From nameless whisper to social transformation: expressions of social resilience by young people in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) - Peter Berliner

The paper presents the results of ten years of participatory action research on young Inuit expressions of social resilience. Through means of social art, encompassing photos, drawings, theatre, songs, bodily movements, and writing, young people in KN/Greenland express their own understanding and enacting of social resilience. The data are from the community-based Paamiut Asasara programme and from the programme Siunissaq uagut pigaarput (the future belongs to us) in Tasiilaq, Nanortalik, and Maniitsoq. The results comes from a youth-led collective learning process (research), which:

1. broadens understandings through art, including photos, drawings, music, masks, and dance, so that the participants can reimagine and transform the social and socio-material life space in a way that promotes social, cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability.

2. Strengthens social support through methods of collective reflection, building social skills in practice, including caring, mutual respect, cooperation, collectively giving space for diversity, providing security, trust, and stable relations.

3. Reflects, reinvigorates social values, and transforms social values into practices in daily life through behavior, movement, films, and public events.

Through the social learning, the young people build a social transformation by expressing the formerly nameless experience of longing for social justice and for a viable future through stories, photos, and other expressions. The paper will open for a dialogue on a cultural, sustainable, and contextual theory of social resilience.