This book is a collective reflection on our SSHRC-funded five year multi-sited international ethnographic study titled Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary, from the perspectives of the research team members and international research collaborators.
Working with partners in Taiwan, India, Greece, England, and in Toronto, the study investigated how the drama classroom/workshop can cultivate relationships, dispositions, and values that orient young people towards, and support them in, engaged citizenship. It builds upon a previous SSHRC-funded study that discovered 'hope' and 'care’ as significant philosophical constructs in young people’s engagement with schools by investigating how these concepts relate to the development of young people's broader civic engagement, and how the collaborative nature of drama work can incite intercultural dialogue and civic engagement for youth in global contexts.
Our edited collection explores the affective and relational lives of young people in diverse urban spaces. By following the trajectories of diverse young people as they creatively work through multiple and unfolding global crises, it asks how arts-based methodologies might answer the question: How do we stand in relation to others, those nearby and those at greater distances?
Drawing on knowledges, research traditions, and artistic practices that span the Global North and South, Global Youth Citizenry curates a way of thinking about global research that departs from the comparative model and moves towards a new analytic model of thinking multiple research sites alongside one another as an approach to sustaining dialogue between local contexts and wider global concerns.