The Allegory on Racism Manifestation project aims to represent the hidden psychological effects when racial or gender discrimination, or racism are internalised. We seek to ensure that placing racial or gender discrimination, and racism in the human rights contexts of European societies takes a new path in public discourse: creating spaces for racialised and LGBTIQ youth to talk about their lived experiences. But we are not talking about discriminatory and racist incidents; we are rather shifting our focus to the psychological effects of such incidents on the mental health wellbeing of racialised youth.

Race and gender are powerful factors of stratification, which produce complex forms of social, racial, gender exclusion and inequalities. Putting Whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom of racial ranking in Europe. To date, academic and public discourse debates on the role of adverse experiences of the intersectionality of racial and gender discrimination; racism; gender-based violence; and internalised racism as a source of increased mental health risk factors among racialised, LGBTIQ individuals remain largely neglected and untested in Europe. And therefore, our motivation lies in using research and literacy-based allegories as narratives and visual stories to convey this complex, neglected, difficult look on racism.

To achieve that, we aim to: (1). Conduct narrative research with 120 racialised youth participants to identify how the intersectionality of contemporary forms of racism affect youth’s mental health. (2). Develop a manual on literacy about the manifestation of racism and gender-based violence. (3). Develop a manual on literacy on the manifestation of internalised racism. (4). Develop interactive workshops where art is used to both initiate conversations on and address the contemporary forms of racism. And (5). Use digital experiential storytelling and theatre of testimony tools to initiate conversations on and to address the impact of internalised racism on the mental health and well-being of racialised and LGBTIQ youth.