Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative by Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative by Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir Caitlin A. Kane Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative. By Kathleen Gallagher with Andrew Kushnir. University of Toronto Press, 2022. Paper $39.95. 424 pages. 34 illustrations. What can theatre offer young people living in a seemingly perpetual state of crisis? Why does theatre education matter in an era characterized by political polarization, racial and economic inequality, and climate change? These are some of the questions that Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir take up in Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative. Following an ambitious five-year ethnographic study carried out at five sites around the world, Gallagher and Kushnir offer a compelling defense of theatre education’s relevance in the twenty-first century and a useful model for interdisciplinary ethnographic research with and about young people. Hope in a Collapsing World pairs Gallagher’s insights as the lead social scientist for the Radical Hope Project (the name that she and her colleagues gave their five-year study) with Kushnir’s verbatim play, Towards Youth, which transforms his observations from the study into a moving exploration of relational ethics in educational theatre and ethnographic research. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 consists of seven chapters focused on Gallagher’s findings and part 2 includes Kushnir’s critical introduction to his play and the script used for its 2019 premiere. In a brief prologue, Gallagher lays out her primary claims and describes her motivations for writing Hope in a Collapsing World, which is the second monograph to result from the Radical Hope Project. While the first monograph, Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research through Performative Methodologies, features chapters by scholars from the study’s five research sites, this new text centers Gallagher’s perspective and challenges readers to reconsider how theatre education contributes to students’ civic development. Gallagher’s research suggests that, although we often focus on theatre’s ability to instill confidence in young people, the value of educational theatre stems from its ability to reduce students’ insecurity. She contends that a sense of security enables young people to tune in and respond to the needs of those around them. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the Radical Care Project in depth. In chapter 1, Gallagher provides a literature review focused on the role that listening and care play in democratic processes. In chapter 2, she describes each of the five sites involved in the study: an after-school program for junior high students in Athens, Greece; an all-girls school that uses drama throughout the curriculum in Lucknow, India; a youth theatre group associated with the University of Warwick in Coventry, England; a university drama program in Tainan, Taiwan; and a high school drama classroom in Toronto, Canada. Despite the differences across these sites, the young people who participated in the study all faced systemic issues [End Page 86] that created a sense of precarity in their lives. In chapter 3, Gallagher details the collaborative ethnographic research methods that she and her colleagues used and outlines their research objectives. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, Gallagher provides a thematically organized overview of the study’s qualitative results. Each chapter features an example of how young people at one of the research sites cultivated care, hope, or interdependency (the themes of the three chapters, respectively) and is supplemented with shorter anecdotes from some of the other sites. Offering detailed accounts of students in Greece who created imaginative theatrical works for young refugees and of teenagers in the United Kingdom who listened attentively to one another’s divergent views on the Brexit referendum, Gallagher demonstrates how acts of care inspire more hopeful understandings of oneself and of the world. In chapter 7, Gallagher summarizes the quantitative results gathered from a survey completed by participants at all five sites. Unlike the comparative framework used in many international studies that emphasizes researchers’ (in)ability to generalize across different sites, Gallagher and her colleagues developed a mixed-methods survey that aimed to “allow...