Loading…

What are you (un)doing with that story?

This paper contributes to growing inter-disciplinary discussion on what and how arts-informed community-engaged research can add to critical engagements with social inequalities. It is based on workshops facilitated by an inter-disciplinary university research group with the Women’s Housing Planning...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Qualitative social work : QSW : research and practice 2019-05, Vol.18 (3), p.514-529
Main Authors: Nouvet, Elysée, Sinding, Christina, Graham, Catherine, Vengris, Jennie, Fudge Schormans, Ann, Fullwood, Ailsa, Skeene, Melanie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper contributes to growing inter-disciplinary discussion on what and how arts-informed community-engaged research can add to critical engagements with social inequalities. It is based on workshops facilitated by an inter-disciplinary university research group with the Women’s Housing Planning Collaborative Advisory in Hamilton, a funded housing project and self-advocacy group in a mid-sized Canadian city. In theoretically informed and carefully crafted exercises, workshop participants performed stories they felt compelled to tell in order to secure resources and empathy from social service professionals. These performances made visible the draining nature and practical limitations of interactions between clients and social service professionals in which only particular affective postures and stories of need qualify clients as worthy of concern. The women then used first-person narrative and image theatre to evoke the worlds they are imagining for themselves and others in their advocacy work. Drawing on feminist, post-colonial, anthropological, and performance studies literature, we describe and analyze how the workshops methods of dramatic ‘play’ enable nuanced, powerful, and collectively energizing critical engagements with painful norms of social (mis)recognition.
ISSN:1473-3250
1741-3117
DOI:10.1177/1473325017735884