Clowns Without Borders Toolbox
UTNS 5144 Blog Post #3
The timeline outlines the global progress towards legitimizing children’s rights with the more recent rise of Clowns Without Borders (CWB) and intersecting global conflict/strife. Set in the background is the map of those who ratified the Convention at its inception in 1989. To date, the U.S. is the only country not to have ratified, though the Convention remains the most widely embraced “international instrument,” per UNICEF.
The “Stigma” collage reflects not the stigma of mental health, but the stigma of the intervention of CWB itself. Placing the viewer in the point of view of Western hegemony on the left side of the graphic, we understand perceptions of clowns as scary or lesser artforms. We also view the world through the lens of news, with an outsized emphasis on Eurocentrism. Furthermore, the central clown standing upon the base level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (a point that CWB wants to emphasize in conjunction with the UN Right to Play) is obscured from the Westerner’s point of view. They see the clown positioned towards the top of the pyramid, viewing entertainment as luxury as they themselves take it for granted. Our own intervention will seek to reframe and communicate the notion that play and joy are a fundamental right of children around the world.
I found 6 charities/NGOs who do work in the space of children’s joy and play. I placed them approximately where they are located and the arrows show the extents of their work, ranging from the scale of the country to the continent to the world.
My last piece brings us back to CWB specifically. It’s important to center their work in this toolbox to remind us of the power of their interventions as is. In lieu of actual interviews, I decided to highlight CWB appearances in media and pull relevant images and text from regions around the world. Though the art of clowning may differ across the world, and the traumas faced by communities differ, there are universal ways that humor can unite us. After all, as Naomi from CWB says, everybody likes a fart joke.
