Location: Roger Bishop Theatre
Moderator: Nicole Nolette
Abstract:
This curated panel will present the ongoing work of Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs, a cross–Canada, industry-academic partnership fostering decolonization, anti-racism, equity, diversity, and inclusion, and access (DC/AR/EDIA) in post-secondary theatre education and funded by a SSHRC Partnership Grant (2023-30). SBF/MSMA responds directly to urgent calls from students, educators, theatre companies, and professional associations who have demanded an end to the systemic barriers that have long excluded Indigenous, racialized, diversely gendered, disabled, Deaf, and linguistically minoritized voices from theatre training. The goal of the project is the development of “wise practices” (Wesley-Esquimaux and Caillou) in response to the “wicked problem” (Rittel and Webber) of advancing DC/AR/EDIA in a climate of financial instability and political uncertainty across the post-secondary theatre sector. Through collaborative research, innovative pilot projects, and sustained community engagement, SBF/MSMA is building sustainable pathways toward equity, justice, and inclusion that extend far beyond its seven-year (2023-30) timeline.
At CATR 2024, SBF/MSMA’s postdoctoral fellows offered papers on a curated panel introducing the partnership’s community-driven research methods. This 2025 panel will deliver an update and expansion on this information, by presenting the methodological and structural framework that we have developed over the partnership’s first three years to support research- and practice-based activity across the university and college departments that are our partners. This framework draws on a relational design research methodology informed by intersectional feminism, the Ontario Federation for Indigenous Friendship Centres’ community-driven Utility, Self-Voicing, Access, Interrelationality (USAI) research framework, and a restorative approach to justice.
Panel chair: Dr. Nicole Nolette, Associate Professor, French Studies, University of Waterloo
L’animation de la scéance serait bilingue. Nous répondrons aux questions dans les deux langues. Nicole is willing and able to moderate other panels in English or French.
Dr. Sunita Nigam, “A Restorative Approach to Healthier Relational Ecosystems in Canadian Theatre Education: Insights from Staging Better Futures / Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs.” [in English]
This presentation will be in English. Sunita is willing and able to moderate other panels in English or French.
Over the past two decades, Canadian theatre and theatre education have faced mounting calls to dismantle entrenched systems that perpetuate racism, sexism, colonialism, sexual violence, and other forms of harm against students, educators, and practitioners. This paper proposes that a restorative approach—grounded in relational theory—can guide responses to these calls by centering and supporting relationships rooted in mutual respect, concern, and dignity. Specifically, it examines how a restorative approach might advance relational justice in the development and governance of Staging Better Futures / Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs (SBF/MSMA), a Canada-wide bilingual partnership enacting equity-oriented interventions to improve the teaching and learning conditions of minoritized students and contract faculty in postsecondary theatre education. Crucially, SBF/MSMA positions a restorative framework as foundational not only to its equity interventions, but also to its research methodologies, workplace culture, and partnership governance. The discussion explores how adopting this framework can transform conventional practices of governance, conflict resolution, research ethics development, and project evaluation, while also informing the creation of equitable bilingual work practices and policies. Ultimately, I propose SBF/MSMA’s explicit use of a restorative framework as a potential model for cultivating healthier relational ecosystems across professional and educational theatre milieux in Canada.
Dr. Jeffrey Gagnon, “Activating Relational Design Research in Staging Better Futures / Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs.” [en français]
Cette présentation sera en français.
This paper demonstrates the development of relational design research as a methodology through its pragmatic activation as the prevailing methodological approach of the SBF/MSMA partnership in its first phase of activities. Design research is a “pragmatic and contingent mixed methodology combining arts-based, participatory, quantitative, and even historical components, although the particular combination is rarely predetermined since design research emphasizes iterative processes” (Aikman, Roberts-Smith & Ruecker 147). Relational theory manifests in multiple ways, but important considerations include an emphasis on how human self “is constituted in and through relationship with others” (Llewellyn 4), that knowledge is “an outcome of relational processes” (Gergan 204), and that the fact of our being in relationship not only “provides lessons on how we should order our societies” (Wildcat & Voth 476), but in the case of SBF/MSMA, how we approach our research. While relational design research was initially developed and theorized to support discrete, short-term community-engaged research projects including some focused on paratheatrical activities, SBF/MSMA’s seven-year, multi-project program of collaborative research–focused directly on theatre pedagogy, theatre making, and the institutional structures that support them–applies relational design research at the level of the overall cross-sector, multi-institutional Partnership project as well as individual pilot projects. Questions arising during the first three years of the Partnership’s research activities have led to an emerging protocol for “aspirational” research ethics; new processes for supporting methodological consistency; and new approaches to measuring research progress.
Dr. Jennifer Roberts-Smith, “Intersectional feminist, restorative leadership in development and practice: Staging Better Futures / Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs” [en français et anglais]
This presentation will be in English and French. JRS is willing and able to moderate other panels in English only.
On behalf of myself and SBF/MSMA co-director Nicole Nolette, I consider how we came to understand our approach to leadership of the partnership. “Why us?,” we ask. The answer tentatively points to another question: “Why now?” Reflecting on the needs the project was intended to address as it was devised in 2020 and 2021, I engage with our early understanding of what leadership would mean for us, and with what it has meant to iteratively build a cross-sectoral partnership to enact systemic change in postsecondary theatre training. I discuss emerging principles of relational research leadership that have proven useful in the context of SBF/MSMA and which may be relevant for community-driven research projects in theatre studies and beyond, with a special focus on “ally-ship” as this concept has been evolving in relation to the roles of individuals and institutions within the partnership. At a time of increasing pressures on universities and the arts, sectors well-versed in crisis narratives, we propose that it is more important than ever to resist such narratives and focus on systemic change.
Biographies:
Jeff Gagnon is a graduate of the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies (Toronto). He is SBF/MSMA’s postdoctoral fellow in community-driven research, ethics, and methodology at the University of Waterloo’s department of French Studies. Jeff’s work on SBF/MSMA’s Wise Research Infrastructures Project, jointly sponsored by Mass Culture, is an outgrowth of his interest in settler colonial infrastructures, spatial ethics, and spectrum sovereignty.
Sunita Nigam is a Community-Driven Research Postdoctoral Fellow on Governance with Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs in Brock University’s Department of Dramatic Arts. She holds a PhD in English from McGill University and completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Theatre & Performance Studies at York University. Her research, which is at the intersection of performance, theatre, and cultural studies, examines the aesthetic and political dimensions of urban, national, cultural, and pedagogical ecosystems. She has published on the racialized, gendered, and class dynamics of performance in Québec and Mexico, including stand-up comedy, blackface minstrelsy, burlesque, activist theatre, and urban design campaigns. Her dissertation, Performing Cities: The Performance and Politics of Place: Mexico City, New York, Montreal, received McGill’s Arts Insights Dissertation Award.
Dr. Jennifer Roberts-Smith is an artist-researcher, whose transdisciplinary work in performance, digital media, design, education, and social justice has appeared in theatres, exhibitions, and scholarly publications internationally. She is Professor and Chair of Dramatic Arts at Brock University and co-director, with Nicole Nolette (University of Waterloo) of Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs.