Participatory Theater as Fieldwork in Chinese Prisons: A Research Note

This methodological reflection is based on the author's own experience taking part in participatory theater projects in mainland Chinese prisons over the past 5 years. This article demonstrates how the author's participation in prison theater projects secured otherwise unattainable research access by forming collaborations with various organizations. Participatory theater workshops also offered the space for sustaining long-term rapport. This research note discusses why trusting relationships are the most important guarantee to obtaining valid data in Chinese prison research. The findings contribute to understanding methodological challenges and innovations of conducting fieldwork in criminal justice systems with no formal research access channels.

Changing the Face of Health Care: A Participatory Theater Intervention for Promoting Retention of Under-Represented Minority Students in Health Care

Date Presented Accepted for AOTA INSPIRE 2021 but unable to be presented due to online event limitations. Health workforce diversity and under-represented minority student enrollment in health professions programs are major sources of concern for allied health professions. We used sequential mixed methods to examine the impact of a participatory theater intervention on minority students’ engagement in their educational journeys toward becoming health care professionals, with the goal of promoting diversity in health care education, and found a significant increase in meaningful participation. Primary Author and Speaker: Sally Wasmuth Contributing Authors: NiCole Keith, Kevin T. Pritchard

CORES: Interactions of artistic and scientific perspectives

<p><strong>CORES: Interactions of artistic and scientific perspectives</strong></p><p><strong>Bernard GUELTON, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, ANR CORES</strong></p><p><strong> </strong></p><p>Artistic context</p><p>The research team Fictions & Interactions of the University Paris 1 and the media company ORBE have developed since 2013 collective artistic experiments between distant cities (Paris, Shanghai, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro). Using specially designed interactive applications and creative scenarios, the goal was to connect remote walkers between one or the other of these cities. The project was to hybridize urban spaces of different conformities through physical, virtual and fictional interactions between participants.</p><p>The artistic practices of space and especially the interactions between distant walkers do not simply provide a context for study here, but form a kind of anticipation of the post-representational paradigm of cartography with examples such as the psycho-geography of the situationists in the late 1950s. As early as 1994, an artist like Fujihata used GPS technology in his project Impressing Velocity. The data collected by Fujihata models the itinerary by producing a contraction of the form during a rapid movement, or an expansion of the form during a slow movement. However, it is from the 2000s that groups of artists from participatory theater such as Blast Theory use GPS technologies, visual and verbal interactions to connect walkers in tasks of exploration or playful interaction.</p><p>Scientific implications</p><p>After several years of experimentation on collective walks using instrumental and shared CTs, a central scientific question has clearly emerged: to what extent are instrumental and shared maps likely to modify our behaviours and spatial representations?</p><p>To answer the question of the impact of mapping tools and collective interactions on collective representations, the CORES project associates and crosses geography, geomatics, cognitive psychology, computer science, artistic practices of walking, design and data visualization. Each of these disciplines contributes to the proposed methodology. Spatial cognition from cognitive psychology is now extended and transformed by the neurophysiology of brain areas dedicated to spatial behaviors. If the study of representations in space has long associated cognitive psychology and geographical sciences, the CORES project renews this association in an original way by closely linking representations of space to behaviours with an approach that is no longer only static, but above all dynamic. Thus, a dynamic approach to the trackings of walkers in relation to a dynamic approach to drawn representations forms an important stake at the level of the proposed methodology.</p>

Humanitarian Theater in the Great Lakes Region

In nominally “postwar” contexts throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region, participatory theater has been mobilized almost exclusively as a tool for either awareness or healing. The rhetoric prescribed for peace and development is so dominant in the humanitarian market that the artist’s ethos is channeled in directions more ethical than aesthetic. The shared circulation of participatory theater through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi shows how an aesthetic model is exported and becomes a transnationalized tool, one designed to be tailored to any kind of crisis context. Thanks to NGOs’ powerful influence, this model shapes theater and performance landscapes by influencing generations of writers and actors, uniting creators through artistic networks. This theater is characterized by a strong aspiration to performativity which occurs in texts and performances through the centrality of the chorus, frequent mise en abyme, and the quest for catharsis.