In this episode Deborah Barndt and Margarita Antonio discuss their collaboration on a participatory arts-based research project called VIVA! in Nicaragua the early days of URACCAN - the University of the Autonomous Region of Nicaragua Caribbean Coast. They talk about how through that project and their collaborative relationship they brought together feminisms, participatory art-based research and indigenous cosmologies.
Margarita is a Miskitu woman from the Nicaragua Caribbean Coast. An Indigenous and feminist activist, she works with international Indigenous women promoting both their collective and individual rights, and their voice in decision-making forums. Margarita has a long career in media and journalism including community TV and in cultural revitalization.
On Deborah Barndt’s website www.deborahbarndt.com, she describes herself as la politica, la poeta, la pensadora - the activist, the artist and the academic. She is Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. In the 1970s Deb was one of the early coordinators of the Toronto Participatory Research Group which was one of the five original PAR networks, or nodes, that was sponsored in the 1970s by the International Council of Adult Education. The sponsorship of these five nodes really facilitated participatory researchers’ collaboration across and within the Global South and North.
