Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative

For young people, the space of the drama classroom can be a space for deep learning as they struggle across difference to create something together with common purpose. Collaborating across institutions, theatres, and community spaces, the research in Hope in a Collapsing World mobilizes theatre to build its methodology and create new data with young people as they seek the language of performance to communicate their worries, fears, and dreams to a global network of researchers and a wider public.

A collaboration between a social scientist and a playwright and using both ethnographic study and playwriting, Hope in a Collapsing World represents a groundbreaking hybrid format of research text and original script - titled Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope - for reading, experimentation, and performance.

Kathleen Gallagher is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Distinguished Professor in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, and Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.
Andrew Kushnir is an independent artist and artistic director of Project: Humanity