Arts-led, youth-driven methodology and social impact: “making what we need” in times of crisis

Abstract

This paper considers the social role of collaborative ethnographic research amid our current intersecting social, political and ecological crises. It investigates how the multi-sited, arts-based, ethnographic study, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019–2024), adopts drama as a tool to at once respond compassionately and imaginatively to crisis, and envision alternative social, political and ecological futures in its wake. A “metho-pedagogical” paradigm is mobilized as a framework to consider how drama is put to work, methodologically and pedagogically, at a time of climate emergency and pandemic. This framework is illustrated across two vignettes, which attend to the social challenges and impacts of emergent drama-based ethnographic research across two years of the study, in varying geographic locations with different cultural orientations, in live classrooms and in virtual theatre spaces. Attention, risk, desire, trust and reciprocity emerge as important proposals for engaging in arts-led research with youth in these times.

Keywords:

• Collaborative ethnography
• arts-based research
• drama
• pedagogy
• research impact

Ethical approval

This work has obtained ethical approval from the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board, RIS Protocol #: 38014. No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ongoing COVID related travel restrictions have prevented us from travelling to the other international sites, instead we are engaging digitally with those sites.

2 We had many discussions with Mr. B about the issue of cellphones. Although the school had a policy that phones should be put away in classrooms, parent pressure and school board cowardice made the enforcement of that rule very difficult for teachers.

3 The participants of the research choose their own pseudonyms and their preferred social identity markers.

4 A term we use to describe variables that have competing effects on a situation, where positive changes in one variable introduce negative or less desirable changes in another.

5 Our global survey is a 40-question online questionnaire, divided into themed sections. The survey is distributed annually, inviting participants to respond to all the questions at once, or 2–3 themed sections at a time according to the needs of each site. This flexibility ensures the contextual factors that shape the experiences and diverse perspectives of the global youth participants are centered, along with the priorities of our research collaborators.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant: 435-2019-0298.

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Gallagher

Dr. Kathleen Gallagher is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Distinguished Professor in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning cross-appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Gallagher studies theatre as a powerful medium for expression by young people of their experiences and understandings. She has published numerous books and articles on the intersection of youth, theatre, and the social world. Her most recent co-edited collection, Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research through Performative Methodologies (2020) and her forthcoming monograph, Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre and Listening as a Political Alternative (2022) are based on her recently completed collaborative ethnographic study.

Christine Balt

Christine Balt is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include interdisciplinary applications of applied theatre, performance, audience research and drama education in studies of ecologies, place and urban environments. Her current research engages with site-specific and place-based performance as tools for examining how young people find and make “place” in sites of rapid urban development.

Nancy Cardwell

Nancy Cardwell is a doctoral candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on arts in education through the lens of critical literacy studies and feminist theory in elementary and secondary school settings. She has been both a course and studio director at York University, a guest lecturer presenting on culture, politics and dance, and has created arts based workshops for educational outreach programs at the National Ballet of Canada, the Stratford Festival, as well as across school boards in Ontario. Both a Dora Mavor Moore and a Gemini award winning dancer and choreographer, Nancy is an established artist on the Canadian dance scene.

Lindsay Valve

Lindsay Valve is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include differential understandings of validity, social impact evaluation, relational frameworks for measuring the societal impact of research and the assessment of research “quality.” Her current research examines the impacts of social science and humanities research by mobilizing the experiences of community members and participants to interrogate the “curriculum” conferred by the research process.