Missing: A Musical Dramedy: Engaging with the missing through the perpetually present

Missing uses a historical reimagining of the murder of JonBenét Ramsey as a launchpad to examine what it is like for a woman of colour to be inundated in a sexist and racist media and cultural spin-cycle. The script tells the story of a young Black girl, Nancy, coming of age and absorbing these cultural messages. In Act 1, Nancy, a child beauty pageant contestant, learns about the death of her friend, JonBenét. Nancy is simultaneously drawn in, obsessed and repulsed by the media storm that follows. In Act 2, indelibly shaped by this childhood event and inspired by her role model Diane Sawyer (pageant winner turned news anchor), Nancy has grown up to be a reporter. She now finds herself peddling similarly problematic stories for ratings and clickbait. Nancy struggles increasingly with both the erasure of identities like her own and the salacious eagerness through which the media (now her job) capitalizes on violence against women in general. The title Missing stems from ‘missing white woman syndrome’ a phrase coined by PBS journalist Gwen Ifill and subsequently adopted by social scientists to refer to the immensely uneven media coverage favouring victims who are upper/middle-class white girls/women in contrast to the coverage and framing of victims of colour. A key goal of the play is to underscore and then question the dominant media representations of women whose stories garner mainstream attention. Whose stories get told? How are they framed? Who, in turn, are marginalized and ignored? How can artists engage representational inequity without inadvertently piling more attention on the already visible? Musicals can and should tackle questions of systemic inequity and inclusion; doing so requires more than positioning protagonists of colour in a theatrical world that fails to acknowledge the systemic realities of our actual one. Missing, a collaborative project in process, tackles these questions.

Are you listening? Echoing the voices of looked after children about their transition to secondary school

Transition to secondary school is a significant childhood event, especially for the most vulnerable children. Many looked after children experience multiple episodes of instability, loss and change which can affect this move. Research shows that school belonging promotes acceptance, inclusion and respect, and impacts positively on school transfer and participation. Asking children for their views on matters that affect them can ease the process and increase their belonging and well-being. This article seeks to echo the voices of 36 children aged 10 to 12 who participated in a therapeutic primary to secondary transition initiative for looked after children. Informed by a participatory action research approach, its focus was to facilitate the child’s voice. Child-friendly, multi-method techniques and activities were used to elicit their views about the transition. Social connections, relationships, feeling safe and belonging within the school environment emerged as key themes. Children specifically highlighted the importance of friendships as a mechanism for supporting their belonging during this time. They also voiced the need for their social connections and belonging to be promoted. This unique intervention provides a framework for facilitating the voices of looked after children and underlines the need for practitioners to listen and understand moves from primary to secondary schools from the child’s perspective.

A Scarred Tympanum

Philosophy is no stranger to autobiography. Yet, despite the fact that we know, thanks to Augustine and Descartes, to Rousseau and Nietzsche, that autobiography can be philosophically useful, the grounds for autobiography’s philosophical significance still evade us. Good detectives that we are, we rummage for clues, for biographical facts that may throw light on this or the other philosophical conundrum, when we have known all along that life told is more philosophically eloquent than life lived. In all of our attempts to recount our lives — to a loved one, to a therapist, to ourselves — there are incidents that seem almost naturally to take precedent over others. Memory, in this sense, works inconsistently, perhaps prejudicially; its retrospective light illuminating some events, which subsequently become important to us, whilst leaving others in the dark. The term that Freud might have used to describe this phenomenon is Nachträglichkeit, an untranslatable word announcing memory’s deferred action, the fact that some incidents only gain significance retrospectively. Nachträglichkeit in its widest possible sense thus describes the fact that whilst life is lived forwards, it can only be understood backwards. This is also true for Stanley Cavell’s autobiographical writings, in which one childhood event in particular emerges as philosophically decisive.