Resonance in Rupture: Co-Creating Narrative Peace thought Feminist Participatory Art Mediation with Generative AI

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 1
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Innovative Pedagogies for Peacebuilding and Global Citizenship: Comparative and Participatory Perspectives

Proposal

1.Background and Problem
The root of social conflict often lies in the irreconcilability of differences—collisions among cultural, temporal, and social standpoints that cannot be settled by simple assimilation (Mouffe, 2000; Hall, 1997). Peace, therefore, is not static harmony but a process grounded in negotiation, dialogue, and mutual recognition of difference (Galtung, 1969; Lederach, 1997). Within this frame, art mediation functions as a soft yet critical practice that converts sites of tension into spaces for encounter, reflection, and co-creation (Li, 2021; Henschel, 2020). This study focuses on Chinese-speaking migrant women in Germany and Austria who face temporal dissonance between moralized life-course scripts and Europe’s efficiency-oriented rhythms, alongside credential non-recognition, language/administrative barriers, racialized representation, and implicit exclusion—all of which marginalize self-expression and public visibility.
2.Collaboration
In partnership with cultural organizations in Germany, the project hosted seven AI-assisted workshops in community venues across Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna, involving 40+ Chinese-speaking migrant women. We positioned generative AI as a low-threshold creative tool to articulate migration struggles and negotiate cultural difference, testing whether participatory art can shift AI from a potentially exclusionary technology to an empowering narrative medium.
3.Method
Anchored in a constructivist paradigm and Participatory Action Research (PAR), we conducted AI-supported workshops. Participants used text-to-image platforms Krea.ai and Kelin AI to visualize emotional timelines, cross-cultural contradictions, and alternative temporalities. Methods followed visual- and narrative-oriented qualitative approaches (Pink, 2013; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000):
•Red-thread life mapping (materializing temporal narratives for collective comparison)
•Prompt-logic cards (a localized adaptation of Task/Format/Voice/Context, after Bowen & Watson, 2024)
•Collective reflection (critical reading of algorithmic outputs and re-prompting).
Data included generated images, field documentation, and transcripts; analysis used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2012), with attention to how algorithmic bias structures representation.
4.Significance
4.1 Prompt literacy as critical agency. The structured prompt cards markedly enhanced expression of complex, nonlinear, affect-rich narratives, improving alignment between intent and AI outputs, cultivating critical AI literacy, and enabling tactical agency within opaque systems.
4.2 Collective image-making as cultural mediation. Co-created imagery fostered “resonance in rupture,” translating personal stories into discussable, negotiable public texts and operating as a cultural mediator without erasing difference.
The project advances a peace-building pathway grounded in art education/mediation: at the nexus of technological critique and cultural dialogue, co-creation becomes a means to negotiate and recognize difference. Theoretically, it bridges feminist AI, the politics of time, and participatory art mediation, evidencing peace as process; practically, it offers a replicable toolchain adaptable to other migrant/minority contexts to cultivate narrative peace, public visibility, and belonging.

Author

• SIFAN PAN