Abstract
This study explores the emotional response and artistic expressions by students from IDP camps and town students, who live in their stable homes, in the conflict-affected Pekon township of Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. This study describes how living conditions, life experiences, and trauma can be depicted in the artistic expressions of children by evaluating 84 middle-school-aged children's drawings that were part of two separate experiments: a free drawing experiment and an experiment using emotional cues. The findings of the first experiment showed that both groups primarily used colors related to negative feelings, which was representative, in their case, of difficult living situations. IDP children reflected themes of displacement and resilience, while town students expressed peace, beauty, and frustrations against the military junta. In the second experiment, when students were asked to draw based on their emotions, displaced students demonstrated resilience and optimism, showing a strong desire to return home while emphasizing conflict's impact. Town students criticized the military junta and conveyed emotions like hope and frustration, due to their recent experiences with conflict, over the need for peace. This study emphasizes the therapeutic potential of art, the differing emotional expressions of these groups, the influence of instructions on their artwork and highlights the importance of understanding cultural contexts to design effective art-based interventions that help children handle emotional challenges in conflict zones.
Author Information
Lugyi No, University of Massachusetts Lowell, United States
Paper Information
Conference: ECAH2024
Stream: Arts - Teaching and Learning the Arts
This paper is part of the ECAH2024 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
No L. (2024) Shades of Emotion: Art as Expression Among Conflict-Affected Students ISSN: 2188-1111 – The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2024: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 11-20) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2024.2
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2024.2
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