Performing counter-narratives and mining creative resilience: using applied theatre to theorize notions of youth resilience

ABSTRACT

As part of a nationwide study of growing socio-spatial inequality, researchers collaborated with a Toronto youth shelter and a theatre company, Project: Humanity, to use drama methods to explore local manifestations of poverty and social polarization. Together, shelter-dwelling youths and researchers challenged understandings of ‘resilience’ beyond their normative framings that fail to consider youth perspectives. Provoking affective encounters, the drama methodology activated a youth critique of structural inequalities and a peer mentoring for developing tactics to confront incidents such as unwelcome police interactions. The authors propose the concept of creative resilience, which draws from the idea of the ‘ensemble’ in drama, to collectively devise and rehearse strategies of survival and resistance for application in the real world. Such creative and critical improvised encounters catalyse, they further argue, a critical-affective stance in participants, facilitators, and researchers. Such a critical-affective stance demands theoretical sophistication in the analysis of empirical accounts because it values affect as constitutive to knowledge production. Using an illustrative case, the authors put forward a new theoretical frame for youths resilience as an ensemble practice. The findings of this study support the experiential and cultural knowledge of youth as critics and agents of resistance in the face of growing global socio-spatial inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• applied theatre
• youth
• homelessness
• drama methodology
• socio-spatial inequality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are aware of the wide variety of terms used to describe young people who are living without permanent shelter, most frequently termed ‘homeless youth’, but we prefer to use the term ‘shelter-dwelling youth’ which describes a current living status without overprescribing an identity.

2. Workshop facilitators Dan, Catherine, and Andrew are all white and in their thirties. Antonio is biracial and also in his thirties.

3. All names of participants are pseudonyms.

4. For a succinct discussion of the social construction of resilience and its implications, see Hutcheon and Lashewicz (2014).

5. The ‘carding’ practices of the Toronto police, adopted from the ‘stop and search’ practices of American police forces, whereby police officers have the right to stop and search people for reasons they are not required to disclose, are widely considered a form of racial profiling. They have come under considerable scrutiny in Toronto and have been challenged for the disproportionate number of racialized youth, living in ‘poor, urban’ neighbourhoods subjected to the random nature of the stops and the subsequent documentation by police of young people, mostly men, who have not committed any crime. For a clear discussion of these policing practices and their impact on racialized youth in Canada, see Wortley and Owusu-Bempah (2011).

6. Our research methodology is closely aligned with our drama methodology. For this study, the research and creative teams would typically discuss the research questions (i.e. what relationship do you have with the neighbourhood you grew up in?) we wished to explore in each workshop session and then derive particular drama activities to engage research participants in physical and dialogic work around a specific research question or theme. This work would be exploratory, but would also provide a shared creative context for reflection in later focus group discussions. In previous research, Gallagher (2007, 2014) describes this methodological process as accomplishing three distinct goals: (i) accessing understandings of youth through indirect means, rather than through more direct structured interview questions; (ii) creating a shared context between researchers and participants that become effective points of reference in interviews and other informal dialogues with youth; and (iii) building a collaborative context between researchers and participants, and among participants themselves, for extending or challenging prior understandings through creative and dialogic processes. At the core of our research methodology is the belief that practical and embodied knowledge can develop through arts practice, and that ideas and theories can also arise from creative work (Anderson and O’Connor 2013).

7. In our taped researcher debrief in the car after that day’s session, the team reflected on our status as White women and one South-Asian man, on our different social positions and how these significantly shaped our engagements and our understandings on that day. Our racialized and gendered differences, our differing ages, our power in relation to social institutions, and our social and cultural capital were clearly on display and significantly shaped our abilities to understand the embodied experiences within the drama.

Additional information

Funding

This study and its dissemination are supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 895-2011-1004] which has funded the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership (NCRP) based at the University of Toronto. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the view of the NCRP or the funder.