What are you (un)doing with that story?

Abstract

This paper contributes to growing inter-disciplinary discussion on what and how arts-informed community-engaged research can add to critical engagements with social inequalities. It is based on workshops facilitated by an inter-disciplinary university research group with the Women’s Housing Planning Collaborative Advisory in Hamilton, a funded housing project and self-advocacy group in a mid-sized Canadian city. In theoretically informed and carefully crafted exercises, workshop participants performed stories they felt compelled to tell in order to secure resources and empathy from social service professionals. These performances made visible the draining nature and practical limitations of interactions between clients and social service professionals in which only particular affective postures and stories of need qualify clients as worthy of concern. The women then used first-person narrative and image theatre to evoke the worlds they are imagining for themselves and others in their advocacy work. Drawing on feminist, post-colonial, anthropological, and performance studies literature, we describe and analyze how the workshops methods of dramatic ‘play’ enable nuanced, powerful, and collectively energizing critical engagements with painful norms of social (mis)recognition.

Covid-19 and the politics of hope: A comparative analysis of Greek and Ecuadorian letters from a desired post-pandemic future

“…The Letter from the Future exercise has been adapted for research purposes ( Sools & Mooren, 2012 ; Sools et al, 22015; Sools, 2020 ) and used in various contexts, e.g., liminal employment experiences ( Sools et al, 2017 , Triliva et al, 2020 ), intimate partner violence ( Kilgore et al, 2018 ), psychiatry ( Sools, 2019 ), voting ( Sools et al, 2018 ), the future of travel ( Tussyadiah & Miller, 2020 ). Although mainly used as text-based method, there are also some promising applications of the method in visual narrative ( Ronkainen & Ryba, 2018 ) and art-based approaches ( Nouvet et al, 2019 , French et al, 2021 ).…”

A space between: Social work through the lens of a mobile tiny house encounter space

“…The authenticity of a gesture of welcome and hospitality will allow participants to take part in the hut experience in their own ways and share a glimpse of trust. Imitating an expected style and token format of life story can for example be expected in institutional procedures for refugee applications (Nouvet et al., 2017). The hut methodology therefore provides a mobile breathing space for a poetics of difference, inspired by Young’s politics of difference (Young, 1990) and imagined through narrative arts.…”

Play-making with migrant farm workers in Ontario, Canada: a kinesthetic and embodied approach to qualitative research

“…While relatively overlooked within arts-informed research debates, there are a growing number of examples of action research projects that integrate the use of drama techniques in working directly with research participants (Conrad, 2004; Gallagher and Wessels, 2013; Guard et al, 2012; Norris, 2011; Nouvet et al, 2017; Quinlan, 2009; Tofteng and Husted, 2011). Increasingly, researchers involved in this work have been integrating the work of late Brazilian theatre director and educator Augusto Boal as adapted from his renowned theatre-based popular education system known as the Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1985, 2002).…”