Performing care: re-imagining gender, personhood, and educational justice

ABSTRACT

Gallagher and Sahni elaborate on their decade-long collaboration, focussing here on their latest multi-sited ethnographic study, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: an intercultural investigation of drama pedagogy, performance and civic engagement (2014–2019) and the pedagogy and theatre work carried out at Prerna School for girls in Lucknow, India. In particular, they elaborate on Prerna’s feminist and performance pedagogy and the central role of care both in the classroom and embedded within the larger organizational framework and culture of the school. Using two illustrations of performance pedagogy, the authors detail how the young women are rehearsing a form of ‘misfit citizenship’, resisting gender oppression and using collective theatre-making to transform the culture-as-given.

KEYWORDS:

• Identities
• girls
• pedagogy
• ethnography
• equality
• poetry

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the deep and thoughtful engagement of a blind reviewer of this piece and the recommendations for revision offered to us as a consequence of that process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Gallagher is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto.

Urvashi Sahni is Founder and CEO of Study Hall Educational Foundation, of which Prerna is one entity.

Notes

1 The study involves Kathleen Gallagher as Principal Investigator, a team of 8 doctoral students from the University of Toronto, a Toronto-based playwright, Andrew Kushnir, who is tasked with the creation of a documentary play from all of the sites, and the team of local research and artist collaborators in each site: Urvashi Sahni (Lucknow), Wan-Jung Wang (Tainan), Rachel King–Turner (Coventry), Myrto Pigkou–Repousi and Nikos Govas (Athens). Gallagher and Sahni have been research collaborators since 2007, spending significant time in each other’s pedagogical spaces.

2 This study is published in Gallagher (2014). Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and a Pedagogy of the Real. Toronto. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.

3 For an introduction to the international collaborators, please see (http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/dr).

We launched our collaborative research study in Toronto in 2015 by spending a week together with the aim to make our diverse contexts appreciable to one another and to spend time together in the Toronto school site. The research collective maintains on-going communication through our digital communications platform through which we share digital data from our sites and engage in debate and collaborative analysis.

4 For further discussion about the school’s philosophy and pedagogy, please see (https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/dr/Research_Projects/Youth_Theatre_Radical_Hope_and_the_Ethical_Imaginary/index.html) for an extended 2015 conversation between Sahni and Gallagher.

5 Gallagher is White and English-speaking, Kushnir is White and English-speaking, Rodricks is Indian-born and Hindi-speaking though the particular dialect of the Prerna School girls was less familiar to him.

6 In Neelands’ 2009 paper, ‘Acting Together: ensemble as a democratic process in art and in life’, he argues persuasively for the pedagogy of the ensemble in drama as a rehearsal for participation in broader democratic processes. It is a creative process in which the play-building, or creative process work, is undertaken by the collective and decisions are debated through a process of consensus-building.

7 In this excerpted video, one can see the critical dialogic work of Sahni with the young women, some of the embodied drama activities used to activate their ideas, and the collectively created final performance of Izzat, which was shared with an audience in India. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDGqsq1_duw.

8 For further understanding of the drama structure of role-play, see Neelands and Goode 2015, Structuring Drama Work.

9 See Kingston and Ferry (2008) for a relevant account of the relationship between emotions and political philosophy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 496715].