Countering Hate Speech Through Video Art

A UNESCO-Awarded Initiative
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"Gift Chikere, a poet and dancer from Nigeria, delivered a powerful speech, emphasizing the “potential of art to influence and change minds towards a better use of social media”. Her project “Disagree in Peace” unites artists from different ethnic backgrounds to educate, inform and create awareness about the depth of hate speech and disinformation spreading across social media spaces."

- UNESCO, 16 November, 2023

 

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​The Video

​Notes
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Description

• The video opens with dynamic visuals of urban youth across different Nigerian ethnic backgrounds — dancing, speaking, creating art — establishing a vibrant cultural milieu.
• Gift Chikere (poet & dancer) appears in voice-over and visible performance, introducing the project’s aim: using art (poetry, dance, film) to challenge the spread of hate speech, disinformation, and divisive digital content. UNESCO+1
• Interspersed are scenes of social media feeds, fragmented interactions, hostile comments, and symbolic imagery of “breathing together” (shared rhythms of dance, breath, collaborative art) that contrast with images of isolation, conflict, and mis-information.
• The tone is hopeful: the video pivots from showcasing the problem to illustrating a pathway of relational healing. Artists from various ethnic groups come together in collaborative performance—sharing space, movement, voice—to model how disagreement need not descend into hostility, but can instead become mutual recognition.
• The project’s title, “Disagree in Peace,” frames its core message: difference is inevitable; what matters is the quality of disagreement — one grounded in respect, shared humanity, and creativity.
• Near the end, Chikere addresses the audience directly: art and media literacy are tools for transformation in digital spaces. She emphasizes how youth can re-imagine digital culture, reclaiming narrative, building community, and resisting hate. UNESCO
• The video closes with a call-to-action: join the movement, create your own “disagreement in peace”, amplify positive media, and deepen empathy across boundaries of identity.

Significance & Award Recognition

• The project was one of four winners at UNESCO’s Youth Hackathon under the theme “Youth powering media and information literacy in digital spaces”. UNESCO
• UNESCO highlighted that the initiative “unites artists from different ethnic backgrounds to educate, inform and create awareness about the depth of hate speech and disinformation spreading across social media spaces.” UNESCO
• By earning this award, the video amplifies the notion that creative and relational modalities (art, performance, shared experience) can be powerful strategies in combating divisive digital discourse and fostering pluralist peace.

More from Gift Chikere
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Listen to Gift Chikere's music on Sound Cloud: Click here.

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Disagree in Peace & 
​Process Philosophy

The Disagree in Peace video embodies the heart of process philosophy by showing that life is not made of static positions but of ongoing relationships, feelings, and creative responses. The film’s form and message both express this.

1. Creativity as the Heart of Reality

Whitehead famously says that “the creative advance into novelty” is the essence of the universe.

In the video, disagreement is not a dead-end. It becomes a creative act—transformed through dance, poetry, and collaboration. The youth use art not to deny conflict but to re-imagine it, turning hostility into shared rhythm and new possibility.

2. Relationality over Isolation

Process philosophy insists that every moment is shaped by relationships--“the many become one.”

The video shows this vividly: individuals from different ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds come together in shared movement and shared breath. Their art becomes a visual metaphor for interconnected becoming—each performer influenced by the others, each contributing something new.

3. Feeling as Fundamental

For Whitehead, experience is bodily, emotional, and shared.

The video uses rhythm, gesture, facial expression, and embodied presence to reveal that disagreement is not only an intellectual matter but a felt one. The performers display empathy, tension, sorrow, and hope—inviting viewers to feel with them. This foregrounding of emotion is thoroughly Whiteheadian.

4. Conflict as Opportunity for Transformation
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In process thought, contrasts—differences that could cause tension—are not problems to be eliminated but ingredients for richer harmony.

The video stages cultural and ideological contrasts, then transforms them into collaborative art. Difference becomes fuel for beauty, not a threat. This is what Whitehead calls “harmonious intensity.”

5. Media as a Field of Co-Creation

Process philosophy recognizes that every environment—physical or digital—is a web of influences shaping who we become.

The video responds to the digital spread of hate and misinformation by offering an alternative digital ecology: a space of responsiveness rather than reactivity, community rather than fragmentation, peace rather than polarization. It shows youth actively reshaping the media world rather than being passively shaped by it.

6. Peace as a Process, Not a Product

Peace is not presented as a fixed achievement but as an ongoing practice of listening, openness, and creative response.

Every gesture of the performers illustrates what Whitehead might call “the power to be affected”—the receptive side of life.

And every collaborative movement illustrates “the power to affect”—the expressive side.
Peace, in this vision, is concrescence in action: many feelings gathered into a new unity that becomes a gift to the world.

7. The Call Toward the Best Possible Response (the Divine Lure)

There is an unmistakable sense of lure—a pull toward a better way of relating.
The youth are portrayed not merely resisting hate but responding to a deeper call: the invitation to build a community marked by compassion, creativity, and possibility.
This is the process vision of the sacred: a gentle but insistent pull toward beauty.