Whose story is it anyway? Exploring ethical dilemmas in performed research (original) (raw)
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Theatre Pedagogy and Performed Research: Respectful Forgeries and Faithful Betrayals
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Proponents of theatre-based research presentations—called, variously, performed ethnography, ethnodrama, arts-based research—often argue that knowledge is both presented and disseminatedmore powerfully and effectively than is the case with the conventional research report, scholarly article, or book. This article looks at some of the ways in which this kind of performance works on us aesthetically and pedagogically. And ethically, the author suggests that performances of qualitative researchmight be productively understood as respectful forgeries and faithful betrayals. While theatre might hold exciting possibilities for critical teacher development, the author also raises some important questions about the implications of this kind of work for the preparation of (drama) teachers.
This paper recounts the investigative journey of a small group of faculty and graduate students at the University of British Columbia who extensively employed research-based theatre methods to collaboratively and performatively explore three distinct but related contexts that represent critical 'moments' in the professional lives of educators and artists. By blending participatory action research with theatre-based inquiry, the researchers explored some of the complex interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics that significantly shape the manner in which everyday dialogues unfold between professionals in both educational and artistic spaces. Through the process of theatricalizing data into an integrated script, and then rehearsing and performing this material in front of several different audiences, various realities were uncovered that elicited a heightened awareness of the multiple voices, loyalties and perspectives that commonly characterize professional and personal interactions. This paper discusses some of the ethical and methodological challenges associated with this work, as well as some of the implications it may have for further investigating the relational dynamics that commonly occur within organizational settings.
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This article discusses several ethical dilemmas with which the author struggled in doing and reflecting on her doctoral research. She engaged a group of high school drama students, from a rural, mainly Aboriginal community, in a Popular Theater project. Titled Life in the Sticks, the project was based on students' initial claim that their issues were determined by their rural environment. Drawing on traditions in participatory research and performance ethnography, performance helped them reexamine aspects of their lived experiences, including those that deem them "at risk." The author's ethical entanglements included difficulties in representing and interpreting the resulting participatory research, problems surrounding the label "at risk," challenges of doing Popular Theater in school, and concerns about the absence of Aboriginal identity/ issues in the students' performances. The author drew on a feminist ethics of care and performance ethics to make her way through the tangles that emerged.
Ethical Issues in Drama/Theatre Education Research and Practice
For four years, the author has been exploring ethical issues in drama/ theatre education research and practice with a variety of international colleagues. This essay chronicles that journey and explores two key aspects related to ethical practice. First, she looks at ethical guidelines for publishing research, making the case for the application of rigorous standards where the context allows. Second, she describes the kinds of ethical dilemmas that have emerged from a series of 'conversations' on this topic at three international meetings, and outlines what she has learned from her work and her colleagues.
Theatre as Research – A Mysterious Mix
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2016
The Australian Curriculum mandates that Arts will be taught as part of the Foundation to Year 10 program in schools. My background as a Theatre-in-Education performer and as a Drama teacher has informed an approach to doing research with children, which involves making up plays about local stories. Firstly, local folk are interviewed and their anecdotes are recorded as data. The children then analyse and interpret the data, as a group, with the help of their teacher. It is then synthesised into a written play script. I have found this Theatre as Research approach to be a wonderful tool for integrating the teaching of local history with the Arts. It also has potential to strengthen community bonds and enhance inter-generational communication. Once the play has been created, the storytellers are invited as audience members to see their lives played out on stage.<br />The paper will relate examples of how I have performed ethnographic Drama with various secondary and tertiary stu...
Making a theatrical documentary from interviews about conflict surrounding salmon habitat restoration and farmland preservation in the Skagit Valley of Washington State was originally conceived as a way to present my ethnographic results in a transformative medium for my research subjects. I hoped that the play would inspire bitterly opposed farmers, Native Americans, and environmentalists to see each other in a new light and recognize their potential to collectively address common challenges. Instead, making the play became an unexpected way to critically reflect on anthropological research and cross-disciplinary collaboration, as well as issues inherent in the Skagit conflict itself. Creating a drama-worthy script forced me to hone in on the most compelling interview passages and to constantly strive for a narrative arc. These spare requirements of theatre exposed the paradox of academic research. Its hallmarks of theorization, accuracy, and caveats can weaken the emotional power of an argument and its potential to influence change. Yet at the same time, the appeal of telling a good story can overwhelm the critical, subtle analysis that is necessary to make sense of complex and incongruous phenomena. My decision to collaborate with a professional theatre artist further exposed norms of anthropology and academia that I took for granted, such as ethical responsibility to research subjects and basic definitions of research and authorship. But it was our need for a narrator that transformed the collaboration into a drama of its own: we agreed the narrator should be the anthropologist -or, me. I was then confronted with the strange and painful process of being represented as a character in the play -and with the possibility that misrepresentations of me might be viewed by audiences that included colleagues, research subjects and potential employers. While I ultimately regained control of how I was represented, the experience exposed the uncomfortable reality that most anthropologists' research subjects are not able to exercise such authorial oversight. In these ways the process of making the play transformed my attempt at researchbased theatre into a method of critically reflective theatre-based research. It enabled me to write a more deeply informed ethnography about the multi-vocal Skagit conflict, with new personal insight into the nature of conflict and
Witnessing Otherness: Shaping Ethical Visioning in Applied Theatre Research
On the 9th September, 2010, Amrita Performing Arts performed ‘Breaking the Silence’ at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. In this play, actors performed memories of life under the Khmer Rouge regime. The theme that carried through the play was a plea for reconciliation between the survivors, and the Khmer Rouge soldiers and their collaborators. In its ‘transplant’ to Singapore, presumably the dramaturgy remained much intact — some of the performance ‘language’ were lost on the audience. At a pivotal and stylized rape scene, some members of the audience laughed. Watching the performance, a few questions that gave rise to this paper, surrounding the practice of ethics in Theatre for Development (TfD) — a subset of applied theatre. They are — (1) Should the play be taken out of Cambodia in the first place? (2) Was the performance in Singapore still an example of applied theatre, since it no longer serves an ethical function of social transformation? (3) Was the leadership of ‘Western’ collaborators an example of colonial incursion into Cambodian culture? This paper addresses these questions of ethics from the framework of Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy.
In this article, we describe three areas of design that need to be considered when conceptualizing a performed ethnography/ research-informed theater project in the field of education: research design, aesthetic design, and pedagogical design. We present 30 questions that performed ethnographers and research-informed theater artists might ask ourselves when we conceptualize our projects. We then provide a discussion of four recent projects that engage with the questions presented and conclude by arguing that (a) research design and aesthetic design interact with and feed into each other and (b) research and aesthetic decisions impact the pedagogical work our projects do.