The main goal of Lab 4 Human Rights is to counter forms of discrimination through effective human rights education, starting from four pillars: anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-abilism, and anti-homolesbobitransphobia. The main educational medium of transmission of human rights, have been the arts, especially the performing arts. The goal of this project was to develop a different way of doing human rights education, one that would focus on bodies in their expressive-relational potential, thus creating more effective pathways for countering bullying and all forms of discrimination both within school and training contexts and in social and family contexts. That is why we involved teachers, educators, trainers, youth workers and addressed our workshops and manual to them. Indeed, it is through the educating community that we want to reach more young people and collectively build a society without barriers and discrimination.
Our project aims to provide trainers, youth workers and educators with an experiential and inclusive methodology based on the performing arts as a means of educating about human rights. What we found is that in Italy, Poland and Romania there is a lack of effective tools for raising awareness of issues such as gender equality, social inclusion, anti-discrimination and anti-bullying. Sexist, racist, ableist and homolesbobitransphobic behaviors are in fact still widespread, and to counter them the educational community and teachers have key roles to play. The need that we caught and intercepted, was the need for alternative tools to classical lecture classes to educate young people about human rights. Therefore, we created workshops and a manual that could be concrete tools through which to engage and interest young people in countering discrimination.