My proposed intervention is designed for first year MA Performance: Screen students at Central Saint Martins, as part of Unit 4A, which explores community and collaboration in filmmaking practices. During this unit, students work with external partners to create films. The organisations they collaborate with include older people at Age UK Lewisham and Southwark, queer club goers at Riposte, D/deaf and disabled performers at Graeae Theatre Company and members of Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company that works with people who have experience of homelessness, poverty and inequity.
To prepare them for these collaborations, I organise training sessions led by diverse practitioners and organisations. These currently include:
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training with Tas Emiabata, exploring positionality and ethical collaboration.
- Trauma Informed Practice training with Cardboard Citizens, guided by the UK Government’s six principles: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural consideration as well as it’s origins in health care settings.
- Aesthetics of Access workshop with Jenny Sealey of Graeae Theatre, integrating access tools like BSL, audio description, and captioning into the creative process.
- Homemade Mutant Hope Machines lecture with Dr Ben Walters, exploring queerness as an intersectional framework and inspiring replicable, hope driven artistic interventions.
- A visit to Age UK Lewisham and Southwark, offering students an opportunity to critically engage with ageism, different cultural attitudes to ageing and ‘in person’ experience with participants of creative projects without the pressure of having to lead, which allows them to observe approaches by experienced professionals in the field.
These sessions offer a robust foundation, but during the IP unit I realised the students would benefit from a space to synthesise learning and generate a shared framework before beginning their projects. Therefore I decided to design a manifesto workshop to address this: a collective, creative exercise to articulate values, strategies, and commitments to inclusive filmmaking.
Manifestos have long been used to declare political, artistic, or ethical intentions, from The Communist Manifesto to the Guerrilla Girls and Paula Varjack. They offer clarity of purpose, collective authorship, and the possibility to challenge the status quo, which as Sara Ahmed attests (2012), is especially important in inclusive practice, where we must confront ableism, racism, sexism, and other structural oppressions.
This workshop would provide students with the chance to distil their training into tangible principles, informed by both their learning and lived experiences. It would also help foster peer accountability and mutual care. Inspired by Dr Walters’ “mutant hope machines,” the manifesto format is flexible, creative, and replicable across other settings in our institution.
Of course, manifestos have limitations. They can oversimplify complex issues and inevitably reflect only the perspectives of those in the room. But critically engaging with imperfection is part of ethical inclusive work. By creating a shared, evolving guide, we support students to move forward thoughtfully and collectively.
Ultimately, I hope this workshop becomes an annual practice and a space for critical discussion and care. It could also be adapted for departmental staff, offering clarity on our shared pedagogical commitments and a deeper understanding of our students needs and perspectives. By consolidating learning and affirming inclusive values, the manifesto workshop aims to empower students to work more ethically, sustainably, and collaboratively, within and beyond the institution.
Manifesto Workshop Plan
Room set up: a circle of chairs around a large table with a monitor at one end that all students can see.
Materials: screen, laptop with access to shared PowerPoint and captioning enabled, newspapers, magazines, printed manifesto’s, glue, scissors, pens, post it notes, A4 and A3 paper.
| Time | Task | Rationale |
| 10.30am-10.40am | Introduction to the session and check in with the students. If they could just give a single 5 word statement about how they are today, what would it be? | This exercise is designed to encourage the students to think boldly, concisely and clearly about how to express themselves, as well as to gauge how the group are feeling so that I can make reasonable adjustments to exercises to meet their needs |
| 10.40am-11.10am | 10am Introduction to the history and application of Manifesto’s. I will present a definition of manifesto and some key examples, giving information about their makers, context and application. There will be opportunities for the students to share their findings and examples to the group. | This exercise is designed to allow a wide range of voices to share and learn together, and to explore the pros and cons of manifesto’s as a collective |
| 11.10am-11.20am | Students will get into pairs and discuss key learnings around inclusive filmmaking practices from the workshops this term. They will take it in turns to describe what they have learnt, how it impacts their practices, and how they would advise others to implement this. The listener will note down key words/phrases. They will then swap roles. By the end they will have a list of key words and phrases that they can incorporate into the manifesto. I will also suggest list poem sentence starters such as ‘I am…’ ‘We are…’ ‘Because of…’ ‘I will…’ ‘We will…’ | This exercise fosters listening and reciprocity between student’s. |
| 11.20am-11.30am | Short Comfort Break. | In this time I will lay out magazine and printed manifesto’s on the table. |
| 11.30am-11.40am | Share back some key words from the pair discussions. Write these down on the screen. | This allows the group to hear each other’s discussions, share ideas and find points of agreement/disagreement. |
| 11.40am-12.00pm | Students are invited to work in pairs to cut out words, phrases and images that connect to their ideas for the manifesto. They should create two sentences per pair. They will put these on their A4 paper. | Allows for creative responses, different ways in for those who don’t like to write, a tactile way to engage with the materials, autonomy over what is important to them |
| 12.00pm-12.10pm | Create a gallery of manifesto ideas. We will place them at the back of the classroom and invite the students to look at one another’s. They will each have post it notes that they must stick on the top 3 sentences that they would like included anonymously. We will then take the highest rated sentences and use these as the framework for our group manifesto. | Allows the group to see the wider cohorts responses and have autonomy over what they would like included, without favouring those who are confident debaters and verbal communicators. |
| 12.10pm-12.30pm | We will discuss the pro’s and con’s and the wording of our chosen sentences. We will ask if anything is missing and think about how they connect with one another. | Encourages the group to edit, to be bold and clear in their principles. It also allows students to step outside of atomised positionalities and think in intersectional ways. |
| 12.30pm-12.50pm | We will assemble the sentences onto our large A3 sheet, creating our group manifesto. This will then be scanned and printed for each student to have. | Creates a tactile and transportable resource that students can have access to on and off campus. |
| 12.50pm-1.00pm | We will discuss wrap up the session with a check out reflection. We will discuss how the session was, what they learnt and how the manifesto might be useful to them in their projects going forward. | Encourages reflective and supportive practices, and offers opportunities for student’s to give feedback on the workshop so that it can be adapted in the future to meet diverse needs. |
References
Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cardboard Citizens (no date) Cardboard Citizens. Available at: https://cardboardcitizens.org.uk/
Deepwell, K. (2022) 50 Feminist Art Manifestos. KT Press.
Duckie (2020) Dr Duckie – Homemade Mutant Hope Machines – The Talk, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT0gKR–d4I
Graeae | world-class theatre & training from D/deaf & disabled artists (no date) Graeae. Available at: https://graeae.org/
Lewisham and Southwark (2025) Lewisham and Southwark. Available at: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/lewishamandsouthwark/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22720222219&gbraid=0AAAAA_PDJFkno-tF9t_b4QpWKRsQOFxiD&gclid=CjwKCAjw7fzDBhA7EiwAOqJkh-NRQY3-TW7lNkSXGucmodNPML-ikR2U3cva7Jf4YMfdT4JNssLhkRoCpMIQAvD_BwE
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) The Communist Manifesto.
Queer ~ Art ~ Techno (@riposte.london) • Instagram photos and videos (2025) Instagram.com. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/riposte.london/?hl=en
Tate (1988) ‘The Advantages Of Being A Woman Artist’, Guerrilla Girls, 1988, Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-the-advantages-of-being-a-woman-artist-p78796
Varjack, P. (2021) Manifesto for arts in a crumbling arts economy – Fifth print run, Paula Varjack. Available at: https://paulavarjack.bigcartel.com/product/manifesto-for-arts-in-a-crumbling-arts-economy-fifth-print-run
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