Socially engaged creative practices : a transdisciplinary study of Woza Moya

Abstract

Woza Moya is an arts and craft community organisation which was officially established in 2002. It is one of two economic empowerment projects of the Hillcrest AIDS Centre Trust in KwaZulu-Natal which were initiated to form part of the Trust’s context-specific holistic health care approach. While Woza Moya sells a diverse range of products, it is well known for the Woza beadwork style. The Director of the project coined that term as a tribute to the custom of naming beadwork styles in the KwaZulu-Natal province. The present study investigates the socially engaged creative beadwork practices at Woza Moya. The study is framed by transdisciplinarity and presents eight vignettes that analyse the design and creation processes. The study is positioned in the interpretivist paradigm and draws upon transdisciplinary discourse from scholars such as Nicolescu (2010), McGregor (2015) as well as Ross and Mitchell (2018) and others. The study focuses on integration and collaboration, which are considered core characteristics of the transdisciplinary methodology (Morin 1999; Nicolescu 2010). Vignettes are promoted as a clear and rich way of deepening our understanding of collaborative, heterogeneous and complex design processes. The use of transdisciplinarity as a framework contributes to tracing both open and hidden activities which form part of the design process, and which embrace the transdisciplinary logic of inclusion and transformation, where creative designs form part of a holistic community care model. These vignettes are analysed according to themes. The themes which straddle the vignettes are: (1) interplay of beading, time and bodily pain, (2) creativity as contagious and viral, (3) men’s active role in beadmaking with women as mentors to men, (4) increased community action, (5) transformed and deepened understanding of others, (6) the ikhaya metaphor for the agora, zone of non-resistance and space of the included middle, and (7) building a home as progress and improvement. These themes combine to form a rich and descriptive rendering of the design and creation process. The central thesis presented in this study is that arts and craft community organisations such as Woza Moya are sites of strong and transformative transdisciplinarity (Ross and Mitchell 2018), which fits with McGregor’s (2015) call for transdisciplinary entrepreneurship.