The CEU Center for Teaching and Learning invites faculty colleagues and doctoral students to join the workshop on Exploring Theatre as a Teaching and Research Method for social change
with
Dr. Maria Kaika
Professor in Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning, University of Amsterdam
Recipient of the tenth annual European Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences and Humanities
You can join the workshop either in-person in Vienna or online
Registration (log in required)
A Zoom link will be sent to participants joining online before the workshop.
"In this talk, I shall give examples of how I employ participatory theatre and drama methods in my teaching and research practice. Using concrete examples, I shall discuss how community theatre and drama:
- employed as a teaching methodology has the ability to transcend disciplinary contexts and unsettle taken-for-granted identities but also taken for granted concepts (such as stakeholder, resilience, participation, empowerment, etc.)
- used as research method can provide a novel insight into the dynamics of social conflict, change and development practices,
- encouraged as a guided socio-spatial practice can be an empowering tool to move beyond processes of ‘stakeholder participation’ and express the plurality of actors, their stories, and their positions in affective ways that go beyond the constraints of language and verbal communication."
Maria Kaika is Director of the Centre for Urban studies and Chair in Urban Regional and Environmental Planning, at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a DPhil in urban geography (University of Oxford) and a Masters in Architecture (National Technical University of Athens). Her research focuses on crisis and financialization, urban political ecology, and urban radical imaginaries and has been funded by national and international research councils. She is author of City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (2005; Routledge, New York) and co-editor of In the Nature of Cities: urban political ecology and the metabolism of urban environments (with N Heynen and E Swyngedouw 2006; Routledge, London); Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Changing Climate (with R Keil, T Mandler, Y Tzaninis, 2022; Manchester University Press) and The Political Ecology of Austerity (with R Calvario and G Velegrakis; 2022; Routledge).