Critical, Ethical, and Creative Collaboration in Applied Theater Research

• In Event: Arts as Public Pedagogy: The Necessity of Engagement With Arts as Public Education

Abstract

Purpose

Towards Youth is a cycle of Verbatim plays exploring the concept of ‘radical hope’ among young people in our current times of global unrest. This paper offers an up-close look at a sustained academic-artist collaboration wherein the playwright has been embedded in a global, multi-sited, ethnographic research study, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary. Specifically, this paper explores the global fieldwork of the project and the movement between the artistic and research methodologies with youth, and the hybrid processes of scholarly and artistic writing, including reflections from both playwright and researcher on what constitutes a rigorous and sustainable scholarly-artistic collaborative practice.

Theoretical Framework

To foreground the social analysis of our creative experiences, we position the young people themselves as theory-builders (see Gallagher & Lortie 2007) of their 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 employ storytelling as a way to invite critical thinking and to imagine how to think the present moment otherwise.

Methods/Data Sources

The ethnographic work itself draws from five distinct socio-cultural and educational contexts: i) Lowest caste girls in Lucknow (India) learning how to transgress the limits imposed on them; ii) disenfranchised youth in Coventry (England) creating a counter-narrative to Brexit; iii) Taiwanese young people in Tainan (Taiwan) finding a way to marry tradition with modernity; iv) youth in Athens (Greece) searching for ways to thrive within economic and refugee crises; and v) Toronto youth making sense of their imagined ‘futures’, their dreams and possibilities, in a rapidly gentrifying and socio-economically polarized city.

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 collaborative, affective and relational landscapes and holds out hope for the ways large social changes might first enter at the level of popular discourse and artistic story, in order to later penetrate broader social/educational policies and practices.

Scholarly Significance

The global, multi-sited ethnography interrogates the connection between engaged youth and a thriving democracy by examining the aspirational ideals of democratic theories, the pragmatic conditions of classrooms, and a theatre pedagogy focused on collectively produced and digitally shared work. The ethnography, and the cycle of plays which has been created from it, offer a theoretically rich and empirically grounded account of the ways in which the concepts of hope and care function in the lives of young people today and in turn how participation in artistic practices and local-global social relations provoke forms of engaged citizenship worth considering in times of increasing youth social unrest.

Authors

• Kathleen M. Gallagher, OISE/University of Toronto

• Andrew Kushnir, Project: Humanity