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ToolsDuffy-Syedi, Kate (2024) Performing care with refugee youth: solidarity, interruption and precarity. Doctoral thesis, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Abstract
This thesis aims to challenge representations of unaccompanied minor refugees in media and state asylum processes by showing how they choose to represent themselves instead, when given the opportunity to do so. In fact, self-representation is precisely what the asylum system and public debates on migration systematically deny to refugees. To counter this pervasive silencing, the thesis employs devised performance projects with refugee youth which develop new modes of collective and self-authorship, created with Phosphoros Theatre, a company I co-founded. The first part of the thesis elaborates the methodological basis underpinning the practice, examining the position of refugee actors in performance making, and how their roles as storyteller, witness, collaborator and audience member might be better understood. Through examining the process of making four new performance projects, over Chapters 3-5, the research reveals how performance practice can make explicit and indeed heighten tacit acts of solidarity and self-sustaining modes of care and interdependence already present within refugee youth communities. In combining ideas around participatory performance with discourses of care, the thesis fosters new insight into performance’s capacity to form collective resistances to the dehumanising processes of the asylum system. This analysis supports the thesis’ argument that through participatory and collaborative practices, performance can not only renegotiate the pervading cultural imaginary and its misrepresentation of refugee youth, but establish more empowering processes of performing life narratives which foreground friendship, care, and solidarity. In sum: while the thesis focuses on advancing new understanding and knowledge of participatory practice in theatre and performance, it places theatre in critical dialogue with care ethics and migration studies. Thus, the research generates new thinking about agency and co-authorship when creating performance with those who have experienced displacement and how this reconfigures our understanding of the ethics and politics of creative practice when working with refugee communities.
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