Methodological Resilience Through Drama as Ethnographic Practice

• In Event: Applied Theater as Methodological Intervention in Qualitative Research With Urban Youth

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:

Within the larger project on urban inequality and socio-spatial polarization across the 6 Canadian metropolitan areas, Toronto has been closely studied by a local team initially primarily using quantitative data to examine neighbourhood changes and trends. Once local changes and trends were more clearly understood, qualitative case studies were initiated to look more closely at specific problems, such as youth homelessness – the focus of this study. This particular project collaborated with an acclaimed socially-engaged theatre company to deliver drama workshops over 16 weeks at a youth shelter located in a socio-economically disadvantaged Toronto neighbourhood.

The objective of this paper is to ask how the concept of resilience can be relevant to theatre methodology used in research with shelter-dwelling youth. This paper argues that the fusion of drama and traditional qualitative methods opened resilient methodological space while also resulting in resilient social relations between the youth and the artistic and research teams.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

When resilience is conceptualized as not something that any one person or group possesses but as a force created in relation – it offers much to qualitative research. This paper counters Brad Evans’ (in conversation with Tyler Pollard, 2014) conceptualization of resilience and resistance as oppositional to one another, suggesting instead that both are necessary. Natalie Bolzan and Fran Gale’s (2012) concept of resilience as social relation actually invites resistance. This paper expands this idea of resilience into the application of theatre methodologies in qualitative research.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:

Through a mapping of the various methods used (For an example of methodological mapping, see Appendix A), this paper will use an analysis of drama – improvisation, value lines, discussion and interviews – to show how a resilience was created among these methods, producing data that enhanced understanding of youth living in this Toronto shelter. This paper will first clarify how the term ‘resilience’ can be methodologically relevant to qualitative research. Then, the paper will shift its focus on to the methodological challenges and affordances of resilient relations drawing from this particular site and research project.

RESULTS:

The paper argues that the use of drama specifically facilitated a methodological resilience in our work with urban youth. In effect, the interplay between traditional qualitative methods and drama methods opened up a resilient relational space. This space allowed for not only an engagement with the youth, but also the opportunity to discuss the very real pressures and limitations placed on the lives of youth by poverty, racism, and homophobia for both those who had lived in Canada all of their lives and also for those who had just arrived seeking new lives as immigrants.

SIGNIFICANCE:

The paper demonstrates how resilience of this hybrid methodological practice (drama + traditional qualitative methods) brought personal story to the larger, prevailing story of the neo-liberal refusal to create adequate social and economic infrastructure for young people, pointing to larger implications for qualitative practice.

Author

• Anne Wessels, University of Toronto - OISE