Our article explores the impact of the global health pandemic on our five-year, multi-sited, collaborative ethnographic study titled "Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists" and "their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice" (2019-2024). We illustrate how our arts-led, youth-driven ethnographic…

This article considers research as inquiry and social intervention through the lens of building theatre audiences. Detailing a research and creative collaboration with a Toronto-based theatre company, and their verbatim play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope created from the data of a global ethnographic research project, we extend Schechner's…

This article explores the nature of ethnographic collaboration during the harrowing and unpredictable times of a global pandemic. Documenting Year Two of a five-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, which necessitated virtual fieldwork in global drama classrooms (in Canada, India, Colombia, Taiwan, England, Greece), we offer a theoretical picture…

Drawing from a multi-sited, global ethnography on youth civic engagement and artistic practices, the author uses students' perceptions from one Canadian high school, as they reflect on their experiences in a drama classroom, to ask what we might learn about the macro discourses and processes of social innovation from the local, artistic, and…

In this paper, the authors argue for novel, less mimetic, ways to harness "the real" in drama practices. They study particular youth theatre-making practices in a Toronto secondary classroom, both successes and failures, to make the case for an untethering of "the real" from realism's representational aesthetics. They further…

In this article, the author examines how a pedagogical and creative practice in one school for lowest-caste girls in Lucknow, India, is harnessing the imaginative affordances of theater--in particular, its ensemble-building and its capacity to hold the present open for investigation--to leverage these practices for understanding the political…

In this article, we consider the aesthetic, political and pedagogical strengths of a verbatim theatre performance, "The Middle Place" by Project: Humanity, a play that explores the experiences of shelter youth in Toronto, Canada. This ethnographic study moved from drama classrooms into theatres and charted audience responses to the…

This article reports on a multi-site global, ethnographic, and mixed methods study on student engagement. Our research has closely examined how engagement and disengagement operate subtly, simultaneously and relationally in the places and spaces where drama is made. Through years of qualitative time in high school classrooms and two different…

Measurements of literacy learning in schools, the authors argue, have settled into static and individualized understandings of what should be the most invigorating and social aspect of schooling for youth. By contrast, this article explores the place of aesthetic, dialogic, and performative forms of literacy in the adolescent classroom by…

The following article describes a research context that has privileged both virtual and placed-based ethnographic fieldwork, using a hybrid methodology of live and digital communications across school sites in Toronto, Canada; Lucknow, India; Taipei, Taiwan; and Boston, USA. The multi-site ethnographic study is concerned with questions of school…

In this paper, the authors consider early results from their ethnographic research in urban drama classrooms by parsing the aesthetic and social imperatives at play in the classroom. Moved by the observation that teachers and students alike seem to be pursuing elusive aesthetic and social ideals, the authors draw on Judith Butler's notion of…

The widespread turn towards "collaboration" in qualitative research methodologies warrants careful and continuous critique. This paper addresses the possibilities and the challenges of collaborative methodology, and in particular what happens when the line between pedagogy and methodology is blurred in classroom-based ethnographic…

This article explores the possibilities and frustrations of using digital methods in a multi-sited ethnographic research project. The project, "Urban School Performances: The interplay, through live and digital drama, of local-global knowledge about student engagement", is a study of youth and teachers in drama classrooms in contexts of…

The study on which this paper is based examined the experiences of students in order to develop a theoretical and empirically grounded account of the dynamic social forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced by youth in their unique contexts of North American urban schooling. The ethnographic scenes, organized into four "beats,"…

This paper explores spatial theory, and particularly a Foucauldian analysis of space, power, and the subject, as a frame within which to examine moves toward security in North American urban schools. We bring into play empirical data from an ethnographic study of New York City and Toronto schools where policies and technologies of record-keeping,…