Feel Like Me

‏“Feel like me” combines art, culture, and digital technology to encounter the massive hate speech experienced by the Yazidi people and encourage empathy and local support towards the minorities. The project involves developing and publicizing a free mobile Augmented Reality (AR) app that puts users into the position and feeling of Yazidi people. Upon downloading and opening the app, audio and textual instructions from the app encourage users to choose a feeling (developed and sourced from real Yazidi experience) to step into a hate speech experience from a Yazidi character. Upon selecting a feeling from the app, the front camera of the user’s phone augments (overlays) a Yazidi cultural symbol on the user. A voice narration from one of the Yazidi characters then asks the user to imagine being in his/her position as he/she recounts a hate speech he/she experienced or witnessed related to his/her role. This project is one of a series of interdisciplinary innovative projects that have been conceptualized, designed, developed, and evaluated by our CHO organization and the Nahrein Network partner (based at the University College London (UCL)) with a fund from the Minority Rights Groups International and CREID (based at the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex University) in the UK.