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 quantitative cross-site surveys, the study captured an expansive view of engagement across our very diverse local and global sites in Toronto, Boston, Taipei and Lucknow. Across our four international sites, all working with youth marked by socio-economic disadvantage, we saw that life in drama classrooms, inflected by life outside school, economic pressures, peer affiliations, stories of language and migration, and broader cultural politics, had tremendous influence on the extent to which young people could take up learning as the opportunity we mean it to be. (Contains 3 endnotes.)