What Does It Mean to Care?

• In Event: School Engagement, Artistic Practice, and Democracy

Abstract

Objectives: Canadian schools for military and first responders confront rising rates of PTSD and suicide amongst their populations. This presentation evokes the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to articulate a pedagogy of exposure, approach, and willingness to engage that nurtures resilience in the lives of young military cadets and first responders whose work exposes them to trauma.
Theoretical Framework: Drawing on anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography and brain science, the artist/scholar reads Why Theatre Matters’ question “How is youth lived?” through Bourdieu’s focus (in Parr 2010) on tacit knowledge, embodied history and what it means to know the world through sensing bodies. The precariousness of the other (Levinas) is exposed in what Malabou calls a “paralysis of touching” that is the contemporary landscape of “the new wounded”. In this context, military students are invisible to the public - who often valorize or demonize them (Dixon and Howard, 2012). The dynamic facility of the mimetic to sustain paradox - loss and contact, recognition of the other and assertion of self – together with bodies sharing space and respectful attention, encourage resilience, difficult friendship, and what Avni calls “managing the heart”.
Data: The matter of caring is explored in the context of a 2012 arts residency with undergraduate cadets at the Royal Military College of Canada and resilience training workshops with first responders (police, military, fire fighters, dispatchers) in Alberta and Ontario.
Results: Drama invites youth to be foolish witnesses, developing healthy brains and greater capacity for compassion and connection. Intersubjectively, participant and witness become changed neurologically and psychologically. Testimonials from participants and research suggests drama has the potential for transforming men’s lives not in the sense of triumph, but of moving through shame and being allowed to become a new person, whose self is not continually referencing what researchers call ‘heroic masculinity’.
Significance: This research has applications to how drama engages narratives in the classroom, where what is at stake, after Deborah Britzman, is the project of reading and love that requires risking the self. As Cyrulnik says, resilience “should not only be sought inside the person, nor within his environment, but between the two, because it ceaselessly weaves processes of intimate becoming into processes of social becoming.” (in Malabou, 2012).

Author

• Julie Salverson, Queen's University