Mobilizing Affect Through Intercultural Applied Theater Methodologies

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

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:

What does the heightened pedagogy of theatre offer to the group and to the research exploration? This paper will describe the affective intercultural methodological processes of the multi-sited global, collaborative ethnography research project. The analysis shared will offer critical insight into how youth come to participate in the political, economic, and cultural lives of their local and global communities.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:

Specifically, this paper will draw from analysis of traditional qualitative methods such as individual and focus group interviews as well as the video-documented creative engagement with Verbatim theatre as a methodological intervention across research sites in year one of the study.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

Sara Ahmed’s (2004) important idea of what emotions do rather than what they mean, has particular significance for the application of theatre methodologies to youth research. Using theatre as methodological intervention allows us to tap into the affective economy in a group, where difficult emotions can be expressed through the distancing mechanism of ‘the stage’ in order that we might all look at them directly without the self-consciousness or sense of invasion and hierarchies of power that direct questioning can sometimes invoke. The intimacy of using theatre to symbolize our experiences and create characters that put us at some distance from those experiences opens up new possibilities for analysis, an analysis that would attend both to our situatedness as individuals and to the circulation of emotions in our social worlds, underscoring Ahmed’s idea referenced above.

RESULTS:

The use of techniques such as improvisation and verbatim theatre, important to our methodological attempts to make productive the tensions between the personal and the structural, or the micro and the macro, makes visible important contradictions. Our analysis of empirical data will show how accessing emotion through the use of improvisation and verbatim theatre created both an interesting distance, and a compelling intimacy. We will demonstrate how our use of verbatim invited participants into the analysis of their own emotions so that they engaged with us, the researchers, from a position of power and authority.

SIGNIFICANCE:

The mobilizing of emotions through theatre in a research process allows researchers to consider how such experimentation may complicate our readings of research participants and of ourselves as situated collaborators in the production of knowledge. The material representation of emotion through drama can both symbolize and externalize difficult emotions, giving researchers something representational to look at in order to discern the place that emotion is playing in participant reported events and in our subsequent understanding of such accounts. Using theatre methodologically doesn’t only create emotion but allows one to experiment with the place of emotion in a research process, to understand what emotions enable or disable in the complex ecosphere of research relations and knowledge production.

Author

• Kathleen M. Gallagher, OISE/University of Toronto