Critical Plays: Embodied Research for Social Change

• In Event: 31.078 - Social Fictions: Creative Research for Social Change

Abstract

Objectives
My book locates itself in an educational context through its setting in a fictional classroom and its central action as the teaching of an arts-based methods class. However, this paper speaks more broadly to the principles of ABR, addressing the opportunities and challenges encountered by those who create it and those who reference it in their own work. While this play is set in a classroom, its characters provide a conduit to a range of social research contexts. These characters, coming from all walks of life and academic disciplines, bring those experiences into their own growing understanding of ABR, through which fundamental questions of ABR and its many contexts can be considered or tested.

Theoretical Framework
The paper draws on performance studies scholarship, in particular the performance ethnography scholarship of Madison (2010) and Spry (2001). What makes this text research and not just a play? Artists have long asserted our own systematic approaches to our work as equally rigorous, but including an affective dimension only strengthens its worth as new knowledge. Artists have always aimed to reflect, critique and extend society’s understandings of ourselves as individuals and collectivities. Similarly, so have qualitative researchers. If we consider that the writing of the play is an act of inquiry (playwriting as method) then we can begin to see embodiment itself as methodology, a system of thought and set of tools.

Modes of Inquiry
Spry (2001) has articulated the ways in which autoethnography and other performance ethnography “originates as a discourse from the margins of dominant culture” (p. 710). Our co-construction of meanings emerged, just as it does in Boal’s Image Theatre work (1995), through a version of ‘silent negotiation,’ with the artwork as the site of the embodied discourse, reflecting the innovation of this qualitative method.

Data sources
This play is based on interviews, observations, community consultation and systematic self-study and co-author interviews, constructing a qualitative methods classroom ethnography, and interwoven with memory, disciplinary texts, popular culture and teaching artefacts.

Results and/or conclusions
Qualitative research embodied through performance texts allows multi-strand explorations and outcomes, as does this one. Critical Plays allows an interweaving of qualitative, creative, queer and gender theories as evolving lenses through these characters, thus offering researchers and students empathic access. Such embodiment of interdisciplinarity is one important outcome of innovative research like Critical Plays that will be explicitly addressed in this presentation. Performing a scene from the play offers a performative snapshot of an award-winning and innovative book series.

Scholarly significance of the work
This style of presentation articulates both the scholarship and need for multiplicity of voices and subjectivities in the work of arts-based and arts informed research. Methodological, epistemological and formal diversities are expanding the field in increasingly diverse and dynamic ways, and playwriting and other performative forms contribute importantly to the scholarly robustness of arts-based research.

Author

• Anne M Harris, Monash University