Hope despite hopelessness: Race, gender, and the pedagogies of drama/applied theatre as a relational ethic in neoliberal times

ABSTRACT In this article, we demonstrate how theatre pedagogy was mobilized, and to what effects, in one Toronto drama classroom which was strongly divided along racial lines. Using the work of Diane Reay (2012) and Tara Yosso (2005) in particular, among other theorists and social commentators, as well as data from a multi-year, multi-sited global ethnographic research project of drama classrooms, we offer two micro-encounters from our data to illustrate how drama pedagogy both reproduced and interrupted the established classroom social relations of race and gender for seven different youth, provoking them to negotiate who they are, what they know, and the world in which they live. Through these micro-encounters, we demonstrate how youth can shift the landscape of traditional learning and explore avenues where different, relational, socially embedded, and more complex intersectional (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 2015) possibilities for “having” a voice may exist.