Voices from Southern Africa: African Perspectives on Decolonizing the Creative Arts in Community, Education, Therapy, and Health

This webinar is offered through its Arts & Health Global Series (https://www.iacaet.org/iacaet-arts-health-global-dialogue-series/). This gathering convenes scholars, practitioners, arts therapists, artists, educators, and cultural leaders to engage a critical and generative dialogue on the role of the creative arts across community, education, therapy, and health. Centering perspectives from Southern Africa, the conversation foregrounds epistemologies and practices historically marginalized within dominant Western paradigms.

At the heart of this webinar is decolonization, not as metaphor, but as an ethical, political, and epistemological reorientation of the field. Drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems that understand knowledge as relational, land-based, embodied, and communally transmitted, the dialogue explores how creative arts practices can move beyond positivist hierarchies of evidence toward culturally grounded, contextually responsive, and relationally accountable forms of inquiry and care.

Southern African philosophical traditions, including the ethic of Ubuntu, articulated globally through the work of Desmond Tutu—invite us to understand personhood as emergent through relationship: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons). Within arts therapy training and community arts praxis in the region, these principles are enacted through circle processes, call-and-response structures, embodied witnessing, ritual, and aesthetic co-creation. Healing is understood not solely as individual clinical intervention, but as restoration of relational balance among body, spirit, community, land, and ancestral presence.

The conversation also aligns with and builds upon scholarship published in the Creative Arts in Education and Therapy Journal (CAET), which has consistently advanced global, intercultural, and decolonial perspectives in creative arts applications in education, health, and therapy. CAET’s dialogic ethos, foregrounding relational aesthetics, transnational exchange, and epistemic plurality, provides an important scholarly foundation for this exchange. Global arts and health frameworks, including those articulated by the World Health Organization, further affirm the role of the arts in promoting wellbeing across the lifespan, while inviting critical reflection on whose knowledge systems shape definitions of evidence, health, and healing.

This webinar affirms creativity as a collective right and a site of dignity, belonging, and restoration. Rather than merely integrating the arts into existing systems, Voices from Southern Africa invites participants to imagine how those systems themselves might be transformed through sustained dialogue, cultural humility, and relational reciprocity.