Menu
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.
Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice
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.
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.
Toronto
Bogotá
Coventry
Lucknow
Kaohsiung
