As youth media creation programmes proliferate, educators and practitioners are learning how to develop stories that interrupt hegemony and point to new ways of being. This research, carried out in an ethnically diverse middle school, highlights the way digital storytelling as an applied theatre praxis brought complexity to student work. The role…

This paper reflects on Arlie Hochschild's concept of "Emotional Labour" to investigate the emotion work undertaken by artists facilitating participatory arts in urban community settings. The discussion seeks to capture the emotional cost of "managing" feelings to understand the resilient practitioner in wider political…

Theatre of the Oppressed was conceived by Brazilian theatre director and theorist Augusto Boal as a "rehearsal for revolution"; it hinges on participants' power to select material for inquiry and frame, shape, script, and perform stories of problems/oppressions in their own lives and communities. In a 12-week-long study I co-facilitated…

Ensemble-building is a practice within drama education that is understood to be a powerful metaphor for democratic living. However, this ongoing work in classrooms also demands that teachers understand and enact a broad, interrelated range of knowledge, skills, and values that support participants' encounters with conflict and representations of…

This article reflects on outcomes of a playmaking project conducted with 14-20-year-old urban students in the USA. The playmaking experience was part of a larger research project designed to facilitate students' understandings of the ways in which their own experiences of discrimination are reflected in pervasive inequity at the societal level,…

The article explores the limitations of applied drama interventions promising integration and inclusion against the material realities of urban disenfranchisement and misrecognition. Through reflection on a participatory theatre project facilitated with young women in an urban secondary school in London, social and moral agendas emerge which…