Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a narrative review of the literature on mental health resilience and other positive mental health capacities of urban and internal migrants. Design/methodology/approach The methodology for this narrative review included a search of articles published up to 2017. The abstracts were screened and relevant articles studied and discussed. Literature on the particular mental health challenges of urban migrants in India was also studied. References found in the literature relating to neurourbanism were also followed up to explore broader historical and conceptual contexts. Findings Several key sources and resources for mental health resilience were identified – including familial and community networks and individual hope or optimism. Nevertheless, much of the literature tends to focus at the level of the individual person, even though ecological systems theory would suggest that mental health resilience is better understood as multi-layered, i.e. relevant to, and impacted by, communities and broader societal and environmental contexts. Originality/value This paper provides insight into an aspect of migrant mental health that has tended to be overlooked hitherto: the mental health resilience and positive mental health capacities of urban migrants. This is particularly relevant where professional “expert” mental health provision for internal migrant communities is absent or unaffordable. Previous work has tended to focus predominantly on mental health risk factors, despite growing awareness that focusing on risk factors along can lead to an over-reliance on top-down expert-led interventions and overlook positive capacities for mental health that are sometimes possessed by individuals and their communities.

It is often proposed that the unique capacity of theatre is that it allows all media hosted within it to manifest themselves in their own particular forms. This chapter pursues Lars Elleström’s notion that theatre is indeed highly multimodal and integrates many basic and qualified media, prompting a recalibration of current definitions of a hypermedium incorporating all arts and media. The author contends that, alongside the significance of material mobility, there are specific temporal, spatial and sensorial modes that are fundamental in defining the mechanics and the potential of the hypermedium. This interplay of modalities creates new forms of hybrid signification through particular dialogues of immediacy and hypermediacy, participant authorship, angles of mediation and angles of exclusivity, transporting theatre into new and sometimes challenging relationships with other assertive qualified media types, notably what the author refers to as the architecture of commerce.

Background: Resilience has proved to be a versatile notion to explain why people are not defeated by hardship and adversity, yet so far, we know little of how it might apply to communities and cultures in low to middle income countries. Aim: This paper aims to explore the notion of resilience in cross-cultural context through considering the lived experience of internal migration. Methods: A sample of 30 participants with experience of migration was recruited from a low-income slum dwelling neighbourhood in the city of Pune, India. These individuals participated in biographical narrative interviews in which they were encouraged to talk about their experience of migration, their adaptation to life in their new environment and making new lives for themselves. Results: Participants referred to a variety of intra-individual and external factors that sustained their resilience, including acceptance of their circumstances, the importance of memory, hope for their children’s futures as well as kindness from family friends and community members and aspects of the physical environment which were conducive to an improvement in their lives. Conclusions: By analogy with the widely used term ‘idioms of distress’, we advocate attention to the locally nuanced and culturally inflected ‘idioms of resilience’ or ‘eudaemonic idioms’ which are of crucial importance as migration and movement become ever more prominent in discussions of human problems. The nature and extent of people’s coping abilities, their aspirations and strategies for tackling adversity, their idioms of resilience and eudaemonic repertoires merit attention so that services can genuinely support their adjustment and progress in their new-found circumstances.

This systematic review seeks to evaluate the documented uses of applied theatre practice within an Indian context. For the purposes of this review, specific applied theatre practices were focused upon, notably community theatre, theatre in education, theatre in health education and Theatre for Development. This article was written in preparation for a collaborative research project (<uri xlink:href="https://mhri-project.org">http://mhri-project.org</uri>) utilizing community theatre practices to investigate mental health and resilience within slum (basti) communities in the city of Pune, in the state of Maharashtra in India. At its most particular level, the review focuses on theatre interventions within migrant slum communities. Of specific interest is the conjunction of applied theatre with research and practice in mental health and wellbeing, and how such collaborations have investigated levels and modes of mental resilience within migrant communities. The review also draws upon related global research to contextualize and inform the Indian context. At present, systematic reviews are not prevalent within the research fields of theatre generally or applied theatre specifically, yet these reviews arguably offer the breadth of objective evidence required to interrogate the efficacy of this practice. This review is therefore intended to rigorously map the existing academic research and the more diffuse online dialogues within India that are pertinent to the subject; to consider the relations, contradictions, absences and inconsistencies within this literature; and, from this, to articulate key findings that may be integrated into the planning and delivery of new initiatives within this field.

This article frames the special issue by offering a broad reflection on the historical development of ideas that have informed debates concerning intermediality and its pedagogical contexts. It opens with a brief articulation of media and intermedial theory to inform the debate. The challenges of contemporary media hybridity are then set within an historical context by tracing the origins of current (perceived) knowledge dichotomies and hierarchies into the philosophical canons of Western antiquity. In examining distinctions between the different types of knowledge and ARTICLE HISTORY