Downstage Center: Centering Trans Ways of Knowing Through Theater as Research

• In Event: Centering Trans Studies in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Research-based theatre is an arts-based methodology that has amassed considerable literature across the social sciences and education in the past two decades (Belliveau & Lea, 2016). In research-based theatre, theatre-making becomes an inquiry process: for example, an artist-scholar might generate and analyze data by creating a playscript; or theatre audiences may participate in knowledge exchange events featuring dramatizations of study results. In this paper, I consider how scholars can continue expanding collaborative methodological possibilities in educational research by utilizing research-based theatre to center trans ways of knowing and how, in turn, trans ways of knowing can inform theatre-as-research practices.

Belliveau and Lea (2016) have proposed research-based theatre as an umbrella term for various theatre-as-research approaches, including documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, and ethnotheatre (Saldaña, 2011). These methodologies have emerged from disparate disciplines and have assorted epistemological and axiological positions; however, these approaches are all committed to collaborative knowledge construction through staged narratives and valuing theatre aesthetics alongside ethical research practices (Belliveau & Lea, 2016). Artist-scholars have suggested that theatre-as-research is particularly suited to centering forms of knowledge and perspectives previously excluded from educational research (Baer et al., 2019). Taking this assertion further, I contend that theatre aesthetics can uniquely center trans ways of knowing in research. Simultaneously, trans ways of knowing can push the boundaries of research-based theatre and what it means to embody trans narratives and characters on stage.

Trans ways of knowing refers to the expansive embodied knowledges of gender nonconforming communities that is both individual, hyperlocal, and more broadly collective (Steinbock, 2021), knowledges which leads to specific aesthetic understandings, such as genre agnosticism and nonlinearity (Baig et al., 2021). For example, a play written with a nonlinear story structure can consider how assumptions of linearity and stability fail to represent the messiness of numerous transitions in our lives (Malatino, 2019). As another example, embodying trans narratives on stage asks us to wrestle with passive versus active audience witnessing (Baer et al., 2019) and staging trans ways of knowing that challenge widely received assumptions with trans narratives by and for trans communities (Baig et al., 2021). To illustrate these examples, I will offer excerpts from a research-based play script I am writing that explores my experiences expressing my transness while a graduate student in counseling psychology. I will conclude the paper by making recommendations for trans-informed research-based theatre practices.

Author

• Christina Cook, University of British Columbia