Seren John-Wood is a final-year Arts and Sciences student, and the project leader of the brand new student-led volunteering project Disruptista. She came in to the office to talk to us about why she started the project, their goals, and the people she’s met already.
Disruptista is a platform for feminist activists from UCL to come together, talk about their experiences, and create a workshop scheme to bring to schools and deliver to state school students in small groups. We want to provide students with a toolkit for becoming activists and empowering themselves and their peers. The germ of the idea came from my reading of a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, as well as my volunteering in Argentina, and working with amazing feminist activists. I don’t want to so much teach students as give them a toolkit, and allow them to use their own experiences to become activists. We’re working with two schools this year, and planning a mini-festival at the end where students from the two schools can come together and we can evaluate the different projects they’ve made and the change they could be able to create together.
I was interested in Argentina in my year abroad by the feminist activism in action there. I was impressed by the young girls attending protests and talks at the ages of 8 or 9, who were asking thoughtful, engaged questions, and they were really engaged in a way I don’t see here, and I started asking questions about why. I felt there was a great difference in the access to information and encouragement to engage politically that state school pupils have in comparison with public school pupils.
We take an introductory, but intersectional, approach to feminism; it’s important to us that it is not just seen from white middle class perspectives, but also from a queer perspective, the perspective of women of colour…we want to look at gender, the body, different kinds of families. Our workshop leaders come from these different backgrounds, which is really important.
The youth activism movement is really exciting to me; seeing the climate strike school protests over the last few months in the UK was incredibly inspiring for me, and we want to try and capitalise on this energy. These conversations are already happening, but schools don’t often have the capacity to help facilitate these discussions, so we want to help that.
Setting up the project and meeting all our new volunteers has been amazing; I’ve been overwhelmed by the number of people who applied; we only have a few workshops running this year, so we’ve had to turn away quite a lot. We’ve met inspiring activists from all across the world through this; we’re working with human rights lawyers, journalists, athletes, Girl Guide leaders… Even if we can’t recruit everyone into the workshops for the time being, it’s been amazing to meet people with similar interests and to create these connections. It’s a strange feeling to be sitting in this room with all these incredible activists who have achieved so much.
I’m in my final year, but I would love to see this continue past my time at UCL. I’d love to see this expand across many different schools, and to create a community of activists across London! We want to give the children the ability to believe that they can enact change in their community, and how important and powerful that is.
Even though the project is still in its early stages, it definitely shows how an amazing idea can be turned into a fully-fledged project! If Seren's story has inspired you, you can take a look at our available opportunities volunteering with women's groups, or even take a look at starting your own student-led volunteering project to make a difference in your local community!