Challenging the Myths: Stories From the Outside and From the Inside of a Women's Shelter

• In Event: Challenging the Myths: Stories From the Outside and From the Inside of a Women's Shelter

Abstract

This presentation is based upon a collaboration among an urban YWCA (organizational stakeholder), a faculty member of nursing and a member of a drama department. The nurse educator interviewed ‘guests’ ‘staff’ and ‘coaches’ at a women’s shelter to generate data on their lived-experiences. The director/actor/researcher/teacher (D/A/R/Tor) (Author, 2018) worked with a cast of 12, predominantly drama students to devise a series of vignettes for video. Employing a hybrid of ethnodrama (Saldaña, 2005) and playbuilding (Author, 2008) methodologies they read the research material searching for themes and stories and integrated these with personal aesthetic responses to dramatize the data (Saldaña, 2003), creating “possibilities for the public good” (Call). They will mount their performative research (Jones, 2017) for a live, interactive session.

Author

• Joe Norris, Brock University