Applied theatre extends beyond traditional performance and entertainment, using theatrical techniques to address social issues and engage communities. In this paper, we emphasise the importance of a socially and politically engaged approach to Applied Theatre (AT) using Paulo Freire's and Augusto Boal's works as primary references to support…

There is growing interest in the use of approaches to public engagement with research that use the arts to facilitate engagement. However, there is a lack of systematic and consolidated learning about how arts-based approaches work in practice and about their effectiveness. To help respond to this gap in the knowledge base, The Healthcare…

Out Of Character Theatre Company's Fresh Visions project pursued an innovative theatre-based research methodology which enabled sustained, in-depth, polyphonic and dialogic engagement around the future shape of local mental health services. Since our previous research (Heinemeyer, Catherine and Nick Rowe. 2019. 'Being Known, Branching Out:…

This article provides an overview of the Survivors: Local Stories of Domestic Violence (hereafter, Survivors) civic engagement project. Survivors' learning objectives were to increase the understanding of the complexity of intimate partner abuse and foster empathy in outsiders' responses, something at the cornerstone of the #MeToo social movement…

These annexes accompany "Arts-Based Approaches to Public Engagement with Research: Lessons from a Rapid Review." The findings of the study are based on a literature review that followed the principles of a rapid evidence assessment, complemented by interviews with six experts in the field of arts-based public engagement. Key findings…

In this paper, the authors argue for novel, less mimetic, ways to harness "the real" in drama practices. They study particular youth theatre-making practices in a Toronto secondary classroom, both successes and failures, to make the case for an untethering of "the real" from realism's representational aesthetics. They further…

This article examines how performance-oriented arts practice with members of socially marginalised communities can be harnessed as a mode of grassroots civic participation, one that can transgress the expected norms of public communication that render some stories and speakers legitimate, and some not. The article will offer an analysis of a…

This article theorises the process of adapting my research on intercultural communication for public performance in collaboration with a theatre company. I frame the collaboration as taking place within a hospitable institutional space, and then consider what it means to enact hospitality interpersonally, given Derrida's understanding that the…

This paper draws upon learning from three action research projects conducted as part of a Europe-wide project exploring young people's social and political participation. Challenging dominant discourses about what 'counts' as participation and what does not, the paper explores how, through the action research projects, young people engaged in…

Purpose: To contribute for the ongoing discussion about associations between art education and citizenship education, presenting Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, as a theatre method that exercises active democracy by means of promoting epistemological development merging Art, Citizenship and Education. Design: Drawing form a selected set…

In a violent clash between rival gangs from Asnières and Gennevilliers in the banlieue north of Paris, a 15-year-old boy was killed at the metro station Les Courtilles, the last stop on Line 13. Inevitably, revenge attacks occurred. Security was heightened with hundreds of police patrolling the area, but residents and city officials alike…

This article explores collective identity as a useful theoretical framework for understanding social and developmental processes that occur in youth programs. Through narrative analysis of past participant interviews (n = 21) from an after-school theater program, known as "The SOURCE", it was found that participants very clearly describe…

This report examines the academic and civic behavior outcomes of teenagers and young adults who have engaged deeply with the arts in or out of school. In several small-group studies, children and teenagers who participated in arts education programs have shown more positive academic and social outcomes in comparison to students who did not…

Adolescent voluntary associations are particularly well positioned in the life course to encourage voting as youth become full citizens. Extracurriculars socialize students into voting by habituating them to civic engagement and by connecting them to politically engaged cultures. We establish this argument by testing the effects of high school…

This paper analyses a community theatre project initiated in 1991 in Ratones, a community in Southern Brazil. It began as an extension project of the State University of Santa Catarina and became an independent project coordinated by former participants, still in collaboration with the university. Aiming to evaluate the benefits of this theatre…