Funding for innovative participatory action research project 'Performing Sociology'

Charlie Cooper has been awarded £6393 by the Higher Education Academy to facilitate a project entitled Performing Sociology that will seek to evaluate the applicability of techniques drawn from participatory action research (PAR) and drama and performance to student learning in relation to sociological problems.

It will accomplish this through introducing these techniques to students exploring the ‘“Problem” of Youth’ - a Level 6 module offered in the Department of Social Sciences critically analysing representations of ‘youth’ in mainstream media, political and academic discourse.

By exploring this theme using PAR and disseminating the findings by way of performed readings of verbatim documentary theatre scripts, the project seeks to offer important lessons of the applicability of these techniques for teaching and studying the ‘problem’ of youth as a theoretical sociological concern.

More about the project

The pedagogical approach adopted is designed to enable students to widen their comprehension of sociological questions by exploring them in a more reflective way. The key tool adopted to enable this, PAR, involves a dialogical approach where tutor and student co-investigate the object of study. It is an approach that encourages students to explore dialectically the nature of social problems beyond traditional understandings invariably founded on positivist epistemological positions. It is a method that presents genuine opportunities for fostering what C. Wright Mills (1959) called a ‘sociological imagination’ - the means to perceive more clearly what is happening to us and to overcome ‘false consciousness’. Moreover, by building on the students’ own lived reality, PAR provides them with the conditions to strengthen their appreciation of competing theoretical positions. In contrast to conventional approaches, the tutor adopts a less didactic role and plays the part of ‘intellectual mediator’ – facilitating open dialogue in which various values and positions can be mapped out, evaluated, challenged and more clearly understood.

The project involves collaboration with a local expert from the field of PAR practice, Tish Lamb, and Dr Fred Dalmasso, a lecturer in theatre and performance from the University of Worcester.