De-centring and the RiDE Journal

The World Trade Centre's twin towers are under attack from a group of suicide bombers. It is major news. The ramifications are extraordinary, and many people remember where they were on the day.

But this is not ‘September 11th’. We're talking about 15 October 1997 – an event that to the best of our knowledge never became known as 10/15. This was the day that six fighters of the ‘Black Tigers’ (the suicide units of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) drove a truck filled with explosives into a hotel located close to the twin towers of Colombo's World Trade Centre. This story was vitally important in the ongoing Sri Lankan civil war and a major attack at the heart of the country's capital from a guerrilla group usually fighting in the North and East of the country. But as a story, we're guessing, it is unfamiliar to most readers of this journal. It is the lesser-known cousin to that other attack on a world trade centre which happened a few years later.

A journal like RiDE is, and always has been, part of a global system of circulating stories and ways of seeing the world. We are imbricated in the powerful structures that determine what is known and unknown. And we are implicated in the assumptions of what is significant and what is less significant. This is the case for any journal – an issue discussed eloquently by Trahar et al. (2019) – but perhaps it is more acutely felt from within drama education and applied theatre because these are disciplines which have always focused on examining the power of storytelling and working creatively with unheard communities. Awareness of where knowledge comes from and what makes particular forms of knowledge gain credibility or authority has, therefore, always been of concern to colleagues who have written for this journal. This does not, however, prevent an international publication such as ours from being part of the problem of unequal access to knowledge. And it doesn't prevent us from re-producing the inequalities shaping what is understood to be significant research. The question for us is what strategies we might put in place to mitigate some of the problems associated with the position we are in.

An event like the attack on the New York World Trade Centre became a centripetal force, dragging narratives, practices, and world events into its orbit. It goes without saying that there are multiple reasons for this – and we do not seek to deny its importance for the many people involved or affected by it. However, the powerful position of the USA, and its economic, social, and cultural reach, create a centre around which other global practices orientate. The War on Terror became a narrative familiar to many of us, framing discussions, arts practices, and research. The war against the Tamil Tigers never became an orientating – centring – phenomena, except for those communities much closer to it.

This editorial does not seek to make a claim that a journal is an ‘event’ in the sense of these attacks, but the question raised here, is in what way RiDE creates a centring force, geographical or intellectual, for an academic community, and how in that process other forms of knowledge are reduced and perhaps diminished. There have been important questions about research journal practices in recent years, particularly in light of anti-racism campaigns, the demand for decolonialising practices and a recognition of the problematic role publishing plays in academic lives (see, e.g., Zaroulia and Odom 2021). RiDE as a journal is no exception and we have welcomed (and still welcome) colleagues in the last few years questioning how we as a journal are responding. They have pressed us to examine how might we de-centre our practices and more actively commit to decolonial processes. If knowledge and research in our disciplines are in fact diffuse and spread unevenly internationally, how might we ensure that the ‘central’ place of a journal like RiDE does not maintain inequalities of access to knowledge or strengthen the existing preponderance of research narratives from the Global North? And at best how might we resist the reproduction of the exploitative practices inherent in colonial and imperial knowledge ‘extraction’?

The founding event of the RiDE journal is clearly not the scale, or in any way literally comparable, to the acts of violence that we started with here. But the point is how events are shaped by contexts of power and become centripetal – drawing in – of other activities. If the founding event of the RiDE journal at Exeter University in the southwest of England in the 1990s was largely orientated around a history of drama education practice in the UK, we need to consider how this has become a centripetal force around which other developments of our field revolve. And then we need to think systematically about how we can uncouple the journal from the assumptions dependent on these origins. We need to acknowledge the diverse contexts that now (and always have been) producing practice, and writing on that practice, and understand how acknowledging these dynamic and diverse clusters of knowledge production will inevitably enhance the quality of research undertaken within our field.

But how to do this? One answer is to abolish the journal at the centre and transfer power across networks of journals internationally – each complementing and interacting with the other in more collaborative patterns of scholarly activity. In the journal's ongoing discussions of de-centring and de-colonial practice, we have had two related but somewhat different voices in response to this type of suggestion. One has said that people working in applied theatre within theatre or education departments are already the marginal researchers in an undervalued disciplinary area. Experiences at international theatre or performance conferences have often reinforced a sense that they are already very much not in the centre of this particular part of the academy. RiDE is, therefore, vital for their legitimacy and visibility within the difficult environment of Higher Education. As Trahar et al. explain (2019), it is already difficult to get non-traditional research published, and RiDE is one outlet for those who feel peripheral to theatre studies. So – from their point of view – we need a powerful “prestigious” journal that validates their very presence in the university sector. A second voice in these debates demonstrates the inequities of international Higher Education even more acutely. These are the colleagues who petition us anxiously about when their articles will be appearing in the journal because their careers – and for some the actual renewal of their contracts – depend on it. We might not like this, but we know that RiDE for some people becomes a lifeline for their employment and therefore their livelihoods. These are the voices that tell us ‘mess with the role of a leading international journal at our – and their – peril’.

So how to de-centre the practice of a journal – in both content and form – in ways that actively challenge the assumptions about which knowledge is important and which is ‘peripheral’ – without negatively affecting the colleagues mentioned above? How to be part of a process that sees scholarship in different international contexts in our field being nurtured and validated for how it has and continues to transform the understanding of our field? Transferring this back to the opening account from Sri Lanka, how might an event like the Colombo World Trade Centre attack take its place as a generator of knowledge about violence and terrorism, rather than remain unknown or at best be a footnote propping up the dominant New York-centred story around which we shape our world?

At the same time as the Colombo attack in 1997, the Open Issue Editor James Thompson was working in Burkina Faso on a Forum Theatre project about HIV/AIDS prevention. He was working with the excellent Atelier Théâtre Burkinabé (ATB) training groups in Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed and observing performances in rural settings across the country. One thing he enjoyed about this company was that they explicitly commented on the way practical theatre knowledge transferred between countries – and in their case arrived from a French colonial centre to their apparently ‘peripheral’ location. From their point of view, Augusto Boal was a Parisian and in fact they already had their own ‘theatre of the oppressed’ long before they met him, and it became named as such. ‘Forum Theatre’ for ATB existed before it was ‘invented’ and was thus legitimised by a practitioner from the Global North. They mockingly referred to Molière's play – Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme – where the bourgeois M. Jourdain, after taking a philosophy class, realises that he'd been speaking in prose all along, without knowing it. For ATB, they had been doing Forum Theatre all along, but it took practitioners from Europe to name it as such for them to be recognised and to get the funding they needed for their work.

We tell this story for its double edge and as a response to the question above. How do we ensure that ATB are not the footnote to a predominantly European account of Boal's practice? The first ‘edge’ is to point to how a knowledge and practice of a theatre of the oppressed was already in Burkina Faso, but the company tolerated the white, European practitioners because of the access to resources this permitted. A journal such as RiDE is part of these power dynamics but needs to recognise its influence more explicitly and provide a means for the knowledge production processes already in place to be supported. Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina, was the centre of Theatre for Development practice in Francophone Africa and we need to defer to that authority and not maintain the myth that it is the practitioners that we have heard of and studied in Europe and North America that hold any keys to ‘best’ or ‘most innovative’ practice. The second ‘edge’ is that the colleagues in ATB did know the work of Molière and Boal, due to multiple histories of colonial education and knowledge exchange, but they marshalled that knowledge to meet their own needs. This is not always the case, and not always easy to do, but a model that frames the world in centres and peripheries, needs to take care not to assume that those peripheries are not active in shaping or using the international knowledge and practice economy to meet their needs. If we assume somewhat simplistically that RiDE is at a centre that it needs to vacate, we miss the fact that the journal is already being used by different communities of scholars in ways that we might be unaware. If we are not going to abolish the journal, we need to create the processes by which international collaborators draw upon and harness those aspects of our platform that are useful for their purposes.

So, what will we commit to? These are not exhaustive suggestions, but the editors here, informed by the wider Editorial Board's discussion and research into these issues, are proposing these starting points and we are keen to hear from colleagues internationally who are interested in further discussing them with us.

Citational practice – We acknowledge that citations create and shape fields as much as describe them. We are committed to encouraging authors to cite with attention to geographical and historical origin of the source, with attention to scholars from different contexts, from different racial, class, gender, and sexuality backgrounds, from scholars from university and non-university settings, from those who are not conventionally understood to be academics but perhaps artists and other practitioners. From people at different stages of their careers, including early career colleagues and postgraduates.

Collaborative practice – We endeavour to collaborate with other international journals to discover points of connection, to conduct activities that are mutually enriching, and that foster relations that do not result in one publication becoming a drain on the other. We aim to create partnerships which ensure resources and networks are shared more equitably. What these collaborations look like will be part of the discussion with other colleagues and the journals themselves. We do not know what international journal collaboration looks like, but we are keen to start discussions with others to explore what it might mean. We want to learn how scholarly networks can be strengthened between journals with different audiences, readerships, and scopes. We are keen to hear from people involved in journal editorship in different contexts to discuss how partnering with RiDE might be mutually beneficial.

Supportive practice – We endeavour to use the journal to support the development of writers at all stages in their careers but with a particular focus on developing researchers from communities of practice and scholarship less frequently represented within this journal and international journals more generally. This includes writers from the Global South, researchers based in under-resourced universities, practitioners without access to academic support, and writers who are working from positions of discrimination and/or vulnerability. This will include mentoring authors where appropriate and providing different entry points to publication in the journal. In drawing new and exciting authors to the journal, we will also work with collaborator journals to encourage our existing authors to publish in alternative outlets.

Publisher advocacy – We will work with our publishers to increase open and fair access to publication in our journal. This will include advocating for other collaborating journals and showcasing the work of those journals within RiDE. We will endeavour to move towards greater open access and where possible create free access campaigns to certain articles. Where possible and beneficial to other journals, we will press our publishers for ways of developing co- and simultaneous publications.

Board development – We commit to an ongoing process of renewal and development of our editorial board membership to ensure it is international, diverse in interest and background and representative of different voices within our disciplinary communities. This will include a commitment to ensuring board leadership remains dynamic, open and supportive to colleagues from different contexts and stages in their career.

We are keen to discuss these ideas with individuals, journals, and research groups internationally. Please feel free to get in touch with any of the editorial team.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the following subgroup of RiDE's Editorial Board: Jan Cohen-Cruz, Peter Duffy, Nic Fryer, Helen Nicholson, Juliana Saxton, Wang-Jung Wang and Sarah Woodland. We would also like to acknowledge Taiwo Afolabi, whose interventions and questions to the Editors and Editorial Board have played a significant part in this ongoing journey.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.