scholarly journals Theatre of the oppressed: linking research, political commitment and pedagogical perspectives

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Alessandro Tolomelli

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1807-1384.2016v13n3p43The intellectual path of Augusto Boal ran parallel with his own life. “A path made by walking”, we can say using Machado’s words. In my personal experience, working as an educator I discovered the necessity of a pedagogical framework to sustain the practice; thinking as educationalist I realized the importance of the political meanings of education; acting as a Theatre of the Oppressed professional I understood the importance of keeping links between theory and praxis, personal and academic research. To summarize, in this paper I try to connect some points between pedagogy, politics and research using the method of the Theatre of the Oppressed as a framework. The first part described the reasons of my interest in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (P. Freire) and then on the Theatre of the Oppressed (A. Boal). Later on, the focus is on the meaning of the words ‘theatre’ and ‘oppression’ to explain the aims and the roots of the Theatre of the Oppressed. At the end of the paper the project is presented: “TOgether”, a European research-action path aimed at constructing a curriculum for the Theatre of the Oppressed trainer as well as experimenting with the aesthetic potential of the method.Teatro do oprimido: pesquisa da ligação, compromisso político e perspectivas pedagógicasA trajetória intelectual de Augusto Boal correu em paralelo com sua própria vida. "Um caminho feito a pé", usando as palavras de Machado. Na minha experiência pessoal trabalhando como educador, eu descobri a necessidade de uma estrutura pedagógica para sustentar a prática. Pensando como educador, eu percebi a importância do significado político da educação. Agindo como um profissional do Teatro do Oprimido, eu compreendi a importância de manter ligações entre teoria e prática, a vida pessoal e a pesquisa acadêmica. Para resumir, neste artigo eu tento conectar alguns pontos entre a pedagogia, política e pesquisa utilizando o método do Teatro do Oprimido como estrutura. Na primeira parte descrevi as razões de meu interesse na Pedagogia do Oprimido (Paulo Freire), e em seguida, no Teatro do Oprimido (Augusto Boal). Posteriormente, o foco é no significado das palavras "teatro" e "opressão" para explicar os objetivos e as raízes do Teatro do Oprimido. No final do artigo o projeto "TOgether" é apresentado: a trajetória de uma pesquisa-ação europeia destinada à construção de um currículo para o formador do Teatro do Oprimido, bem como experiências com o potencial estético do método. 

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (S1) ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Jessica Damon

This paper describes the interaction between an American community of dancers and the wave of Afro-Brazilian influence that entered that community. Through personal experience, academic research, community observation, and conversations, the author examines the role of samba and the religious dances of the orixds within a suburban white community, highlighting how meaning is changed and constructed based on cultural context. The author emphasizes how women in this community responded to the political, social, and sexual implications of a non-native dance form, and how their resulting self-identification as a community was transformed. The essay questions how Americans can locate themselves within the greater cultural context of samba and other Afro-Brazilian dance forms, not simply as cultural outsiders but as women deeply connected to the unique American reality of these practices.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Sally Bick

This chapter introduces the political landscape caused by World War I, the crisis in capitalism, the Great Depression, and the Popular Front, crises that would shape Copland’s and Eisler’s individual musical and political perspectives. Their political commitment led them to embrace film music and to seek employment in Hollywood. Their decisions took place within the debates regarding the aesthetic and political values of high and low culture as exemplified by culture critic Gilbert Seldes (The Seven Lively Arts), George Antheil, and others. The chapter also discusses Hollywood as an industrial enterprise and the conditions that composers like Copland and Eisler faced working in the movie capital.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
José Gregorio Lemus Maestre

The inquiry is part of the research line: Community Integration, Pedagogy and Evaluation in the training of professionals, with the complex objective of analyzing Freire's work in light of the cries of the South and some solutions to the crisis. From the transcomplex rhizomatic transmethod, deconstruction gave room to the revision of some works of this distinguished lawyer, philosopher, and educator, while the crisis was deconstructed. In reconstruction, the summons of Paulo Freire is fully urgent; freedom as a political issue for citizens, where education is rethought with dialogue and political literacy. The political commitment to liberation is resumed considering the liberation from the crisis of life, especially in Venezuela.


Author(s):  
Paolo Bartoloni

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is invoked several times in the work of Giorgio Agamben, often in passing to stress a point, as when discussing the political relevance of désoeuvrement (KG 246); to develop a thought, as in the articulation of the medieval idea of imagination as the medium between body and soul (S, especially 127–9); or to explain an idea, as in the case of the artistic process understood as the meeting of contradictory forces such as inspiration and critical control (FR, especially 48–50). So while Agamben does not engage with Dante systematically, he refers to him constantly, treating the Florentine poet as an auctoritas whose presence adds critical rigour and credibility. Identifying and relating the instances of these encounters is useful since they highlight central aspects of Agamben’s thought and its development over the years, from the first writings, such as Stanzas, to more recent texts, such as Il fuoco e il racconto and The Use of Bodies. The significance of Agamben’s reliance on Dante can be divided into two categories: the aesthetic and the political. The following discussion will address each of these categories separately, but will also emphasise the philosophical continuity that links the discussion of the aesthetic with that of the political. While in the first instance Dante is offered as an example of poetic innovation, especially in relation to the use of language and imagination, in the second he is invoked as a forerunner of new forms of life. Mediality and potentiality are the two pivots connecting the aesthetic and the political.


Author(s):  
David Fearn

Eschewing historicist certainties, this chapter reassesses the political salience of Alcaeus’ lyric poetry by investigating his literary contribution to sympotic culture. Placing Alcaeus’ politically engaged voices within recent theoretical perspectives on deixis, ecphrasis, and the distinctiveness of lyric as a literary mode, the chapter argues that Alcaeus makes a systematic issue of the question of the accessibility of the contexts gestured towards, and in so doing opens up as an alluring prospect the idea of political engagement through literature. The literary and cultural significance of proverbial statements in Alcaeus is also discussed. Alcaeus’ lyric claims are felt across time and space via their special foregrounding of both material culture and political engagement, through performance and reception.


Author(s):  
Takeuchi Ayano

AbstractPublic participation has become increasingly necessary to connect a wide range of knowledge and various values to agenda setting, decision-making and policymaking. In this context, deliberative democratic concepts, especially “mini-publics,” are gaining attention. Generally, mini-publics are conducted with randomly selected lay citizens who provide sufficient information to deliberate on issues and form final recommendations. Evaluations are conducted by practitioner researchers and independent researchers, but the results are not standardized. In this study, a systematic review of existing research regarding practices and outcomes of mini-publics was conducted. To analyze 29 papers, the evaluation methodologies were divided into 4 categories of a matrix between the evaluator and evaluated data. The evaluated cases mainly focused on the following two points: (1) how to maintain deliberation quality, and (2) the feasibility of mini-publics. To create a new path to the political decision-making process through mini-publics, it must be demonstrated that mini-publics can contribute to the decision-making process and good-quality deliberations are of concern to policy-makers and experts. Mini-publics are feasible if they can contribute to the political decision-making process and practitioners can evaluate and understand the advantages of mini-publics for each case. For future research, it is important to combine practical case studies and academic research, because few studies have been evaluated by independent researchers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582110054
Author(s):  
Guylian Nemegeer ◽  
Mara Santi

This article argues that Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Notturno conveys a conscious political and cultural message which is consequent of his long-lasting political commitment to the nation. This political value of the book has been mainly overlooked. Therefore, the first part of the article shows the locations of the political and war-related content, and how the book can be considered as a war diary. Moreover, the first part of the article relates the Notturno to d’Annunzio’s political project for the nation at the time when the book was composed (1915–1921). The aim of this part is to dispel the enduring critical misinterpretation of the Notturno as an intimate collection of memories and visions and to foreground its national value. The second part of the article addresses the roots of the Notturno’s political message from a literary point of view by relating it to the national commitment underlying d’Annunzio’s works since the 1880s. This commitment is based on the revalorization in the author’s literary works of the Italian national past, in particular of the 16th century, where d’Annunzio continues and renews the national storytelling of the Risorgimento.


2013 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 70-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xavier Domènech Sampere

“That the number of our Members be unlimited” … Today we might pass over such a rule as a commonplace: and yet it is one of the hinges upon which history turns. It signified the end to any notion of exclusiveness, of politics as the preserve of any hereditary elite or property Group … To throw open the doors to propaganda and agitation in this “unlimited” way implied a new notion of democracy, which cast aside ancient inhibitions and trusted to self-activating and self-organising processes among the common people.E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class The decline of labor history in the research agenda of senior Spanish scholars matches the surprising interest in it of young researchers as indicated by the opening of new lines of research and the explosion of studies on other social movements that also have a strong class character in their origins. Moreover, despite the progressive decline of published academic research on the quintessential social movement, the truth is that its history is still crucial for understanding the political and social dynamics of the late Franco regime and the first years of democracy for at least two reasons.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-333
Author(s):  
Alena Pfoser ◽  
Sara de Jong

Artist–academic collaborations are fuelled by increasing institutional pressures to show the impact of academic research. This article departs from the celebratory accounts of collaborative work and pragmatic toolkits for successful partnerships, which are dominant in existing scholarship, arguing for the need to critically interrogate the structural conditions under which collaborations take place. Based on a reflexive case study of a project developed in the context of Tate Exchange, one of the UK’s highest-profile platforms for knowledge exchange, we reveal three sets of (unequal) pressures, which mark artist–academic collaborations in the contemporary neoliberal academy: asymmetric funding and remuneration structures; uneven pressures of audit cultures; acceleration and temporal asymmetries. Innovations at the level of individual projects or partners can only mitigate the negative effects to a limited extent. Instead this article offers a systemic critique of the political economy of artist–academic collaborations and shifts the research agenda to developing a collective response.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donatella Della Ratta

In this essay, I reflect on the aesthetic, political and material implications of filming as a continuous life activity since the beginning of the 2011 uprising in Syria. I argue that the blurry, shaky and pixelated aesthetics of Syrian user-generated videos serve to construct an ethical discourse (Ranciére 2009a; 2013) to address the genesis and the goal of the images produced, and to shape a political commitment to the evidence-image (Didi-Huberman 2008). However, while the unstable visuals of the handheld camera powerfully reconnect, both at a symbolic and aesthetic level, to the truthfulness of the moment of crisis in which they are generated, they fail to produce a clearer understanding of the situation and a counter-hegemonic narrative. In this article, I explore how new technologies have impacted this process of bearing witness and documenting events in real time, and how they have shaped a new understanding of the image as a networked, multiple object connected with the living archive of history, in a permanent dialogue with the seemingly endless flow of data nurtured by the web 2.0.


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