Urban School Performances is an international research project examining how theatre contexts and practices in schools impact youth engagement and identity. The research borrows from theatre approaches and resists traditional scientific objectivity. It collects multiple perspectives from researchers, participants, and their artistic works. Performances are studied both as artistic creations and cultural reflections. Digitizing performances introduces challenges of representation that require collaborative solutions respecting participants' agency. The goal is creative, context-sensitive research illuminating local voices within global discussions.

1. Urban School Performances: The Interplay, through Live and Digital Drama, of
Local/Global Knowledge about Student Engagement
Kathleen Gallagher
When qualitative research is conceived as a series of moments, performances, creative
encounters, and temporal relationships that can never be repeated, rather than a series of
value-free and distanced observations, the research encounter itself cannot help but
challenge some of the traditional questions about the nature of truth, the power relations
of knowledge, and the politics and ethics doing research. Differences of epistemology
and method in qualitative research, however, eerily echo the larger cultural schism
between science and art, which might also be characterized by the tension between
standing apart and being fully involved.
In this presentation, I am aiming to map out the methodology of a piece of research that
takes as its subject and often its method how youth work with theatre, what they create, in
what contexts, for what purposes and to what effect. Our empirical qualitative research
borrows much from the theatre. We work in a way that resonates with Gearing’s
description of researches as “emotionally aware inter-actor(s) engaged with other actors”
(Gearing, 1995, p. 211). In the course of this presentation, I would like to briefly point to
four interesting aspects of our research that derive much of their impetus from the theatre:
i) the break with objectivity; ii) the polyvocality of the research voice, ii) performance as
a digital and live form of listening/communicating in the field; iii) the relationship
between performance and research: pragmatic and theoretical tensions; and iv) creating a
framework for inviting the critical reception of (digital) performance work.
The Study
Urban School Performances: The interplay, through live and digital drama, of local-
global knowledge about student engagement (USP) is an international research project
that is examining, through attention to theatre contexts and practices in schools, how the
relationships among culture, identity, multiculturalisms, student engagement and theatre
have an impact on the lives of youth in schools and communities traditionally labeled
‘disadvantaged’ in the cities of Toronto, (Canada), Kaoshiung (Taiwan), Lucknow
(India), and New York City (USA).i This Canadian-led project brings together diverse
cities to examine student engagement, theatre pedagogy and performance, and success at
school from a local-global perspective and to illustrate how such a multi-site ethnography
is changed by arts-based, participatory, and digital/performative research methods.
Because the insights of youth about questions of engagement with school remains a
central concern, this project seeks new ways to engage diverse youth in the research
process, in the context of four communities equally concerned with ‘raising the bar’ for
those students most disengaged from traditional practices of schooling.
Bringing the social and the performative together, USP is engaging youth, teachers
and researchers in a creative inquiry, using digital-drama research tools (see Gallagher
and Kim 2008), to better understand the relationship between engagement and the social,
academic and artistic contexts of schooling. Given the importance of context in
ethnographic research, we also examine the relationship between youth’s sense of agency

2. and the social structures and rules within which they operate in schools, in order to
generate context-specific profiles of resilience and ‘at risk’. Of particular interest to
studies of theatre and pedagogy, we will determine the nature and quality of the
relationship between achievement in drama/theatre and school engagement by closely
examining the pedagogies particular to the collaborative processes of theatre-making. In
other words, the research project is concerned with how young people ‘perform’-
socially, academically, and artistically- in school contexts situated in marginalized
communities. The research therefore examines both the cultural and everyday
performances and the artistic performances created by youth in the particular context of
drama lessons. In other words, we are talking about the aesthetic- and social- work
undertaken in the context of the drama/theatre classroom and how we come to know that
through ethnographic study.
i) The break with objectivity
The ‘objective sciences’, those that stake their claims to truth as some contrary of art, in
other words, the other side of subjectivity, the universal, have produced a system of
technologies (involving organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and,
most of all, a mindset1) that has profoundly modified our culture. To better elucidate the
power and prevalence of this system, I turn to feminist, experimental physicist Ursula
Franklin, who has helped me to rethink the science of social science research.
I use Ursula Franklin’s notion of a system of technologies in order to rethink more
generally the ‘scientific method’ in research. In our performative research, we resist the
conventional separation of knowledge from experience, an important marker of
traditional science, in its aim of discovering universally applicable laws of nature and to
extract the general from the particular. Franklin (2006) points to the intrinsic lack of
context in any general law that limits that law’s usefulness and that the emphasis on
abstract over concrete experience has significantly lessened the confidence of people in
the astuteness of their own senses (p. 315). It is not that we think nothing ‘in general’ can
be gleaned from the specificities of what we encounter in our research sites, only that we
must keep the particular and the general in fruitful tension.
How do we do this? We take up the theoretical discourses about ‘youth’ currently in use,
we look into writings on devising, on interculturalism in theatre, on collaborative artistic
processes and we situate these against the thematics of conversations with youth in our
sites, the conversations they have with each other that we are privy to, the reception of
their theatre work in their own communities, and our own aesthetic and substantive
judgments of what they create.
ii) Polivocality: Researcher and Participant Voices
Why would we bother seeing Hamlet 100 times if limitless interpretations were not
possible? And yet, this somehow goes against conventional wisdom in research circles.
The remnants of positivism, perhaps… a resistance to losing one’s authoritative voice,
perhaps… or maybe it’s just quite difficult to carry out. The open reading of a research
moment means that multiple interpretations can surface and a different form of
1
For a carefully drawn out account of these processes, see Franklin, U. (1999) The Real World of
Technology [revised edition] Toronto: Anansi Press.

3. triangulation can occur. Ethnography is being constantly reinvented through an ever
widening set of methods used to engage in the specificities of particular research
contexts. Traditional notions of triangulation have indeed lost their hold. But what is
gained and what is lost in an ethnographic turn that borrows from performance, from
participatory research methods, from the visual turn in research? And what of
ethnographies whose terrain is global? No longer the site specific, culturally bounded
entity it once seemed to be, what kind of knowledge does ethnography produce when it
pushes beyond the traditional limits of time and place? When it is multi-voiced? Is it
simply the predictable emergence multi-site ethnography or is there more going on? Here
I draw on Ursula Franklin’s critique of the ‘scientific method’, which eclipses what we
might call the social processes of fact-making or knowledge production.
Our challenge is to find ways to reveal the social processes of our fact-making. Our
different voices currently emerge in fieldnotes, in meetings, and in co-authorship. But the
bulk of analysis is before us and the pressure for consensus looms.
iii) The Relationship between Performance and Research: Pragmatic and
Theoretical Tensions
The work of Irish playwright, Brian Friel’s theoretical writing on the arts/theatre have
helped me to think more consciously about ‘participation’ in research and use it,
methodologically, as counterpoint to those technologies that fix us/our research
participants and cause us/our research participants to mistrust or even subvert our own
senses and sense-making. In Friel’s (1999) view:
The arts grow and wither and expand and contract erratically and sporadically.
Like beachcombers or Irish tinkers they live precariously, existing from idea
to idea, from theory to theory, from experiment to experiment. They do owe
something to the tradition in which they grow; and they bear some
relationship to current economic and political trends. But they are what they
are at any given time and in any given place because of the condition and
climate of thought that prevail at that time and in that place. And if the
condition and climate are not right, the arts lift their tents and drift off to a
new place.
Flux is their only constant; the crossroads their only home; impermanence
their only yardstick. Once they realize that they have been so long in one site
that they have come to be looked on as a distinct movement, that city hall is
thinking of extending the city boundaries so that they can be absorbed into a
comfortable community, they take fright, attack the movement—the apparent
permanence—that they themselves have created, reject the offer of hospitality,
and move to a new location. This is the only pattern of their existence: the
persistence of the search; the discovery of a new concept; the analysis,
exploration, exposition of that concept; the preaching of that gospel to
reluctant ears; and then, when the first converts are made, the inevitable
disillusion and dissatisfaction because the theory is already out of date or was
simply a false dawn. And then the moving on; the continuing of the search;
the flux. Impermanence is the only constant (p. 16).
We have experienced this kind of impermanence already in our Toronto sites. The
challenge is to make a virtue of these highly changeable contexts by working

4. improvisationally and being led by participants’ theatre and social performances. What
are they asking us to care about?
Creating a Digital Framework for Colloborative Theatre Research:
a) Questions of Judgment: Aesthetic and Social
b) The vertical and the horizontal in ‘live’ and ‘digital’ performance
What do we do when our ‘live’ theatre event becomes digitized. There are aesthetic,
methodological, and theoretical aspects to this move that bear examinination. French-
Canadian playwright/actor/director Robert Lepage (in Delgado & Heritage, 1996) likens
the “live” experience of theatre to a sporting event. People scream and shout at a sporting
event because they believe it may change the course of things. In theatre too, he says,
people want to believe that they are somehow changing the event, that their presence is
changing the course of things (p. 146); theatre does not “fix”, like an image or a word
captured by the ‘objectivity’ of the lens; the ‘truth-telling’ camera. The traditional
function of the camera, then, is more akin to positivist notions of research. Aesthetically,
it can be seen to be fixing a moment, freezing a relationship, ‘capturing’ a true picture, A
primary challenge for post-positivist researchers, then, who choose to use video in their
research, is to negotiate the research relationships in order that research participants are
not merely testing and being tested/critiqued by the lens and the researcher but contesting
and returning the gaze.
Robert Lepage reflects upon these important aesthetic qualities, in a 1996
interview, when he describes the differences between theatre as a “vertical form” of art
and film or television as a “horizontal form”:
It’s vertical on many levels in the sense that I think theatre has a lot to do with
putting people in contact with the gods, whatever that means. That’s where
theatre comes from. Plays were written in a vertical manner about human
aspirations... There is a sense of spirituality in theatre: it’s a medium that you
could use to talk about spirituality, about spiritual quests. Of course, there’s a
reason why film has a horizontal frame; because cameras pan and cinema is all
about everyday life and realism. Being at that level it goes from left to right, or
right to left. Sometimes it does pan up and down, but in general horizontal stories
are better told with film. Maybe the shape and frames of film will all change one
day. But why hasn’t anybody invented a vertical screen after a century of
cinema? The medium technically and symbolically is about the horizon, the land
on which human beings work and walk (p. 144).
In research terms, then, to design research with an eye toward the ‘vertical’ would mean
to ask research questions that have many potential answers contingent upon the
relationships that are cultivated through the research and relationships of historical
contingency across time and space.
Extending further this aesthetic metaphor, Lepage suggests that there are two
ways to tell a story: a metaphorical way and a metonymical way. Metonymy is a
horizontal telling - a beginning, middle and end - with things happening in a certain
order. But metaphorical telling is like seeing a piece of theatre where there are many
levels, where things seem to be connected in a “vertical way”. What would it mean,

5. methodologically, to design a study that connected people, their contexts and
relationships, in horizontal and vertical ways? The question itself points rather obviously
to the need for multiple perspectives (both digital and ‘live’) in the seeing and the telling
of research. This is likely one reason why forms of literature, theatre, and visual media
have proliferated in the representation of qualitative research. These artistic forms enable
researchers to evoke the nuances and complexities of fieldwork and other research
activities. Over the last 20 years, ethnographers have been challenging the very
conventionality of ethnographic writing and proposing “more open, messy and
fragmented texts” (Denzin & Lincoln 2000; Ellis & Bochner 1996-cited in Dicks et al,,
2005, p. 31, Fusco, in this volume). Postmodern researchers, like Patti Lather and Chris
Smithies, have experimented with ‘vertical’ forms of reporting (see Lather &
Smithies1997), while other researchers have exploited the vertical powers of theatre in
qualitative research dissemination (see Gallagher, 2006; Goldstein, 2003; Conrad, 2002;
Saldana, 1999; Norris, 1997; Donmoyer & Yennie-Donmoyer, 1995; Mienczakowski,
1995). But using digital video in our research challenges us, in a very fundamental way,
to revisit our more habitual ‘modes’ of operating in the field. Dicks et al (2005) argue
that “[t]he film-based ethnographer sees the field through the camera lens, while the
writing-based ethnographer observes first, and then writes. The camera lens works to
'enframe' the field into compositions, while the constantly moving human eye tends to
organize it into scenes” (p. 82). And even beyond the filming itself, the practice of video
editing is particularly powerful in enabling us to ‘see’, organize, and analyze research
data in new ways:
Editing “rituals serve as a ‘frame’ whose stabilizing effect experienced through
repetition in cycles and in rhythmic recurrences, allow us to see things with a
different intensity, and … to perceive the ordinary in an extra-ordinary way”
(Leimbacher & Trinh 2005, p. 135).
So our first challenge is selection: what do we choose to post for our collaborators
abroad? Our next challenge is: how do we give them enough context so they can make
sense of what they are seeing without directing their attention to what we have seen in the
clips. And three: what other vocabularies are available to us beyond the judgment of
whether the work is ‘good theatre’, ‘good for young people’, ‘good for these kinds of
young people’. How do we talk about the tensions of the aesthetic and the social that are
inextricably linked in the clips we post for analysis?
Can the interiority of the lives of research participants or the sense of timelessness that
often marks ‘live’ interaction be ‘translated’ to digital video modes? Can research that
exploits digital modes of recording and representing avoid the pitfalls of the objectifying
gaze of the camera? Can collaborative forms of research proliferate with the inventive
and artistic use of video as a more collective rather than a hierarchical research process?
Can digital video research expand the research imagination by evoking new postcolonial
research narratives? These are some of the questions for which we do not yet have
answers.