Unshackling the Body, Mind, and Spirit: Reflections on Liberation and Creative Exchange between San Quentin and Auckland Prisons

This article explores a creative project entitled Performing Liberation which sought to empower communities with direct experience of incarceration to create and share creative work as part of transnational dialogue. One of the aims of the project was to facilitate creative dialogue and exchange between two incarcerated communities: prisoners at Auckland Prison and prisoners at San Quentin Prison in San Francisco. Written using autoethnographic methods, this co-authored article explores our recollections of key moments in a creative workshop at Auckland Prison in an attempt to explain its impact on stimulating the creativity of the participants. We begin by describing the context of incarceration in the US and New Zealand and suggest that these seemingly divergent locations are connected by mass incarceration. We also provide an overview of the creative contexts at San Quentin and Auckland Prison on which the Performing Liberation project developed. After describing key moments in the workshop, the article interrogates the creative space that it produced in relation to the notion of liberation, as a useful concept to interrogate various forms of oppression, and as a practice that is concerned with unshackling the body, mind, and spirit.fals

Performances of Healing and Reconciliation

This forum looks at a particular effect that is often claimed both ritual and theatre: that of healing or reconiclliation, whether social, political, or personal. In this forum, we bring together artsits who work both inside and outside what might be seen as the ‘applied’ theatre world to discuss what that healing or reconciliation might look like, and the challenges and problems with the way it can be thought about and executed. I would venture that most readers of this forum would be loath to abandon the claim that performance has the potential to offer some sort of social healing, but the critical examination here of just what sort of healing is possible, and how it might operate, can help us make better sense of the limits and possibilities of such claim

It's my life: Evaluation report

This report presents a snapshot of some outcomes from the by-youth for-youth It's My Life youth smokefree research project, which was funded by the Pathway to Smokefree New Zealand 2025 Innovation Fund. The report includes quantitative data from the It’s My Life pre and post evaluation surveys, campus cessation reporting, and social media analytics, plus qualitative data from youth participants in the project. Two key results from the Massey University surveys are that over the It’s My Life campaign timeframe, smokers’ desire to quit increased and tolerance of the tobacco industry, in general but also particularly among smokers, reduced. We interpret these results as an endorsement of the decision by the young people who designed the campaign not to vilify smokers but to use positive empowerment themes to make smokers feel supported and encouraged to take back control of their lives from tobacco companies.falseMinistry of Healt

A difficult transition to a new relationship: Britain and Cyprus in the European Union

This article examines the relationship between Britain and Cyprus after the latter joined the European Union (EU) on 1 May 2004. It argues that the difficulties that emerged were in part a product of the ill feeling that developed at the time of the April 2004 referendum on a UN peace plan. However, it was also shaped by British attempts to end the isolation of the Turkish Cypriots and ease Turkey's EU accession process. These tensions were particularly noticeable throughout 2005, when several attempts at rapprochement between London and Nicosia foundered. However, it now appears as if London and Nicosia have adapted to the new relationship. Although areas of tension still exist, it appears as if they will be at a lower level of intensity than was the case in the immediate aftermath of accession