Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice​ (2019-2026)

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Glacier descending into a lake, backed by snow-covered mountains and a cloudy sky.
Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019-2026)​

In our current climate emergency, what if we had a single, infinitely renewable resource that could save us all?

Young people have taught us that this resource is HOPE. Our new project considers hope as a political alternative that can shift the narratives of climate change.

Background

Our research in Radical Hope (in Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary) revealed profound connections between the practice of drama in the classroom and the capacity of youth to develop 'care' by learning in relation to one another, in intellectual and embodied ways. We found that youth agency is mined relationally, and that knowledge that is generated collectively is particularly significant in the cultivation of an ethics of care.

Young people have taught us that this resource is HOPE. Our new project considers hope as a political alternative that can shift the narratives of climate change.

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 Four schoolgirls in uniform smiling and holding colorful lunchboxes, standing in a sunlit classroom or hallway.
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Group photo of students and a few adults outside a school building on a sunny day.
Citizen Artists and Climate

Our current project, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics, orients this ethics of care to the environmental-social nexus and explores whether the experiences of ‘learning-in-relation' and deep listening that emerge in collective theatre-making can also help participants understand the mutual imbrication of the environment, society, and culture at a time of ecological and socio-political polarization.

Objectives

To explore global questions of environmental and ecological degradation along with social and political polarization using hybrid genres of drama, performance, and digital media, to encourage an interdisciplinary conversation with young people about the nature of intersecting global crises.

To examine and extend the possibilities of a global ethics of care, as part of a framework for global citizenship, within and across global ‘locals’ where young people receive each other’s digital-live theatre productions.

To clarify how intergenerational dialogues, in which youth are positioned as ‘teachers,’ can advance the aims of global climate education, as youth leaders seek environmental and social justice and try to educate their communities in the current politically polarized era.

To advance new interdisciplinary methods for application in curricula and pedagogy in drama, media studies, and across the arts, through convergences of the digital and the live, the social and the ecological, and the local and the global.

Research Sites

Our research collaborators lead drama programs in six countries around the world.

Bogotá, Colombia
Coventry, England
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Lucknow, India
Thessaloniki, Greece
Toronto, Canada

Our Collaborators

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Myrto Pigkou Repousi

Myrto Pigkou Repousi

Dr. Pigkou-Repousi  is an Assistant Professor in Theatre in Education at the Department of Theatre (School of Fine Arts) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Dr. Pigkou-Repousi's doctoral dissertation charted how ensemble theatre contributed to citizenship education in disadvantaged schools in Greece.

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Dr. Urvashi Sahni

Urvashi Sahni

Dr. Sahni is the founder of Prerna School and works in the area of personal and collective transformation through drama. She studies the scripted rules imposed on with lowest caste girls by home, making the domestic public, as students explore and express the politics of power that limit their lives.

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Rachel King

Rachel Turner King

Dr. King is the Assistant Professor in Creativity, Performance and Education at the Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick. She examines the ways drama and theatre-based pedagogies can be used to create hospitable and convivial spaces for interaction between multi-ethnic communities.

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Jorge Arcila

Jorge Arcila

Dr. Jorge Arcila is a Colombian-Canadian theater director, researcher and higher education teacher based in Bogotá-Colombia-South America. His work explores relationships between arts, collective memory and drama pedagogy in social and political post-conflict contexts.

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Betsly Lan

Betsy Lan

Betsy Lan is a theatre artist, scholar, and teacher at the Junyi School of Innovation in Taitung, Taiwan.

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Chia-ling Yang

Chia-ling Yang

Chia-ling Yang is an Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Gender Education, National Kaoshiung Normal University in Kaoshiung, Taiwan.