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From Personal to Political—Taiwanese Youth Navigating Multiple Identities and Renegotiating Confucian Ethics Through Documentary and Ethno-Theatre Methodology

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Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope

Part of the book series: Perspectives on Children and Young People ((PCYP,volume 10))

Abstract

In my dual role as the lead researcher in the Taiwan site, and as an experienced Community Theatre and Oral History practitioner, I worked with one of my university classes to explore The Radical Hope Project’s performative methodologies of Verbatim Theatre, Oral History, and Collective Devising. This chapter discusses how, based on the data from observations, interviews, as well as questionnaires, the performative methodologies of the project facilitated opportunities for students to explore their multiple identities as well as their complicated negotiation of traditional Confucian ethics within contemporary Taiwanese society. In this chapter, I offer a detailed exploration of my students’ working processes as they tackled urgent issues they perceived in society, such as gender inequality, LGBT+ rights, and the socio-economic crisis. In collaboration, the students were able to re-construct their various familial, sexual, and personal identities in response to these social issues by configuring and re-figuring original narratives taken from their own lives. I close the chapter by considering the importance of the project’s global relationality: through online communication and face-to-face meetings, I (and my students) benefitted from multi-sited perspectives. Kathleen Gallagher, Dirk Rodricks, Andrew Kushnir, and Kelsey Jacobson visited the Taiwan site in 2016 and their dialogue with me and my students offered us valuable global perspectives on our local issues that deeply impacted my own and my students’ work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I conducted a focus group with my class to debrief their Verbatim Theatre experience in March 2016.

  2. 2.

    The same class of 40 students completed both the verbatim and Oral History Performance units as part of the Radical Hope Project. This Survey was completed by these students after the Oral History Performance unit was completed but offered reflections that are also useful as I considered their Verbatim Theatre experiences.

  3. 3.

    In this volume, authors Myrto Pigkou-Repousi and Christine Balt write about the experiences of Greek youth from two different angles. Pigkou-Repousi, a practitioner-researcher, offers an inside view of how youth experience the ongoing intersecting and overlapping crises. Balt makes meaning of these experiences through digital footage bringing to bear her own social location as a researcher based in Toronto. Also, in this volume, Rachel Turner-King and Nancy Cardwell explore how the young people of Canley Youth Theatre negotiated ideas around the Brexit referendum result.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Drama Creation and Application, National University of Tainan, Tainan City, Taiwan

    Wan-Jung Wang

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  1. Wan-Jung Wang
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Correspondence to Wan-Jung Wang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Kathleen Gallagher

  2. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Dirk J. Rodricks

  3. Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Kelsey Jacobson

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Wang, WJ. (2020). From Personal to Political—Taiwanese Youth Navigating Multiple Identities and Renegotiating Confucian Ethics Through Documentary and Ethno-Theatre Methodology. In: Gallagher, K., Rodricks, D., Jacobson, K. (eds) Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 10. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1282-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1282-7_5

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  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-1281-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-1282-7

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