2021: "If I can't spray, it's not my revolution!" Global citizenship education through participatory graffiti workshops with girls

The background for the project was the "2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" adopted in 2016 with 17 development goals, which include gender equality (SDG 5), but also reducing inequality (SDG 10) or ensuring peace and justice (SDG 16) – also topics that play a major role in the lives of women. The project aimed to give these aspects of the "Agenda 2030" more visibility and to sensitize young people in particular to them. The participatory project combined content workshops on SDG 5 - keyword: the global problem of violence against girls and women as a human rights violation - with artistic-creative (graffiti) and media workshops. The goals were knowledge acquisition, reflection on a local and global level, raising awareness on the issue of violence, and ultimately empowerment of the participants, whereby this self-empowerment also took place through the acquisition of new skills in the artistic and media fields. Emphasis was placed on digital communication of the results in order to make them available to as many users as possible.

In the context of the CPDC, the IKF cooperated with the Democracy Center Vienna (Global Citizenship Education Workshops) and the Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Graz, as well as with three youth centers (*peppa in Vienna, Steppenwolf in St. Pölten & Ja.m in Graz), a street art collective and the media company Frog Queen Media.

The planned activities addressed several levels. In the three selected youth centers, a series of workshops was offered aimed at girls and young women over the age of 14. Of the total of four meetings with around twenty young people, which were coordinated with the youth center social workers and took place over several weeks, the first dealt with democracy and human rights as the basis for respectful coexistence (DZ). The participants were to be strengthened in their own competence of perception and assessment of discrimination, exclusion and violence in connection with their living environment. The second workshop focused on the topic of violence against girls and women in their own social environment as well as in a global context (IKF). Global perspectives were discussed not only at the local level (e.g. femicides), but also through the involvement of representatives (living in Vienna) of feminist groups and movements from the global South (Ni Una Menos). In the third workshop (IKF/street art collective), an artistic examination of the participants own experience of violence took place under the guidance of the artists. Afterwards, the group was divided along two activities: While one group worked together to create a graffiti as an expression of the previous reflections, the other group created a concept for photojournalism under the guidance of an expert. Finally, at the fourth meeting (IKF/street art collective), the graffiti was implemented, which in turn was documented by the photo group. In addition, Frog Queen Media made a short video about the artistic process, for which participants were also interviewed. The artistic results of the workshops were edited for a wider audience in a zine.

The project was accompanied by a media campaign, which included a dedicated project website (https://www.girls-can.at/) and the creation and support of various social media channels. Judith Laister, who works at the Institute of European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Graz, and Sabrina Stranzl also conducted an external evaluation of the entire project.