which transcends national borders and reaches towards transnational dialogue and solidarity:

“I want to put my abilities to use in this project to create art which carries powerful messages and impacts the cultural heritage of my native island and even beyond its borders.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

Still, though, they recognise the potency of their own agency in the midst of ecological and social problematics. Facing entangled crises of exploited lands and peoples, they are not immobilised. They recognise and express their own motivation, drive, and creative potential:

“Tackling the topics of social and environmental justice through a new approach is particularly interesting to me. The idea of using art to raise awareness about these issues is essential—and to do so in parallel with another country will enrichen our responses.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

Indeed, the issues to which they respond demand no minor task. But in the arts, they see the potential to articulate the kinds of sensitivity, knowledge, and futures that such a crisis demands:

“The environment is a subject which is close to my heart. I hope to understand and learn through collaborative exchange. To express oneself is important to me, no matter the medium. It makes it possible to liberate oneself, to become more sensitive, and to bring new solutions”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

Like Guadeloupe, South Africa is experiencing significant exposure to food insecurity, energy and water crises, and climate harms as a result of climate change. Indeed, the national average temperature has increased twice as fast as global temperatures since 1990 (Adom et al., 2022). But the country has also been a dynamic hub for climate justice organising, with the emergence of coalitions that seek to advance a vision of climate justice that brings environmental, energy, gender, racial, immigrant, climate, and economic justice together. In the words of our youth co-creators,

“If we can get the word out there, educate and raise awareness to different communities we can stop climate change and learn to take care of our land, our nature.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

Youth co-creators affirmed the relevance of climate justice conversations to their daily lives. Indeed, this is a material issue that qualitatively shapes almost every aspect of South African landscapes and communities, even if not framed as such in dominant narratives:

“Where I come from there are no conversations and activities that address climate crisis and impacts but it affects most of the people from the township daily, things like the burning of houses due to global heat, the floods that fill the houses when it’s raining and many more.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

This experiential knowledge is crucial to the perspectives and places at which we come to meet our youth co-creators. They experience climate injustice on a daily basis—but they are not the first in their families or communities to do so. Certainly, our youth co-creators draw transnational, temporal, and sectoral links which join the dots between issues of labour, extractivism, and transnational solidarities:

“I remembered a time when my father used to work in cobalt digging in the Democratic Republic of Congo, my country of birth to make ends meet. This is how [climate justice] became important to me. … there are workers out there, not just in Congo, but all over the world who work in harsh conditions just as my father did a long time ago.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

Acknowledging the shared colonial histories of extractivism, possession, dispossession, enslavement, and the subjugation of peoples, it is in these urgent parallel but not unconnected contexts that we devised and invited our youth co-creators into ToCA. Our project seeks to build capacity, generate, and disseminate knowledge about innovations in youth-led transformative climate justice education through the arts. As such, our project makes use of a series of knowledge exchange activities, including training programmes, workshops and seminars, the creation of practical resources (such as scripts produced by young people and illustrated zines that can be shared easily online), and wide outreach across the civil society sector, supported by an online and social media presence. The knowledge created through the artistic research process will support climate justice education actors (young people, educators, academics, and policymakers) to participate in and shape climate justice education.

ToCA seeks, too, to create cross-community dialogue both within and across Guadeloupe and South Africa in the long term; knowledge production and knowledge exchange amongst creative practitioners, researchers, and young people (recognising that these categories of people can and do overlap!); new networks with a capacity to respond to issues around climate justice in ways that speak to the local and global ecological politics of gender, race, coloniality, and intersectionality; and finally, significant creative output that can be used as a climate justice education tool across South Africa, Guadeloupe, and beyond.

3. Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces: A Framework for Collaborative Artistic Research

Broadly, artistic research (in various contexts, and depending on particular nuances, also referred to as Practice as Research, Practice-based Research, Practice-led Research, Performance as Research, or Research Creation) acknowledges the epistemic dimension of artistic practices. Underlying artistic research is the notion that creative practice can reveal particular kinds of knowledge and understandings that may not become apparent through other research methods (E. Barrett & Bolt, 2007, p. 1; Farber, 2010, p. 9). Spatz (2024) notes the radical and ‘decolonising’ potential of artistic research to counter normative research paradigms and institutional and text-based scholarship. Exploring the alliance of artistic research with decolonial, Black, Indigenous, feminist, and queer studies, Spatz (2024) further offers that artistic research, as both a political and epistemological endeavour, affords ‘strategic and potentially far-reaching interventions into the structure of academia and, by extension knowledge itself and of the socially shaped material world’ (11). From a decolonial perspective, seeking ‘other’ ways of knowing, such as through artistic practices, is a way of undoing entrenched knowledge hierarchies, for ‘There is no global social justice without global cognitive justice’ (Santos, 2014, p. 42).

As an artistic research project, ToCA draws on collaborative theatre-making to position participants as co-creators in the process. Collaborative theatre-making or ‘devising’ has a long lineage. The early development of collective creation and socially engaged performance can be traced to the ‘Third World’ of the 1970s, particularly South America, in the work of pioneers like Fals Borda and Paulo Freire and activist groups such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (Grimwood, 2022). South Africa has a history of collective labour in theatre, too. For example, in the tradition of Protest Theatre, which emerged as cultural resistance in the anti-apartheid struggle. These forms lean on a democratically organised workshop system, whereby agency and responsibility are distributed among a web of co-creators (Vass-Rhee, 2015). Collaborative theatre-making approaches have the capacity to be prefigurative (Batsleer et al., 2022) by offering a democratising, embodied, relational, and ecological process of political transformation in action. In a collective and collaborative artistic process, co-creators can enact inclusive spaces and playfully imagine alternatives to the status quo by engaging in political expression and dialogue.

ToCA works from the understanding that the arts and artistic processes are both ways of knowing and knowledge generation by inviting participants to access shared and marginalised archives, personal narratives, memories, and languages that circulate outside of dominant, hegemonic knowledges. This is further founded on the notion that collective experimentation can ‘cut across normative accounts of what it means to know’ (Manning, 2016, p. 27). We chose collaborative theatre-making as a research practice through which youth co-creators can explore their experiences of climate (in)justice to open up alternative narratives and archives, ‘other’ ways of knowing.

Furthermore, as is our particular focus of this paper, we drew from the frameworks of ‘Safe(r)’, ‘Brave(r)’, and ‘Riskier’ spaces to search for ways to establish an ethico-political basis for the practice of collaborative theatre-making. Out of this, we hope to develop educational tools for young people from Global Minority Communities to further strengthen the transnational networks of youth climate justice and cognitive justice in climate justice concerns.

That a project is collaborative does not in itself mean that all participants have an equal stake or say in it (Bagnoli & Clark, 2010). This is an insight which is drawn from the growing literature on Participatory Action Research with young people. Given the power dynamics that many young people experience in their interactions and relationships with people older than them (hooks, 2000), Youth Participatory Action Research scholars ask us to interrogate the power dynamics at play in research projects that cut across age/generation. Both scholars and the participants of their research have raised concerns—and even criticisms (Elliott, 2021)—about the possible inequities, imbalances, and even injustices amongst youth participants, academic researchers, and the wider contexts in which they work together (Bagnoli & Clark, 2010; Mayes & Arya, 2024). Still, there is value in embarking on collaborative work of an intergenerational nature, for it ‘enables youth and adults to work collectively to theorize, question, and resist institutional and social injustices through transformational pedagogy’ (Wright, 2020, pp. 35–36).

This is an effort which we argue contributes to bolstering decolonial ecologies rooted in the Global South(s) (Ferdinand, 2019); where the racialised injustices which shape the lives and realities of French citizens in ‘overseas’ France (Guadeloupe) are obscured, ignored, and dismissed in dominant national narratives (Vergès, 2010); where the legacies of ‘Apartheid’ persist for South Africa as part of a continent hit by the sharp end of uneven global climate burden distribution (Tuana, 2019; Rice et al., 2021); and where questions of intergenerational justice can sometimes go unnoticed in the (necessary though imperfect) North/South terms framing climate justice debates (Chazan & Baldwin, 2019; Skillington, 2019).

We are not the first to use theatre-making with these goals in mind. For what we are trying to achieve with our own work, this research is indispensable. It helps us to reflect on the normative and transformative potential of artistic research and collaborative theatre-making to contribute to alternative epistemologies and drive social and political change (Bell & Pahl, 2018). It reminds us, too, of the logistical, ethical, and political challenges which intergenerational collaborative projects can be faced with (Elliott, 2021).

The existing scholarship focusing on Global South(s) contexts and communities suggests that collaborating with marginalised young people through the arts can be a powerful form of resistance against ‘the racism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism, and imperialism that manifest’ (Grimwood, 2022, p. 198) in the social and material arrangements of racialised life (Tuck & Yang, 2013). But there remain gaps still in the literature at large, specifically around collaborative theatre-making as an artistic method to generate alternative narratives—especially by exploring, documenting, and honouring the lived experiences and political propulsion of Global Majority youth-led climate justice. It is with this in mind that we turn to the framework offered by Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces to ground the artistic process ethically and politically. These frameworks have supported our project where young people are invited to become knowledge creators around climate change from the frontlines of this planetary crisis.

Much of the available mainstream climate education is highly technical and focused on the natural sciences. It is criticised by academics and activists for its emphasis on political impartiality, which fails to address the weight of intersectional politics, the issues of justice, and the social, economic, and political causes of the climate crisis (Sultana, 2022a). Decolonial thought points to the ways in which climate education can perpetuate universalising abstracts, totalising claims, and the political–epistemic violence of coloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). In this context, the ToCA project takes a politicised and decolonial approach to youth-led climate justice education, using the ethos of Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks to explore narratives and knowledges with young people about imperial, ecological, and intergenerational injustices. We do this in the specific contexts of South Africa and Guadeloupe—two lands that are facing the urgency of the climate crisis while responding to the legacies and continuations of European imperialism and colonialism (Ferdinand, 2019). Performing research in such spaces requires emancipatory methods (Freire, 1970; Bell & Pahl, 2018). But these methods cannot be deployed without a serious consideration of ethics, safety, and power (Swartz & Nyamnjoh, 2018). While this is true across all collaborative research practices, we would argue that the ‘unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality’ (Sultana, 2022b) and the threats it presents make it especially urgent to prioritise the safety of the young people at the helm of these debates. Our emphasis on ethical and political grounding leads us to our use of the Brave(r), Safe(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks, which offer the ToCA project a way of assessing the choices we are making with our youth co-creators, as well as a framework that holds us to account as researchers.

Safe(r) Spaces frameworks are designed to minimise risk and reduce harm by creating supportive, non-judgmental, and inclusive environments for marginalised communities. However, in collaborating with young people, Brave(r) and Riskier Spaces are equally important to ensure youth co-creators, especially those from marginalised communities, feel comfortable enough to contribute to the artistic process without fear of negative consequences. We have chosen to work with Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks together as a way of shaping commitments and principles to ways of working for our youth co-creators, as they offer a strong starting point for a collaborative framework that our project seeks to build on in the South African and Guadeloupean contexts.

The Brave(r) Spaces frameworks were born out of the concept of ‘safe’ and ‘safer’ spaces. These latter safe spaces have been used in social justice and liberation movements since the 1960s. More specifically, we can trace their usage back to the LGBTQIA+ organising that led to the Stonewall riots in 1960s New York City (traditional unceded Lenape/Delaware territory). Safe and safer spaces were, at this time, also already being used by other social movements and notably, too, by social change makers and scholars active in developing queer and feminist studies (Hanhardt, 2013). But the concept has been developed since then. Social justice educators have critiqued the term as being ‘overused and undertheorised’ (B. J. Barrett, 2010, p. 1) and have thus supplemented and developed it further as ‘Braver Spaces’ (Rikard & Villarreal, 2023). In collaborative research, these Braver Spaces are designed to encourage participants to take intellectual and emotional risks and engage in challenging conversations or creative expressions. The goal is not only to provide safety but also to create an environment where participants feel supported in pushing boundaries, exploring new ideas, and confronting difficult or uncomfortable topics.

In the context of making theatre as a form of collaborative research for climate justice, Brave(r) and Safe(r) Spaces represent different approaches to creating environments that foster youth engagement, artistic practice, expression, and learning together. Both Safe(r) and Brave(r) Spaces aim to support the wellbeing and agency of participants, but they do so with distinct emphases. Neither is uncontested. Certainly, the notion of ‘Braver’ Spaces has been criticised as an approach which implies that marginalised peoples will have to do even more additional work in organising and creative settings: ‘To all those who interact with brave spaces, if the importance of this labor isn’t acknowledged then your brave space sucks’ (Zheng, 2016). Still, Rikard and Villarreal argue that ‘the impossibility of creating a true ‘safe space’ or ‘brave space’ is not an excuse to stop trying to protect our collaborators’ (Rikard & Villarreal, 2023, p. 8).

We understand that these spaces, whether Brave(r) or Safe(r), are aspirational. It is our role as researchers to support our youth co-creators to have a space in which they can be safe and brave enough to take ‘acceptable risks’ (Rikard & Villarreal, 2023). Yet, what these concepts mean in an artistic context and to our specific group of youth co-creators at ToCA has depended on the unique entanglement of their own individual social locations, biographies, and personal experiences and interactions with wider structures and contexts. We therefore explored the Safe(r)/Brave(r)/Riskier Spaces as possible frameworks for creating a shared, creative laboratory with young people responding to the climate crisis in South Africa and Guadeloupe. The next section explores some of the emerging insights shared with us by the youth co-creators of the ToCA project.

4. Co-Creation as a Method: Youth Participatory Theatre for Climate Justice

Now, an overview of the early artistic processes themselves and our initial sessions that supported them: It is these early sessions from which the data underpinning this article emerges. Within the context of our transnational project, we knew that the ways in which our individual co-creators would understand and interact with the frameworks we were interested in would be shaped by their cultures, experiences, and social settings—not least because our project unfolds in two different countries, South Africa and Guadeloupe. It was thus essential to reflect explicitly on the meaning and potential of building Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces together as an ethico-political basis for the ToCA project, insights of which we share here.

As we will see in more detail below, the co-creators in both of our groups suggest that safety, bravery, and risk are useful—even essential—concepts on which to build shared foundations of trust and solidarity in the context of an interdisciplinary artistic research project that unfolds through collaborative theatre-making.

To take our first steps in defining safety/bravery/risk as shared knowledge in our co-created spaces, we designed a series of activities to be animated in each youth group’s respective first session together. These activities included group discussions, individual exercises, and arts-based activities, such as individual reflective writing, the game ‘Where Do You Stand?’, and explorations and games drawn from collaborative theatre-making processes such as Theatre of the Oppressed (Jackson & Boal, 2005). This loose programme was designed to elicit deeper insights about what these concepts might mean to our youth co-creators and how they might propose an ethos for the artistic research process. Concretely, some of the prompts that our groups responded to during their first respective sessions included the following:

• “I feel safe when…”
• “I feel brave when…”
• “I take acceptable risks when…”
• What does it mean to you to feel/be safe/brave/take acceptable risks?
• What are the key principles that we want commitment to from ourselves, each other, and the facilitation team? How will we monitor and evaluate our delivery on these commitments?
• What are we hoping to learn from the process and what are our next steps?

The aim of these early sessions was for the respective cohorts of youth co-creators to arrive at sets of principles to which all ToCA collaborators could adhere and be accountable to. We also intended for this set of explorations to serve as a means of reflecting on the similarities and differences between the variety of personal and collective experiences found within the respective groups in South Africa and Guadeloupe. This recognition of power and difference within our working settings is crucial to recognise as we address a climate crisis deeply characterised by inequalities rooted in colonial difference (Sultana, 2022b; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

From these sessions emerged a set of data—in the form of recorded oral, written, and illustrated reflections produced by the young people during the activities co-facilitated by the ToCA university/artist teams. These insights from the young people—which have already been woven throughout the early part of this article—form the basis for our analysis and insights presented below.

5. Animating Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces with Youth Co-Creators: Findings and Discussion

As we will examine in more detail in this section, our early work suggests three overarching findings. Firstly, that bravery, safety, and acceptable risk can be understood as co-constitutive of each other. They facilitate both introspection and relational reflection. Put simply, an emphasis on all three (safety, bravery, and acceptable risk) enables young people to feel at ease as individuals but also to carefully and continuously reflect on their relationship with others in collaborative climate justice-centred spaces. Secondly, we learned that choosing to work with bravery, safety, and risk as the key architectures of a collaborative space means choosing to centre affect. In the context of making theatre as research—and as politics—this methodological choice can be understood as a feminist insistence on the radical potential of emotion and affect as both individual and collective tools for driving social (Vachhani & Pullen, 2019) and, in our view, ecological change.

Relationality similarly emerges in decolonial discourses as a principle to counter universal abstracts, political–epistemic violence, and reframe ecology and the very notion of human existence as ‘living with other living organisms’ (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 166). Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks might thus be useful tools for theatre-making processes that use affect to move people ‘from the balcony to the trenches’ (Delina, 2022) of climate action. Finally, we reflected on the theme of materiality, particularly as it emerged from the conversations with our Guadeloupean co-creators. While affect and relationality are central to the effective use of Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks, we cannot shy away from the very concrete contexts of material and financial insecurity under capitalism in which they take place. This precarity emerges from the histories (and continuities) of colonial extraction and dispossession, which maintain and reproduce barriers to feeling safe, brave, or able to take risks both in collaborative research spaces and beyond. This matters in projects where university researchers and practitioners are working with under-resourced communities, especially where state or institutional funding (especially from the Global North) is available to the researchers/practitioners.

The remainder of this section will locate these findings in the words of our co-creators as shared with us in the first sessions we organised with them around Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces.

5.1. Bravery, Safety, and Risk as Co-Constitutive and Entangled

Our early findings suggest that notions of safety, bravery, and acceptable risk were critical to the youth co-creators’ sense of wellbeing in the project. When given the option of exploring the possibility of creating Safe(r), Brave(r), and/or Riskier Spaces, the youth co-creators did not position them in a hierarchy. Rather, they consistently emphasised the importance of all three of these features, positioning them in a co-constitutive, even symbiotic relationship with each other.

Our co-creators situated acceptable risk as a necessary complement to balance safety, as they affirmed that calculated risks are essential for personal growth and collaborative creative work. Taking an acceptable risk was also a constituent of bravery: one could not be brave without taking risks. Hence, being brave, safe, and taking acceptable risks emerged as complementary behaviours that our co-creators saw as normative goods. In their own words,

“Bravery involves risk.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

This understanding of bravery and risk could be drawn from the experiential knowledges of our youth co-creators, stretching beyond the shared workshop spaces we were collaborating in:

“I take acceptable risks to solve my life problems.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

Further, bravery and risk could be understood as a boon to agency. Taken together, they enable the youth co-creators to face new challenges and conditions, such as those that we face as subjects implicated in the climate crisis:

“Bravery = taking risks, giving oneself the means to achieve an objective in spite of fear, overcoming the feeling of fear, leaving one’s comfort zone.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

And importantly—as we will examine shortly in a brief reflection on what bravery and risk look like in educational settings—feeling safe, brave, and taking risks is about the kinds of boundaries and preparations made by all parties sharing a collaborative space, not just an individual:

“I feel safe when my limits are respected. When there is a clear framework, I feel good and at ease. I feel brave when I am facing my fears, when I accept the unknown while getting out of my comfort zone. I feel I take acceptable risks when I evaluate the risk, while there are measures to protect my safety put in place through adequate preparation.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

Bravery is co-constitutive of acceptable risk. Our co-creators suggest that facing up to risks in an everyday context necessitates bravery. And, indeed, operating in climate-vulnerable contexts means everyday life is already riddled with both social and ecological risk. Responding to this risk is brave and necessary—no matter the scale at which it articulates itself. Though this may seem obvious or intuitive, it is an important insight, for it reaffirms and reinforces the symbiotic, rather than adversarial, relationship amongst the concepts of Brave(r), Safe(r), and Riskier Spaces. Our youth co-creators demand that we attend to the deep entanglement of bravery, safety, and risk—rather than choosing bravery over safety or vice versa, as the debate is often framed. An explicit animation of these concepts in tandem with each other is useful and necessary for participatory researchers and arts practitioners seeking to facilitate equitable yet generative spaces of collaboration with young people.

5.2. Calculating (Acceptable) Risk as a Relational Practice

While risk was combined with bravery and safety, youth co-creators recognised that these risks had to be calculated and considered. This consideration and calculation is what makes risks acceptable and situates them as acts of bravery as opposed to—in the words of one of our Guadeloupean co-creators, stupidity (“Bravery is not equal to stupidity”—Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe). This process of acceptable risk-taking makes the use of Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks a relational practice, both in terms of how we relate to each other and our shifting locations. Relationality emerges as a key concept across discourses in decoloniality, Black, Indigenous, and feminist studies. Indigenous communities and scholars, for instance, reframe dominant and colonially informed conceptions of human existence by the meaningful nature of the relationships we cultivate with each other and the land (Wildcat & Voth, 2023).

Who we are, the worlds we hope to create, and how we practice relating to each other are bound up together (ibid)—thus making reflections on the consequences to our actions worthy of continued introspection, especially as we seek climate justice. We see this articulated in the reflections of our co-creators, even if not framed by them as such:

“Acceptable risk is knowing that it’s a risk that you’re ready to deal with consequences.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

“I take acceptable risks to protect others.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

“What is safety? What is bravery? Taking acceptable risks? It is not being violent, not giving non-constructive critiques. It is having a good spirit and confidence. It is being at ease. It is knowing how to say things.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

To some extent, the frameworks discussed here encourage introspection, and as we will see shortly, this can manifest in feelings of permission to be oneself in the collaborative space. Still, taking acceptable risks was firmly situated by our co-creators as a social (read: relational) act. The act of taking risks can affect others—negatively or positively. Risks might protect—or harm—them. The potential consequences are thus manifold. Recognising this, young people involved in processes and communities seeking change express their agency as they calculate these risks in relation to the social dynamics which shape and are shaped by the risks they take in collaborative spaces. The emphasis on taking an acceptable risk foregrounds the delicate and shifting power dynamics that regulate collaborative and participatory spaces such as the ToCA project. Indeed, these risks can simultaneously produce feelings of safety for some, while they create insecurity for others in the same shared space:

“Is this space ever really safe? If you create a safe space, what does that really mean? For who?”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

We might say that this contradiction mirrors some of the dynamics and debates at play in climate politics—where green transitions are proposed in specific regions at the expense of others. This dynamic, which, by no coincidence, plays out along the lines of North/South inequalities, has been dubbed ‘climate coloniality’ (Sultana, 2022b). But as our youth co-creators observe in the local context of our own project, safety (or if we push this even further, justice or emancipation) cannot be meaningful when secured at the expense of others. And so, young people are aware of the tensions and contradictions that emerge within our own collaborative climate justice spaces as we try to take acceptable risks and co-create spaces that are Brave(r) and/or Safe(r). It is through this meaningful animation of bravery, safety, and acceptable risk, which is attentive to relations of power within our own collaborative space, that we become able to respond to the historical and current power dynamics that manifest in the climate crisis. Exploring these dynamics through notions of safety, bravery, and acceptable risk simultaneously further opens the possibilities to reflect and act on the messy, entangled nature of our evolving relationships as we co-create theatrical work on climate justice.

Young people were also conscious that taking acceptable risks and being brave did not need to mean taking the ‘biggest’ risks with the highest stakes. Rather, taking (acceptable) risks and being brave within the context of a collaborative theatre-making research project was framed as being about taking the ‘smaller’, often less publicly visible, steps towards acts of (acceptable) risk and bravery. In their words,

“It’s not always about doing the biggest risk or taking the biggest risks. It’s about even doing the small things… you waking up, you not giving up on yourself each and every day.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

“You don’t have to go and fight a war and be brave; just the little things.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

These ‘little’ things are not always the most visible, high-risk gestures that take up public space. But such acts of resistance remain potent nonetheless as disability and feminist studies, among other areas of thought, have taught us (Butler, 2015; Hedva, 2016). As such, our embrace of the Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks enables us to support our youth co-creators in articulating an ‘environmentalism of everyday life’ (Peña, 2005). It is thus in the ‘mundane matters’ (Enloe, 2011) of spaces which start with lived experiences that marginalised communities can describe, speak back to, and push back against the status quo of extractivism, hierarchy, and domination. And, indeed, the use of these frameworks means that they take these risks in spaces where their safety and wellbeing are prioritised and respected—for the acceptable nature of the risk remains paramount. Where our co-creators recognised the impact of ‘small’ risks in forging Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces, they insisted that this risk was never a careless or unmeasured risk. To come back to an affirmation from one of our Guadeloupean co-creators, ‘Bravery is not equal to stupidity’.

As researchers and educators, we might reflect, too, on one of the spaces in which we often find ourselves in contact with young people: education. How might we work against extractivism, hierarchy, and domination to better support youth climate action? And what role might the kinds of risk-taking explored by our youth co-creators play in this? Indeed, our classrooms and educational policies often perpetuate risk aversion (hooks, 1994). But perhaps we might see these ‘smaller’ risks as ways—strategies—that take us towards the larger (necessary) risks that seek and support social transformation and climate justice. In other words, young people’s small risks might be understood as prefigurative of larger risks—and as invitations and reminders to educators of the kinds of risks that we need to take to support this prefiguration. As bell hooks reminds us, youth ‘empowerment cannot happen if we [teachers and educators] refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks’ (hooks, 1994, p. 21). To avoid coercing students into taking risks, then, we should ‘not expect students to take any risks that [we] would not take, to share in any way that [we] would not share’ (hooks, 1994, p. 21). Rather, we might construct and step into bravery, safety, and acceptable risk together—acknowledging that we are all implicated in questions of climate justice and must all respond to it (even if our roles and experiences within it vary).

Upon reflection, then, we might see the simultaneous role of bravery/safety/acceptable risk as a tool to draw the agreed boundaries of our shared theatre-making process—without, as much as possible, limiting the imaginative potentials of our young collaborators to envision and embody the kinds of politics and relationships (or ‘relationalities’) that prefigure alternative social and environmental futures.

5.3. Affect and Reflexivity in Brave(r), Safe(r), and Riskier Spaces

As mentioned previously, working with the Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks facilitated a simultaneous movement towards introspection and reflections on relationality. This simultaneous movement was also deeply implicated in affect, or emotion, both in terms of individual and collective affect. Discussions rooted the concept of bravery in feelings of vulnerability. This theme aligns with the aim of fostering an environment where individuals feel able to carry and express themselves honestly and take risks without fear of judgement. Youth co-creators expressed that bravery involves overcoming fears and being open about one’s emotions:

“Being brave is taking steps even though you don’t know where it might take you… taking action even though the location might be unknown.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

These feelings may lead us to and through our vulnerabilities:

“I feel brave when I cry. Become vulnerable.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

“I feel brave when I overcome my fears.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

Safety was closely linked to a feeling of freedom to be or express oneself. Youth co-creators tended to feel safe when they felt that they had total space to express their thoughts and feelings, to embody and embrace their senses of selfhood. In their words,

“Safety means letting your guard [down]. Allow[ing] yourself to be vulnerable in spaces…”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

“I feel safe when I’m allowed to be myself.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

Still, these feelings of safety are contingent. They are not absolute nor a given. The relationships that youth co-creators have to the places they inhabit are crucial:

“Safety varies from place to place. And this is what makes me feel safe is having a warm feeling and being very much aware of which room I’m at, where I’m at.”

(Youth co-creator, South Africa)

“Safety = comfort zone, out of danger, without anxiety or nervousness, free self-expression, feeling at ease.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

The themes of safety and selfhood that emerge are crucial for creating an inclusive and supportive environment where all members feel valued and respected. Again, this centring of affect was articulated in a relational way. Not only were co-creators concerned with their own freedom to articulate their sense of selfhood, but they also insisted that this freedom was extended to each individual who was part of the space. At the same time, they tended to want to be open and vulnerable in their interactions, which is not a central pillar of a ‘safe space’.

5.4. Acknowledging the Materiality of Spaces

We recognise the centrality of affect and relationality to the effective use of Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks. Yet, we cannot shy away from the very concrete contexts of material and financial insecurity that produce barriers to using these frameworks well in collaborative research spaces and beyond. In no uncertain terms, our youth co-creators spoke to the material nature of safety:

“Safety -> mood/environment; financial (being at ease without struggling); being able to question oneself; physical (no physical, non-consensual violence).”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

Safety is not simply about a sense of identity or selfhood—it is also about meeting material needs, which form the basis for the former:

“Safety is when I can meet my principal needs. When I have a feeling of wellness and being out of danger.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

Without a doubt, safety is in large part (though not exclusively) about materiality:

“Safety/security: I feel secure/safe when I receive my payslip.”

(Youth co-creator, Guadeloupe)

This matters in projects where university researchers and practitioners are working with under-resourced communities, especially where the former’s activities are being funded. This was a particularly important question for our team, which included researchers from/based in Global North contexts. Our funding, too, came from an institution based in a Northern country, the former imperial core of the UK (SOAS, University of London)—a material dynamic which other climate justice-oriented projects may well be operating on.

Although our decision to pay our young people for their time was factored into our initial grant application (i.e., before we had access to the insights from the research that it ultimately funded), the emergent findings from this project confirm and reaffirm the importance of taking into account the material securities and insecurities which contribute to making a space safe(r), brave(r), and within the bounds of acceptable risk. It goes without saying that climate justice is a deeply material—not post-material—issue. Any project responding to climate justice must thus account for this. This is an important, too often under-emphasised, aspect of creating and sustaining equitable and secure collaboration with young people. And it is particularly prescient as we recognise the profound materiality of climate change as an issue shaping and reshaping Global South communities and ecologies.

6. Conclusions: Towards an Ethos for a Theatre of Climate Action

We return to the question posed by one of our South African youth co-creators in response to the Safe(r) Spaces framework: “Can you be safe and brave?”. The contradictions within and across these frameworks raised useful questions such as this one, resulting in a more constructive foundation of principles and commitments for the collaborative processes. Focusing on one specific element of these frameworks (i.e., bravery, safety, risk) alone is not enough. Youth co-creators emphasised the co-constitutive nature of all three of these frameworks. They recognised the need for creating hybrid approaches to facilitate and support their “other” ways of knowing, which drove our artistic collaborations.

In order to recognise marginalised voices at the frontlines of the climate crisis, ToCA draws from artistic research as a methodology that affords possibilities to counter hegemonic archives, narratives, experiences, and epistemologies. Collaborative theatre-making offers a democratic and relational space for such encounters and for co-creators in research processes to become knowledge creators. Democracy, relationality, and equal participation, however, cannot be assumed. Through our work in ToCA, we have found that Brave(r), Safe(r), and Riskier Spaces created an ethico-political ground for artistic research, and specifically here, collaborative theatre-making as knowledge interventions in the world.

As emphasised above, research processes led by creative collaboration can be processes of democratisation. Still, these processes cannot be extricated from the world in which they take place. This means that they can be–and often are–still limited in terms of the power they can harness to radically transform relations of power at large. Yet, artistic collaboration remains a source of motivation and even excitement for researchers, artists, and young people seeking other, better worlds.