Khawaja Bilal Ahmed Lone

6.1 Deconstructing Identity through the Arts with Students in Urban Pakistan (Paper)

Khawaja Bilal Ahmed Lone – Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

Rabia Hasan – Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

Abstract:

Media access and consumption has grown exponentially over the past few decades, and young individuals are exposed to content from all over the world on an everyday basis, shaping their opinions and personalities in real time. This curriculum prototype for a workshop designed for Pakistani undergraduate students addresses the root of these influences, specifically in terms of power structures and symbolic violence, and largely covers and attempts to build upon the hybridity of culture. This curriculum enables students to reorient their learning experience and allows for relative experiences to be shared and create nexuses of intersectionality of ideas. The course encompasses four modules, namely Language, Gender, Class and Caste, and Spirituality, which relate to the most obvious aspects of identity which are informed by the values and norms imposed by British colonialism. The intention behind the creation of the curriculum is to enable students to reflect on their art and media consumption. The workshop intends to bridge the dissonant gap between an individual’s roots and contemporary practices, giving them the cognitive tools to form their individual and collective identity without the suppression that comes with social capital and global influence.