News

Our research team in Toronto is looking forward to the year ahead as “The Drama Workshop” moves into its second year. On October 20th, the team had their first fall meeting of our global research network for our SSRHC-funded project, The Drama Workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises (2025-2030) Exciting updates were shared from all sites–Ireland, India, Greece, Nigeria, and Toronto. Supporting each other through our Global Community of Practice model, it was inspiring to gather together and hear details about the drama pedagogies and practices unfolding in fieldwork in this second year of the project. We would also like to warmly welcome our most recent doctoral student research assistant addition to the team: Welcome Ming-Wei Chen! The Toronto team is looking forward to continuing to work with artist-collaborators Andrew Kushnir and Zorana Sadiq early in the winter term with Professor Banuta Rubess in her DRM 200 course. But before that, the team is getting ready for the first research site visit to Kolkata, India. Kathleen and team members are gearing up for an intensive 10 day visit to work with our collaborator Dr. Munia Tripathi, a recent CDTPS graduate who is newly working at Presidency University. Congratulations Munia!

Dr. Gallagher’s SSHRC-funded Drama Workshop research team has had an active year of fieldwork across university and school settings in Toronto—partnering with embedded artists, students, and educators in creative workshops and interviews—while ongoing analysis and a growing international community of practice continue to shape the project across five global sites.

In this recently published article, we (Gallagher, Kirsh, and Cardwell) argue that attunement to sensory and more-than-human dimensions of climate research fosters alternative ways of knowing and engaging with the environmental crisis. Use the link above to access a copy today.

Kathleen Gallagher and Christine Balt’s new chapter, Against Righteousness: Finding Activism Through Drama Pedagogies, explores how drama can create meaningful pathways to activism for young people in public education. Challenging the binary of political righteousness and apathy, the chapter argues that drama pedagogy offers a relational and creative space where curiosity, ambiguity, and feeling can help young people engage with activism in more inclusive and accessible ways.

Drawing on empirical research in a Toronto high school, Gallagher and Balt examine how drama-based practices supported students in exploring local histories, environmental questions, and Canada’s settler-colonial legacies. The chapter highlights how creative encounters with everyday places and spaces can foster political awareness and agency, opening new possibilities for activist learning.

By foregrounding wonder, curiosity, and collective exploration, this publication contributes to important conversations about youth civic engagement, drama pedagogy, and the role of arts-based learning in shaping democratic participation.

The Drama Workshop research team is pleased to share a new publication by Kathleen Gallagher, Valve, and Tripathi in Studies in Canadian Literature. Rethinking liveness through the digital real: The virtual as a performance venue in empirical theatre research explores how theatre-making and theatre research continue to evolve in digital spaces.

The article challenges traditional understandings of “liveness” in theatre as dependent on physical co-presence, arguing instead that virtual environments can create their own forms of immediacy, relationality, and embodied connection. Through empirical theatre research, the authors examine how digital platforms can function as meaningful performance venues, opening up new possibilities for collaboration, creativity, and shared artistic experience.

Congratulations to Dr. Kathleen Gallagher and her team of collaborators on being awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant for a new international research project, "The drama workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises."

On February 24, 2025, the Toronto team hosted a local book launch. Enjoy some of the author talks and pictures from the day!

Based on a six-year ethnographic research study taking place with teachers, artists, community leaders, and young people globally, and taking its lead from the following provocation —can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice? —this book examines how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being.

In this article, Dr. Kathleen Gallagher, Ashleigh Allen, and Dr. Christine Balt examine how a virtual, speculative fiction writing and performance workshop nurtured a deeply situated yet expansive aesthetics in which youth can imagine more hopeful futures in their worlds.