Relational Aesthetics and Metaphor as Interventions in a Post-Truth World

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-4 - Truth, Trust, and Story: Practice, Pedagogy, and Power in the Lives of Youth

Abstract

OBJECTIVES OR PURPOSES:
This paper will highlight how participants in Athens and Tainan engaged their desires to move beyond “the single story.” For Athens, this emerged from nationalistic narratives that had framed the Mediterranean refugee crisis that was unfolding at the time of the research. In Tainan, the struggle to adhere to the “single script” of a young person beholden to familial duties, in the midst of a rapidly globalizing Taiwan, resulted in participants seeking out for themselves alternative truths. The following question emerges: how can aesthetic processes of making drama facilitate truth-seeking in a post-truth world?

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
This paper draws from what Gallagher and Jacobson (2018) highlight as “an assemblage of reals” (p. 40) in devising drama. Here, it is through non-realistic, imaginative storytelling, that a multiplicity of truths is offered. Such aesthetic choices centre non-dominant ways of knowing. Moreover, they advance what Thompson (2015) calls “an aesthetics of care,” an ethic driven by sensory and affective encounters that prioritizes relationships above all (p. 437). One of the ways in which caring aesthetics arises is through metaphor, which, according to Gallagher (2016) “affords multiple entry points, invites strangers in, provokes analogous and critical thinking, and can command formidable affects” (p. 80). It is through metaphor that drama contains opposing and contradictory truths in relational ways.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
This paper will draw on the data collected during the research team’s visits to Tainan and Athens in November 2016, and March 2017, respectively. In both sites, devising – the process by which a script for drama is developed through collective efforts – will inform analysis. For Athens, the paper will focus on 12 hours of devising carried out by the PI, local collaborators and students. Supplementing these data is that from 5 focus group interviews with 22 youth and 5 individual interviews with collaborators and informants. Tainan analysis will examine 12 hours of rehearsal process across 3 devised plays, along with data from 3 focus group interviews with 46 students, and 3 individual interviews with educators and administrators. Data sources take the form of digital video, images and performance artefacts.

RESULTS/FINDINGS:
The drama invited participants to engage with multiple truths in a single space. Imaginative stories, generated through relational processes of devising, became aesthetic interruptions of master narratives proliferated by media, state and tradition. For the participants, it became evident that the metaphor-laden and fictional “reals” of the drama offered more authentic ways of witnessing the world than those offered by the dominant “truths” of their post-truth contexts.

SCHOLARLY SIGNIFICANCE:
In a digitally-saturated landscape dominated by algorithmically-driven social media, information is filtered to exclude contradiction. This paper demonstrates that drama pedagogy can bring together multiple perspectives in imaginative and complex ways. Here, ironically, it is fiction that functions as a powerful tool to bring together a myriad of truths. This harnessing of different perspectives, amid the myopia of the post-truth paradigm, is a crucial one for scholars and teachers seeking ways to develop informed civic engagement in educational contexts.

Author

• Christine Balt, University of Toronto