This article examines drama in relation to girls' education, and considers some of the ways in which drama might be applied in schools to challenge limiting hegemonic narratives about gender and support the emerging understandings and performances of femininities of adolescent girls. It reports on case study research conducted with a Year 9 Drama…

This article presents a guided tour of the Men's Room, an arts and social welfare project that works with young men with experiences of homelessness, sex work and the criminal justice system. Focusing on three "dwelling moments" that capture how the project occupies space and time, the article describes how a queer spatial practice supports the…

In this "RiDE" themed edition on environmentalism, some short pieces are chosen where practitioners describe their own specific environmental practices. Zoe Svendsen and Lucy Neal point to the positives in two commissioned works ("The Trashcatchers' Carnival" and "3rd Ring Out"), underlining the importance of participant agency for effective…

Foucault's "technologies of the self" provides a frame through which to review the way in which different drama conventions work to govern the knowledge of the self that can be represented through the drama. The "Learning Partnerships" workshops provide the field site for the study. These workshops position high school drama students as coaches…

This article examines the performativities of three marginalised "at risk" youth who participated in a longitudinal digital storytelling project undertaken in formal and informal settings in Singapore. Seeking to foster young people's agency, identity and multiple literacies, the three and one half year project developed a range of digital…

The author travelled to Jaipur, India, in June 2009 to run a project with a group of 12 young runaways at the Bal Basera Centre, a transitional shelter for boys under the age of 18. The Centre sits within the Jaipur Municipal Police force compound, just a few yards away from the City Railway Station. Bal Basera, or "transit home" in Hindi, was…

This paper describes a research project designed to find out what happens when process drama strategies are applied to an advanced level of additional language learning. In order to answer this question, the author designed and facilitated six process drama workshops as part of a third-year course of Italian at a university in Brisbane, Australia.…

For more than 30 years drama has been promoted as a valuable teaching tool for language learning. Recent research results have reinforced this position. However, these and other earlier studies reveal that the overall success of the work is dependent, at least in part, upon the artistry of the teacher and the quality of the pretext materials used…

Drama is often used as a tool to investigate experience and to assist people to rehearse for change. Dramatic portrayals, however, can reinforce rather than challenge limiting stereotypes, and there is the potential for a positivist approach to research through drama to contribute to a pathologising of the subject and to limit the possibility of…

In autumn 2006 the Arts Council England set up the "Into the Scene" project in order to increase the number of disabled and deaf theatre practitioners graduating from accredited training courses and to increase the quality of their experience. A team from Graeae, the disabled-led theatre company that profiles the skills of actors, writers and…

Performance-making and peace-building are processes predicated on the production of safe space. But what is "safe space"? In performance-making, what is it that makes space safe without losing the creative potential of tension? What role is there for risk? And, once achieved, how does safe space become meaningful beyond its immediate community of…

In Turkey, creative drama has been incorporated into many fields; in particular, it has been used in training teachers. In learning how to use drama to teach different subjects, trainee teachers have always participated willingly in drama studies. Part of the reason for this is that Turkish people are familiar with drama activities through…

This article examines a view of site through postcolonial feminism to suggest that multiple and contradictory discourses of culture, location, gender and context are all vital in an understanding of a specific site when working with a community. These views are applied to a project undertaken with a group of Asian women in Britain exploring issues…

The authors facilitated a Theatre for Development training workshop for Save the Children UK with a number of children in three villages in northern Bangladesh in 2000. In 2005 they revisited the young people, unofficially and informally, to assess for themselves if there had been any impact of the TfD on their lives. They asked what the young…

On 21 September 1999, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan destroyed more than 100,000 houses, causing 2,294 deaths and 8,737 injuries. In the aftermath of the earthquake, a great number of social workers and cultural workers were thrust into Nantou County and Taichung County of central Taiwan, the epicentre of the earthquake, to assist the…