Welcome
Welcome to this presentation of the Women of Influence research project: Exploring the Potential and Impact of Indigenous Female Community Participation and Leadership in Amazonian Peru.

This is a creative participatory project with interdisciplinary, international and intergenerational dimensions that – since 2019 – has aimed to support a group of young women from the central Amazonian area of Peru in developing their capacity for leadership roles.

It has been conceived as a collaborative partnership project between:

• A team of researchers and students (from the University of East Anglia in the UK and the Catholic University of Peru in Lima), 

• media practitioners (from the Peru-based collective EmpoderArte), and

• The younger members of OMIAASEC: a non-profit organisation that defends the rights of Indigenous women of the central Amazonian region of Peru
  

Section 1: About our Project
The Women of Influence project has been developed around the following key features and principles:

1. It aims to take a decolonised and decentred position, that’s to say that the research team has been inspired by and led by the challenges posed to us by our community partners, listening to and responding to their needs and ideas as much as possible in the design and delivery of the project.

2. From a gender perspective, it focuses on the experiences of women and intergenerational knowledge exchange between the elders and the younger members of the communities.

3. The young women with whom we have been working self-identify as members of specific indigenous communities located in the central Amazon region in Peru: those being the Ashaninka y the Yanesha people. 

4. These young women, while each having their own individual concerns, are joined together as members of important organisations that are defenders of indigenous women’s rights: ONAMIAP y OMIAASEC. 

5. Together, we have identified issues of common concern for these young women:  climate change, deforestation, contamination, and the loss of ancestral knowledge, language, and traditions. We also noted that they suffer discrimination (as Indigenous women). And that they feel largely invisible and unheard, on both a personal and a political scale.

6. We have mobilised, together, the creative use of the audiovisual as a tool of engagement – thereby developing skills, experimenting with innovative means of self-expression, and creating artefacts such as short films, audio files, manifestos - for sharing with others – across the communities, with state representatives, educators, activists and students.

7. The project has an interdisciplinary heart – drawing on the team’s expertise in Anthropology, Cultural studies, Law and Creative Production).
   

Section 2: Time and Place
Place has been an important dimension to this project for many reasons – logistical, practical, conceptual, emotional and physical.

In specific terms, we worked with young women based in the Central Amazon of Peru; in the Region of Junín; in the Provinces of Pichanaqui and Satipo. We travelled with them to their communities, which are based along the river Perené communities, such as Bajo Aldea, Waypancuni, Bajo Kimiriki, Churingaveni, Impitato Cascada and San Pascual.

As we developed the Project together, the importance of place to the young women and their communities became very clear. Their relationship with and respect and care for Mother Nature – the river, the land, the flora and fauna with which they co-exist – is Paramount. It is a fundamental part of their identity. 

As for Time, our project is contemporary; that’s to say, it seeks to support young women who are finding solutions to their everyday challenges – personal and, more broadly, political – in the context of their current lives and experiences.

And yet we have been very mindful of the specific historical contexts that have shaped these contemporary experiences, such as:

• Discrimination, within communities as well as between communities and the broader population, including the Peruvian state; 

• Violence, including during the internal armed conflict that affected the whole of Peru in the 1980s and 1990s and yet where the devastating effects on the Indigenous population of the Amazon have been far less reported;

• Migration, leading to the breakdown of attachment to territory, disruptions in governance, and limited capacity to maintain the ancestral knowledge systems that have been vital for the preservation of the environment and way of life.

Timeline

The project has a long and complex trajectory. In 2019, the relationship between researchers at the University of East Anglia and the Catholic University of Peru began to take shape across interests in cinema, culture and visual anthropology. 

With the help of a grant from the British Council Peru, the research teams designed and delivered workshops which took place at each institution to establish themes of common interest.

These workshops led to the identification of interests in exploring further, together, the experiences of women, indigeneity and community participation. 

We were specifically interested in discovering different approaches to and models of leadership – women-led, collaborative, intergenerational, dispersed, based on mutual support and respect – and to appreciating these distinct approaches as providing novel solutions to the challenges faced by their communities.

We then secured a grant from the British Academy in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, hopeful that the fieldwork would start soon after. However, with travel and other restrictions continuing for much longer than anyone had anticipated, we had to rethink our approach and shift the scope of the project, resulting in the development of a more longitudinal relationship between all our partners.

Thereafter, the project has developed as seen on the slide, with much time given to establishing the team, developing contacts, building trust, care and mutual understanding – using a mix of online workshops, fieldwork, dissemination and sharing – in a range of locations across Peru and the UK.

Between fieldwork, we’ve worked hard as a project team to become effective advocates for our community partners: co-producing the short films, supporting the distribution, screening and discussion of those; developing the project website as a form of toolkit; giving and supporting presentations; producing research outputs; raising further funds; and maintaining communication and morale, often at very difficult times for every team member – both personally and politically.

Section 3: Participatory Work
So, how exactly have we worked together? What did we do?

This section takes us through the methods we developed in our efforts to:

• build trust and confidence within and across individuals and collective participants

• develop deeper knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the context within which we were operating

• find creative ways to develop collectively situated knowledge bases, using audio-visual tools to construct narratives and positionalities based on lived experiences that directly address contemporary, local concerns

• share these experiences and concerns with wider groups - including local community members of all generations, academics, artists and activists around the world. 

Launching a project such as this at the height of a global pandemic, COVID-19, meant we needed to rethink our original plans about fieldwork and shift from intensive in-person workshops to shorter, regular online sessions.

In order to establish contact with the young women, we first needed to gain the trust, confidence and consent of the leaders of the organisation to which they belonged: OMIASEEC, a non-profit organisation that defends the rights of indigenous women of the central Amazonian region of Peru. 

This was done through building on and referring to previous partnership work with the organisation, through hiring a ‘local co-ordinator’ based in the region who knew the group well, through formal letters, and through online introductory meetings at which those leaders set out their expectations from any research project. In particular, they emphasised the need for care, for active sharing and for a collaborative, non-extractivist approach. They were keen for the young women of their group to learn new skills, benefit from new experiences, and for this project to contribute to their development as new leaders.

Once contact was established, we set up a series of online workshops, the content of which included a mixture of presentations, discussions and creative exercises. We wanted to learn from and about each other, with the end goal of creating some kind of manifesto to be shared widely.

Nine virtual workshops were held via Zoom from July to November 2021. Through these, the research team learnt quickly about the challenges faced by the young women as they made great efforts to participate: issues to do with lack of stable technological infrastructure, differing digital literacy levels, inequalities of access, other life priorities impeding attendance, and so on.

Nevertheless, we found ways of sharing information about each other’s lives by showing, describing, and explaining the significance of objects such as those on this slide.

We also quickly realised that using audio-visual tools based, first of all, on the mobile phone to create something collectively would be the most motivating and productive way forward for all.

As an interim output, we invited the group to submit audio pieces from their communities for a crowd-sourced film called Treeline by Ruth Maclennan, collectively made film - “a vivid reminder of the swathes of green that continue to encircle and nourish the planet, and a powerful emblem of the shared resources and shared futures that bind people together” - compiled from hundreds of hours of footage of forests submitted by people across the world, including our group.

In December 2021, during a brief hiatus in lockdowns, several of the research team travelled to Junín to meet the young women in their place and spaces and to begin the work of producing short documentary-style films that would become their creative manifestos.

While being well-versed in the possibility of social media content creation, none of the young women had made films in this way before - our goal was never to make them into accomplished filmmakers but to offer some support in developing the capacity to use filmmaking as a tool for communicating and sharing their concerns and ambitions.

In short, we worked together on the following:

• Pre-production workshops over one weekend in Junín central Amazon of Peru

• Production of 5 short films in the communities over the following week

• Editing and post-producing the footage via virtual workshops between February and June 2022

• And then returning to Junín in August 2022 to share the films in the communities via screenings, discussion and food.

All five of these beautiful, powerful films can now be found on our website - please take a look. Stills from two of them are featured here on this slide.

Since 2022, they have been shared at numerous community events, stakeholder presentations, via academic conferences and as part of film festivals worldwide. Our role as researchers since then has become centred on sharing the work through:

• Facilitating screenings and discussion of films/themes with communities, educators, academics, artists, and activists.

• Setting up opportunities for the young women to engage in advocacy and leadership work with politicians and human rights organisations.

• Developing intercultural appreciation with children via the development of resources and toolkits for educators.

We have maintained contact with the group via online chats and sharing of small updates from our respective communities, as well as continuing the creative collaboration through further workshops - online and in person - whenever logistics and funding will allow.

Section 4: Challenges and Insights
Our goal has been to get leaders and influencers with the capacity to (re)shape policy to listen differently, respond with empathy and act positively in relation to what they hear from the young women.

EXPANDING THE TOOLS OF ENGAGEMENT

• Strategies to support Indigenous women - audiovisual and other skills development

• Leveraging networks and partnerships for visibility, advocacy

• Providing resources, sharing skills and creating a platform (website)

• Films as creative manifesto

• Bridging the gap between local and global advocacy efforts (events, films - toolkit)
    

Challenges Encountered:

• Emotional burden of hearing difficult stories.

• Logistics: remote access, language barriers, cultural nuances, technical challenges … physical exhaustion.

• Managing expectations of all partners and stakeholders (funders, universities, community groups).

• Handling ethical dilemmas (consent) and ensuring participant safety. Responsibility.
  

Key Insights from the Field:

• Building trust and relationships with our partners (‘hermanas’/sisterhood).

• Strategies for participatory research (e.g., workshops, storytelling).

• Balancing emotional involvement and professional boundaries

This slide shows two of our young women interviewing an elder female member of their community about her life, during which she reveals some intimate and painful memories. Great care had to be taken to support all concerned through the process in order to ensure a positive outcome for the individuals at the heart of these stories

This slide, on the other hand, demonstrates some of the logistical situations - emphasising the need for training, support, positivity, resilience and creativity. 

Finally, this one shows one of the community screenings. This event began with great difficulty as the male community leader was, in the end, unable to support the event due to other priorities. Still, it ended well, with a family-led screening and robust discussion across all the generations during which many intimate details were shared.

What have we learnt?

• The power of partnerships and the need to invest much time to develop these. 

• The importance of trust-building and ‘being present’

• The potential of creative audiovisual methods as tools of engagement and dissemination

And thematically:

• the importance of restoring ancestral knowledge - as activists act in themselves towards identity recuperation

• the care for local solutions to local problems (climate, water, violence)

• ongoing tensions between the state (mainly central) and Indigenous communities

Section 5: Calls to Action

As calls to action that demonstrate solidarity and make a genuine difference please:

• Share the stories of our project

• check out our website

• watch and discuss the films. 

Check out our project partners’ websites and social media, engage with them, and thereby support indigenous young women’s leadership and rights directly. 
ONAMIAP
OMIAASEC
EmpoderArte

Consider using participatory and audio-visual research methods for collaborative projects. See our toolkit for ideas.

Contact us for further information, including about our toolkit for educators to be used with children and young people: sarah.barrow@uea.ac.uk