Monitoring and Evaluation of Transformative Creative Placemaking on University Campuses

Abstract

The study argues that the value of arts-based interventions in peacebuilding and development is yet to be fully realised due to a paucity of effective monitoring and evaluation models. In a context of growing attention to the benefits of university community engagement to social change, this article reports on how social practice creative placemaking embedded in engaged scholarship can be assessed for efficiency and its effectiveness in giving salience to silenced and ‘unusual’ voices in the pursuit of social justice. We propose an effective monitoring and evaluation model that shows the change development processes and can track and attribute causality.

Keywords

Engaged creative placemaking campus relations monitoring and evaluation arts for social change community engagement

Introduction

Over the past few years, universities in South Africa have gradually increased their university-community engagement efforts. The National Research Foundation has gone on to invest generously in university community engagement. This is for a good reason. The collaborative efforts of university students, scientists and community stakeholders are key to realising political, social and economic development, and are closely connected to the wealth, improvement of quality of life and place liveability (Orr, 2016). The diversity of teams from various domains teaming up on university community engagement adds more value to local innovation compared to homogenous players (Chimbari, 2016). Therefore, engaged scholarship has a transformative role in enlarging societal and academic imaginations by connecting local, historical and specialised knowledge to enable effective inclusion of marginalised and silenced voices (Mtawa et al., 2016).

In a context of growing attention to the benefits of university community engagement to social change (Esau, 2015) this article reports on how social practice creative placemaking embedded in engaged scholarship can be monitored and evaluated for its efficiency and its effectiveness in giving salience to silenced and ‘unusual’ voices in the pursuit of social justice. We should emphasise that the utility of social practice creative placemaking is not limited to university campuses. Social practice creative placemaking can be pursued in any community. However, this study focuses on university campuses with a view to contributing towards the debates on campus safety and improving the quality of experiences on university campuses.

The study proposes a monitoring and evaluation framework which can be used to track and assess the inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts of social practice creative placemaking in improving the quality of people’s experiences in higher education institutions and its key stakeholders. In addition, the framework identifies enablers and constraints for effective and efficient creative placemaking. The emphasis on monitoring and evaluation continues to drive developmental work both within the public sector and in higher education institutions (Govender, 2016; Ijeoma, 2014). Often, we have had an abnormality where monitoring and evaluation are viewed as separate from the project itself (Shah et al., 2006). We propose that the monitoring and evaluation framework should be designed at the planning and conception stages of the project. The framework provided in this article aids in planning an evaluation of arts for social change and community engagement work.

The proposed framework is based on a triadic relationship between social practice creative placemaking, university community engagement, and monitoring and evaluation. Social practice creative placemaking leverages the use of arts and creativity to create spaces of habitual contact where dialogue involving transformative learning and breaking out of social norms that predispose the community to under-development, violence and injustices (Courage, 2015). University community engagement, at times called engaged scholarship, emphasises the two-way relationship between academia and the community and how the mutuality of the relationship adds value for both partners in their pursuit of making a difference (Franz, 2016). The information or outcomes produced further enhance the academic disciplines, the dissemination of knowledge that is produced, and public good. Monitoring and evaluation come in to facilitate effective citizen/stakeholder engagement, de-bureaucratisation, and to promote responsiveness and evidence-based decision making and efficient and effective resource allocation (Kaul, 2017).

For the purposes of completeness, we will briefly engage in a discussion which explains South Africa’s troubled past and present and the novel exercise of social practice creative placemaking. That discussion is called in as an aid to come up with a contextualised monitoring and evaluation framework. South Africa finds itself ensnared by challenges whose roots emanate from the apartheid era (Bank et al., 2018). The university as a microcosm of the community and site for ideation should lead the way in embracing social practice creative placemaking.

Tensions in South Africa

Some of the challenges South Africa faces at present do not necessarily emanate from errors, omissions and commissions of today. Rather, they are a product of the past. The apartheid government created and legalised a hierarchised society of inequity. During the apartheid era, retaliatory violence was regarded as part of the liberation strategies that helped the oppressed to regain their freedom, and violence was justified, nurtured, even at the expense of those who suffered from it. Furthermore, human dignity and respect for other human beings was lost. The post-apartheid society appears to perpetuate the apartheid system (Bank et al., 2018; Buqa, 2015). As a result, the ramifications of the nation’s conflicted apartheid past persist in South African communities and universities. While South Africans achieved freedom without new values enshrined in the Constitution, the nation is now plagued by violence, namely murder, road rage, rape, aggression, anger, impatience, xenophobia and carnage, to mention but a few.

Universities also experience violence and damages to property despite transitioning from a racially divided education system to one that is perceived to be democratic (Norodien-Fataar, 2018; Pather, 2015). The triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment persist in the same racial patterns they followed during the apartheid era, both in communities and on university campuses. Although enrolment of previously disadvantaged groups of the nation’s population has tremendously improved, giving a veneer of hope, there are a lot of structural issues which need urgent attention. In particular, poor-quality secondary education and a lack of student readiness for university aggravate the social inequalities.

Universities are continuously faced with student violence despite improving on student centredness (Musengi and Ndofirepi, 2020). This could be due to the apartheid legacy discussed earlier, where aggrieved citizens often turn to violent protests as a means to ensure that their concerns are heard and addressed, and to challenging socio-economic circumstances (Miller and Pointer, 2019). Suggesting that there is no dialogue on campus should not be misconstrued as saying that there is absolutely no cordial communication on campus or that there are no opportunities (Walker and Mathebula, 2019). Indeed, there is communication which often leads to unsustainable piecemeal compromise resolutions. Our understanding of dialogue is framed through the lens of Isaacs (1993: 25) who defines dialogue ‘as a sustained, collective inquiry, into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that compose everyday experience. Yet the experience is of a special kind, the meaning is embodied in a community of people.’ Dialogue and social practice creative placemaking on campus environment set us up to explore our own thinking and behaviours together, thus moving to a shared understanding of problems and issues relevant to the university community (Querubin, 2011). For effective social practice creative placemaking, communication platforms should be monitored and evaluated.

Both the physical and social infrastructure at South African universities are significantly different from what most students experience at school and in their communities. According to Norodien-Fataar (2018:61), ‘(t)he historically unequal distributions of economic, social and cultural capital in the South African landscape have created disparities in the way students’ access and engage with the university’. The access is not always coupled to success (Scott, 2018: 2). The problems on campus are symptomatic of a bigger national crisis in which citizens feel alienated by their neighbourhood. Bank et al. (2018:1) believe that the ‘(t)he crisis of post-apartheid South Africa is centrally a crisis of placemaking. It is about the failure to undo apartheid place-making trajectories and the associated spatial, social and economic consequences of these, which reproduce poverty and inequality.’ Suffice to say that post-apartheid South Africa is failing to inspire and create a place reflective of present realities and aspirations.

It is, however, important to note that while challenges persist, some universities are already embracing placemaking and all its variants to improve campus life and student experiences within the vicinity of the campus. The University of Pretoria has challenged the exclusivity and isolation of universities through leading an urban renewal and social transformation project around its Hatfield campus (Hendricks and Flaherty, 2018). On the other hand, research has revealed a disconnect and neglect of placemaking-related activities at the University of Fort Hare, concluding it has no intrinsic commitment towards either the town or place-making (Thakrar, 2018). Therefore, physical and social infrastructure at South African universities requires a raft of changes to inspire civility, innovation and many other graduate attributes. One of the ways that change can be engineered is through social practice creative placemaking (Mutero and Govender, 2020). However, for social practice creative placemaking to successful there is a need to systematically monitor and evaluate the physical and social infarstructure for their efficacy and efficiency in improving the quality of life.

Challenges in social practice creative placemaking monitoring and evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation are a powerful transformative management tool that can assist higher education institutions to improve the manner in which tasks are undertaken to achieve the institutional goals. Mackay (2007: v) posits that strategic, tactical and operational decisions will be more relevant if they are evidence based. The essential actions needed to build a monitoring and evaluation system are to formulate outcomes and goals; select outcome indicators to monitor; gather baseline information; set specific targets and their completion dates; regularly collect data to monitor progress; and analyse and report the results. Implementing monitoring and evaluation systems as a technical intervention would limit social practice creative placemaking as a transformative tool. For a monitoring and evaluation system to be effective, it must be positioned as far more than a technical instrument for change where social contexts also need to be considered (Mackay, 2007).

Institutionalisation of a sustainable social practice creative placemaking monitoring and evaluation system requires that it is an integral part of the organisation’s vision, mission and targets. An institutionalised social practice creative placemaking monitoring and evaluation system should also operate as a function of every community engagement project manager (Ackron, 2008: 5). For an institutionalised monitoring and evaluation system to be sustainable it must be integral to any managed organisation or institutional environment and not an add-on activity. Also essential is to have a managed environment, since it is part of the management control function (Ackron, 2008: 13). For effective monitoring and evaluation systems to subsist, organisational culture imposed from the top down must embrace monitoring and evaluation as a key management activity. Furthermore, the locus of control for the oversight activities should at least be located at least one organisational level above that being monitored and evaluated.

In the context of a social practice creative placemaking monitoring and evaluation system, higher education institutions should develop and implement policies and procedures to ensure the inputs, outputs and outcomes of community engagement activities are achieved. Despite the benefits of an effective monitoring and evaluation system, barriers to institutionalising monitoring and evaluation systems in many institutions and programmes include a lack of demand and ownership, lack of a modern culture of fact-based accountability, lack of evaluation and financial management skills, and lack of feedback mechanisms into decision-making processes (Mackay, 1999: 4). According to Kusek and Rist (2001: 17), institutions are likely to experience the following three as the challenges when planning and implementing an monitoring and evaluation system: (a) lack of agreement on institutional or sector-wide outcomes due to a lack of political will, a weak central planning agency or a lack of capacity in planning and analysis; (b) lack of accurate and reliable information due to the lack of a skills base; and (c) poor administrative culture and function without the discipline of transparent financial systems.

These barriers could be more pronounced in higher education institutions as they experience pressures to remain financially sustainable and relevant to the communities they serve. Monitoring and evaluation provide a platform for open engagement, reflexive thoughts and just actions. Monitoring and evaluation presuppose an objective approach to continuously evaluating success, diagnosing the cause of the current challenges, and devising collaborative and creative solutions.

Monitoring and evaluation for social practice creative placemaking

This article pursues a thought experiment as a methodological approach due to the novelty of the study area. The conceptual proposal forwarded in this article was therefore drawn from analysis of extant literature on university community engagement and monitoring and evaluation as well as observations on campus life. In order to develop a framework for monitoring and evaluating social practice creative placemaking, there must first be a common understanding of social creative placemaking itself. Creative placemaking is a developing field of practice that deliberately pulls the power of the arts, culture and creativity to serve a community’s interest while driving a broader agenda for change, growth and transformation (Webb, 2014). The transformation of spaces through creative placemaking allows reasoning and affection to determine how people interact. Hoy (2017, vi) avers that creative placemaking is a platform through which we can build empathetic communities through its processes that are inclusive and culturally responsive. Creative placemaking, however, has the binary and linear notion of authorship and audience which implies that some citizens are spectators on issues that concern their own development (Kwon, 2004). As a result, this study prefers that universities and by extension all communities in pursuit of social cohesion and social justice should instead invest in social practice creative placemaking.

A social practice creative placemaking approach is not just focused sprucing up and giving the university’s physical infrastructure an expensive look. Rather, the focus is on achieving place liveability through ensuring fluid and reciprocal interaction between people and the physical infrastructure in ways that proffer sublime social living. The conversion of spaces into liveable places is premised on the view that concrete walls are living organisms which are flexible to human needs (Lefebvre, 1974). Social creative placemaking encourages the growth of civility, reciprocity, humanness and respect among people (Courage, 2015). For the purpose of this article, the following definition will be used as the frame of reference. According to Courage (2015: 3):

Social practice placemaking is an inclusive placemaking anchored in community-led development and uses social practice arts in place. The arts activities range from community storytelling, gardening and cooking to avant garde performances, they are located in everyday places – streets, housing estates, supermarkets.

Essentially, social practice creative placemaking is the intentional leveraging of the arts to shape the present and future of communities through community planning and development that is human-centric, comprehensive and locally informed. Social practice creative placemaking builds empathy, bridging social capital, and betters the economy of a polity (Courage, 2017). Broadly defined, art is a creative social construction which reflects the day-to-day lived experiences and realities of a people. The arts are expressive and imaginative displays that carry the beliefs of a culture. There is a wide corpus of arts styles which include music, fine arts, literature, drama, pottery, graffiti and more.

The need for social practice creative placemaking on South African universities campuses is premised on the realisation that campuses are fast turning into havens for crime. This is particularly the case with the so-called Black universities, which experience violent protests at the beginning of almost every semester (Fomunyam, 2017). We hold to a strong belief that besides the usual challenges such as affordability and accommodation, the university’s physical – and by extension social – infrastructure remains either imposingly domineering and exotic to the experiences of the student. There is a need to facilitate communal interaction and safety on university campuses. Currently, a university, like many other public spaces, allows people to be in constant movement with little connection between them (Amin, 2002: 79). Differently put, people’s physical proximity to each other on campus is not necessarily creating a platform for them to connect beyond a flimsy non-empathetic level. The urge is to nurture micro-publics, through creative placemaking, where empathy and interdependence thrive in order to engender intercultural understanding (Valentine, 2014: 85). Amin (2002) posits that ‘micro-publics of everyday social contact and encounter’ include, for example but not exhaustively, hobby interest clubs, communal gardens and youth centres. These activity and spatial sites create opportunity for ‘intercultural intermingling’ as they involve negotiations of the everyday that cross boundaries of difference – ‘banal transgressions’ as they are termed. In these microspaces of shared social space, people from diverse backgrounds are forced into an inter-cultural dialogue around the common project, a dialogue that involves negotiation and breaking out of habitual patterns of self and interaction, to learn new ways of being and relating and, in some instances, transcending cultural boundaries.

The idea behind the pursuit of social practice creative placemaking at university campuses is to create universities which are platforms for ideation, equity respect and equality where the personal, political and contextual meet. This can be achieved through a more comprehensive and transformative form of co-operation between academy and society which allows a seamless integration of the disparate cultures of home and college. According to Courage (2015: 3), in a social creative placemaking context people work ‘in equanimity that engenders deeper feelings of place attachment in the collaborative group, which in turn affects notions of civic participation and individual and community identification’. As a microcosm of the world, the campus experience should ideally have balanced influences from the local communities, the world and the unseen future. The issue of knowledge co-production is a key concern in higher education. In a presentation by Gibbons at the 2006 Council for Higher Education (CHE) conference, he identifies a metaphor called ‘agora’ that proposes a public space where ‘science and the public meet’ to provide the opportunity for production of ‘socially robust knowledge’ (CHE, 2007: 24). A perfect balance is likely to ensure that there is cross-fertilisation of ideas between communities and the university as well as improved research uptake.

Council on Higher Education (2007) ‘Service-learning in the curriculum: A resource for higher education institutions’.

Broadly, the steps to follow when setting up a creative placemaking project at a university include identifying partners, stakeholders, the physical space and curriculum development. It is important for the university to discuss and make a list of potential stakeholders catering for the individuals and various interest groups in society. Equally important is to identify the physical space where the creative placemaking initiatives will be implemented, as well as to have discussion and clarity on the activities that will be undertaken and their envisaged deliverables. Ideally, the pursuit of social justice through creative placemaking and engaged scholarship should follow the ‘Habermasian discursive democracy’ explained by Keet (2014: 851) as ‘a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens, coordinating their collective affairs through their common reason’. Below, we provide a diagrammatic representation of the protocol for creative placemaking (see Figure 1), which we emphasise is not static and prescriptive but a dynamic process.

Figure 1.

Monitoring and evaluation for social practice creative placemaking (arts for social change). Adapted from Govender (2011).

The effective implementation and sustainability of creative placemaking is a function of the attributes and characteristics of both the physical and social infrastructure, collaborative communal leadership, holding on to a collectively defined social cohesion, respecting plurality of knowledges and democracy, tolerance of ambiguity, and monitoring and evaluation.

While exploring creative placemaking in the pursuit of social justice is important, the efforts will not magically result in greater inclusion if we do not learn from and implement lessons from experience. There is a need to create a monitoring and evaluation system that helps primary stakeholders, implementing partners and project staff to learn together in order to improve their interventions on a continual basis. Investing in monitoring and evaluation allows for a brand of excellency thought of as both efficiency and effectiveness (Thurer et al., 2018). Monitoring and evaluation is defined by the OECD (Development Assistance Committee, 2002: 27) as a continuing function that uses systematic collection of data on specified indicators to provide managers and the main stakeholders of an ongoing development intervention with indications of the extent of progress and achievement of objectives and progress in the use of allocated funds.

There are many models for monitoring and evaluation which are informed by both different theories and contexts. An excellent evaluation framework is not necessarily the most sophisticated and visually appealing, but one that serves purpose both with ease and effectively. One of the widely used models is the logic framework. According to Dyehouse et al. (2009: 188), logic models represent a linear perspective of a system and have limited ability to identify multiple influences on particular change. Mathison (2005: 72) puts forward the idea that the logic models may not be applicable to complex adaptive systems because the reasons for and the nature of changes are emergent and cannot be attributed to the hierarchical relationships between the variables.

Creative placemaking is a mechanism within a complex adaptive system as it allows both individuation and socialisation of all stakeholders. To begin with, ‘(c)omplex adaptive systems are characterized by apparently complex behaviours that emerge as a result of often nonlinear spatio-temporal interactions among a large number of component systems at different levels of organization’ (Chan, 2001: 1). Secondly, individuation places emphasis on individuals finding themselves, but no individuation is possible without socialisation, and no socialisation is possible without individuation (Habermas, 1991: 26). This means that creative placemaking succeeds ‘where a community’s full development comes from people realising their individual potentials and working as collectives’ (Mutero, 2017: 167). To add to the problem, social practice creative placemaking operates in a fragile context of elaborate relationships, interactions and power dynamics which make the process of monitoring and evaluation challenging. The work itself is often reflective in nature and people often incorporate reflective activities into the delivery of the project.

The evaluation framework presented here realises that art is not a ‘magic bullet’ which summons desired change against any odds. Instead, the pursuit of place liveability, social cohesion and economic prosperity through creative placemaking follows a complex adaptive system. Arts-based approaches to social change designed to influence individual and collective behaviour and social change present specific challenges for evidence-building (Herrington, 2016). One such difficulty is in attributing causality. If left unattended or improperly handled, attribution of causality has potential to ruin the relationship between collaborators as well as to adversely affect continuity and scaleability of creative placemaking and community engagement. Herrington (2016: 6) argues that social and behaviour change activities have always presented challenges for development practitioners, as it can be difficult to assess whether change has in fact taken place, how the change has been produced, whether change is influenced in the most effective way, and what the unintended consequences of their actions around behaviour might be.

The framework we propose here does not set predetermined outcomes which are determined by inputs; it recognises that the agency and shape of participatory arts interventions, just like peacebuilding, are premised on complex wilful human interaction. As posited by Hunter and Page (2014: 128), ‘(p)redetermining the change that is most contextually relevant and needed in a multi-layered peacebuilding process is problematic. Strict goal orientation can limit the generative capacities of building in peacebuilding (and making in art).’ Therefore, we propose that monitoring and evaluation for creative placemaking should be done using a model which combines constructs from the following three models: the Systemic Performance Analysis model (SPAM) developed by Govender (2011); Herrington’s (2016) 3R Framework; and Hunter and Page’s (2014) models.

Our motivation to combine learnings from the three models is based on a need to come up with a model which adapts to change and can trace causality. When using the SPAM model, the data should be collected from key stakeholders who include university leaders in charge of community engagement and their implementing staff, community members, students and local authority staff. SPAM is set up to allow a continuous learning and improvement process where data and information collected at each stage is utilised to monitor and evaluate both the relationships and mechanical processes during a social practice creative placemaking programme.

SPAM realises that social practice creative placemaking is a culture; therefore, it has a life, it can morph, mutate at any given point either to serve the interest of people and their environment or as dictated by environmental changes. Consequently, the chain from original inputs to impact might also change. SPAM offers a flexible model malleable to any changes at any stage. Govender (2011: 298) posits that ‘SPAM considers each component of the transformation process as a subsystem that is interdependent and interrelated to other subsystems that also interact with the environment.’ In Figure 1, we present a diagram of the model.

Within the social practice creative placemaking space, one needs to monitor and evaluate both objective and subjective key performance areas. The literature presents a number of alternatives to monitoring and evaluation issues into resource availability and utilisation (Lemarleni et al., 2017; McWilliams and Siddabathuni, 2017). However, monitoring and evaluation of qualitative key performance areas which include perceptions, feelings and justice may pose a challenge. This could be attributed to the operations of social practice creative placemaking in that it is complex and dynamic.

The SPAM above introduces the components of the systemic assessment framework, namely, the inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts as subsystems that are interrelated and interdependent. However, unlike the logic model which presupposes a linear causal effect which is unrealistic in a complex system, our use of SPAM follows an eclectic model built on constructs from two arts for social change evaluation models. First, every stage is framed using Hunter and Page’s (2014: 130) four key questions of evidence gathering and analysis:

1. What was intended?

2. What emerged?

3. What insights were gained?

4. What happened next?

At every stage, as indicated in the model above, SPAM is built to monitor and evaluate deviation and to inform subsequent steps. An awareness of the fact that the subsystems are interrelated inevitably leads to an in-depth assessment of every stage if we are to make informed decisions.

Our measurement of outputs in arts for social change in this model draws parallels with Herrington’s (2016: 8) 3R Framework which focuses on the Reach. According to Herrington (2016: 8), Reach looks at ‘the who’; whether the performances are being presented to a suitable audience, and who is engaging in the performances. An assessment of Reach using this model should also take note of the gender and age of the people reached. This information contributes to determining whether or not critical mass or key leverage points are being reached in order to influence social norms. Reach is assessed by gathering data on demographics, using a ‘key people’ versus ‘more people’ approach. The Arts for Social Change Evaluation Model is built with an understanding that reaching key people or huge audiences is not enough just on its own. The urge is to achieve inclusivity and diversity. This is important because in some communities we run the risk of performing for or targeting the converted or people who are not really in need of the intervention.

There is an inherent need to look at both the outcome and impact; that is, to question, among many other questions, what happened as a result of the creative placemaking processes and activities. The creative placemaking intervention should resonate with the expectations and challenges of the target community. Resonance is an early indication of the project’s impact. Essentially the difference between response (outcome) and response (impact) is the time at which we measure and sustainability. Response comes immediately after or even during implementation, while impact is long term. Herrington (2016: 8) opines that ‘(r)esonance digs into the immediate interpretations and reactions of participants, focusing primarily on individual and interpersonal levels of change. Resonance is also closely tied to Process and Quality.’

One way to evaluate the resonance of creative placemaking in the pursuit of social justice is whether the audience identifies with both the content and production process. Chiefly, besides looking at other things such as the beauty and meaning, we should assess on whether the intervention facilitated personal and interpersonal change in the university community or whatever context we are working on. For instance, for a musical performance or art installation the community should give their own contextual interpretation of the songs or art respectively. This will give an indication of resonance. It is also important to look at the production process (teambuilding) aesthetics or quality of the artistic production as well as the content. Using the model presented here, it is possible to track internal changes within individuals, interpersonal changes amongst peers, changes in dynamics and relationships amongst social groups at the community level, and broader institutional and political changes.

In this model, response is framed as the goal of the project or the change in culture that comes as a result of the intervention. Therefore, at the response or impact level we focus on whether all the process we went through has increased capacity and enabled the target community to act. In the context of the university we could be looking at percentage of knowledge sharing, exchange and, most importantly, use. Primarily, the evaluation of response tracks the efficiency of the process used to achieve change as well as the effectiveness of the intervention.

Conclusion

This study argues that the value of arts-based interventions in peacebuilding and socio-economic development is yet to be fully realised. We argue for pursuing social justice and making universities liveable places through disruptive creative placemaking. We hope that this article will make a case for accelerating scaling up the pursuit of social justice through social practice creative placemaking in South Africa’s university campuses. Importantly, the study contributes to the limited body of knowledge on how to ascertain whether change has in fact taken place, how the change has been produced, whether change is influenced in the most effective way, and what the unintended consequences of interventions might be. The framework allows an evaluation which investigates how universities, non-governmental organisations, local authorities, the community and other stakeholders coming from diverse backgrounds work together to achieve common goals. The evaluation model looks at partners as holonic, allowing a continuous assessment of the (in)dependence of entities in a web relationship (Strom, 2011). The proposed social practice creative placemaking model presents a holistic and systematic approach to transformative justice with key stakeholders operating in open and collaborative space.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (104860).

ORCID iDs

Innocent Tinashe Mutero

Ivan Gunass Govender

Author biographies

Innocent Tinashe Mutero is an Applied Ethnomusicologist with research interests in community engagement and arts for social change.

Ivan Gunass Govender is a Senior Lecturer at the Durban University of Technology. He researches on monitoring and evaluation and university community engagement.

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