Kif-kif: Comics for inclusion is a project of direct engagement with young Spanish Muslims and also immigrants, aimed at strengthening their participation and effective integration into the social environments in which they live, giving value to their cultural roots.
Reinforcing these values as something positive and normal among the youth during a stage in which their personalities are being shaped will help to separate them from those environments which exploit feelings of disorientation among the so-called second and third generations of Arab Muslims.
The project seeks to operate in the form of a network that interacts with the distinct role players involved in the project’s development from their schools and town halls to their local Muslim communities, mosques, etc.
Objectives
- Promotion of multiculturalism and social integration of Muslim communities and the fight against islamophobia.
- Increased involvement and coordination of the various players working within this social sector reaching inter-sectorial agreements developed between organizations at the local, regional and national level.
Territorial enviroment of execution
The project is being implemented from January 2017 in several public secondary schools in Madrid and Catalonia. In the next school year is going to be implemented in other regions of Spain like Ceuta, Valencia or Murcia.
The comic
The main tool used to achieve the objectives set out within this large section of the population is the comic The Outskirts. This comic is the result of the workshops that took place during several months in 2016 in the Secondary School Aurèlia Campany (Cornellà de Llobregat, Barcelona) with the collaboration of the artist Manu Ripoll.
The comic has been published digitally in Spanish, the other languages spoken in Spain and its territories, English as well as in Dariya (Colloquial Moroccan Arabic). Thus the families and friends of young people in the Arab world can download for themselves the application with the comics in Arabic. In this way the project is also able to stand up against the common stereotyping in Arabic countries of Europe as being islamophobic.
We chose the comic for being an innovative and agile format closely related to the youth of that age. The project benefits from the immediacy of visual narrative when it comes to expressing conflicts, overcoming them and sharing them.
Educational materials
Taking advantage of the comic as a creative process, we generated a series of educational materials which address the issue of understanding and integration of these communities, as well as the growth of islamophobia and the struggle against radicalization. The format of these teaching materials is independent of comics so that they can be used in schools and community centers without the need to create the comics again which would be much more complex and costly.
The workshops
Using those materials and the comic The Outskirts as a base or a pretext to open discussion about islamophobia, we implement 5 workshops (lasting around an hour each) in each one of the governmental secondary schools chosen for the project.
The first workshop is about multiple identities. Starting from the comic we play in the class with the students with the aim of opening a critical reflection on identity.
The second workshop is a dramatized reading of those parts of the comic The Outskirts where islamophobia issues or even problems within the Muslim community appear.
The third workshop focuses on women and islamofobia.
The fourth workshop is about the responsibility of mainstream media in our vision of the Muslim communities in Spain and in Europe in general.
The fifth and last workshop is a debate about all the issues that emerged appeared during the previous workshops.
Building on the experience of the Al Fanar Foundation in the world of social comics, both activities and workshops are held in which focus is put on the importance of development of citizenship, intercultural communication and the active creation of participatory elements which reinforce the inclusion and integration of these young people with their non-Muslim peers and their social environment in general.
International impact
- The project was chosen to be presented in the CEV Policy Conference: Promoting Inclusion Preventing Extremism (PIPE) that took place the 13th and 14th of October 2016 in Brussels. The project is the only Spanish project chosen to be part of the PIPE Initiatives Guide
- The project was presented last week at the First Interfaith Dialogue On Violent Extremism (IDOVE) organized by the African Union in Adis Ababa (Ethiopia).
- AWARE, Alliance of Women Against Radicalisation and Extremism
- BRAVE (Building Resilience Against Violent Extremism)
- International ToolFair XI (Malta, November 2016)
- Countering and Preventing RadicalizationFundación Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, (Bruselas, 20/11/2017)
- I Foro Mundial sobre las Violencias Urbanas y Educación para la Convivencia y la Paz (Madrid, 19-21 de abril 2017)
