Using Theater to Explore Sociospatial Inequality With Shelter Youth

• In Event: 46.025 - Creative and Critical Justice: New Approaches to Methodological Border-Crossing

Abstract

Purpose
Seeking Shelter (a pseudonym) provides shelter and a variety of programs to alleviate the multiple challenges faced by homeless youth. In this inner suburban community, 25% of families live below the poverty line and the school drop-out rate is 50%. As researchers, we collaborated with a socially-engaged theatre company - Project: Humanity - to develop a more nuanced understanding of the consequences of income polarization and localized poverty for youth. This presentation will explore how we used theatre methodologically to nuance our understandings of their experiences of spatialized urban inequality.

Theoretical Framework
To keep the social analysis of our creative experiences in the foreground, we aimed to position the young people themselves as theory-builders (see Gallagher and Lortie 2007) of their own lives and key players in the task of social analysis. Rather than taking experience and stories as the grounds for ethnographic authority, storytelling as method with young people is often consensus-resisting and dialectical. Storytelling used in this way positions the story not as a place at which to arrive, but as a place from which to begin inquiry. Using Hannah Arendt's (1979) notion of 'thinking without a banister', we used storytelling as a way to invite critical thinking and to imagine how to think the present moment otherwise.

Methods
The interpretive work of understanding the embodied languages of theatre enlivens research for both researchers and participants. The encounter is dialogic, sensual, and imagistic. Our thinking-in-community approach exercised the imagination and stimulated a plurality of the mind as we worked with their 'real stories'. Using improvisation to produce data with the youth, we pressed into service the Lacanian idea of the 'real' as beyond the symbolic and beyond language.

Data Sources
The research is built from verbatim theatre built from life stories and interviews. This presentation will focus particularly on the improvisation work we did, as we examined together the youth's relationships with the Toronto police force.

Results
Rather than argue for or against the power of theatre to make social change, the work examined in this paper places value on the affective landscape and holds out hope for the ways in which large social changes might first enter at the level of popular discourse in order to later penetrate broader social policies and practices. Thompson (2009) insists that what reaches us through the senses, in theatre, is foundational to the politics of performance, eschewing the idea that the affective realm repudiates political action.

Scholarly significance
McCreary (2001) resists the idea of 'giving voice', ubiquitous in youth research, in favour of what she calls 'granting an audience' (p. 332). Our work with homeless youth has allowed us to consider the ways in which homeless youth become 'audience' to their own stories, the stories of their peers, and we, in turn, became audience to their stories and their critiques of our research narrative. Embodying ideas through theatre in our research allowed us to consider the vital relationship between space, social location, and power.

Author

• Kathleen M. Gallagher, OISE/University of Toronto