For those who’d like to read it, my full PhD Thesis is available here:
For those who might simply want to read the abstract to know what it’s about I have included below:
Shaping Socially Engaged Art Practice and Critical Pedagogy in the UK arts and cultural sector: An Auto/biographical Framing of Class, Gender and Political Activism
ABSTRACT:
Situated at the intersection of critical pedagogy, radical theatre and political activism, this
PhD thesis reflects critically on a series of publications and an interdisciplinary counterhegemonic socially engaged art practice between 2010-20. Mobilising the
auto/biographical as a conceptual framework for critical analysis, the thesis addresses
questions of systemic inequalities, cultural democracy and social transformation in the
UK arts and cultural sector. By examining my lived experience through the analytical
lenses of intersectionality and feminist standpoint theory, the thesis foregrounds how
interconnecting oppressions of gender and class have contributed to the formation of my
creative practice and its pedagogical interventions, constituting a direct critical response
to redressing unequal power relations at a structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and
personal level. In chapter one I examine how the process of writing this thesis begins to
expose the complex and interconnected ways in which structural oppressions of class and
gender continue to be disabling for working-class women. Drawing on a series of written
publications, it outlines how my lived experience of engagement with the radical social
and political movements of the twentieth century, such as feminism and the anti-war
movement, led me to create a singular critical praxis and pedagogy. By positioning
socially engaged art practice and critical pedagogy within wider struggles for social
justice, chapter two examines the unconference ‘Taking Part’ (2010) within the critical
ontology of my practice and the possibilities of working across sectors and disciplines to
offer creative resistance to the growing inequalities of political austerity that marked this
period. Through locating the immersive Participation on Trial within a series of public
manifestations of theatre as protest, chapter three reclaims the role of theatre as a place
of resistance, examining its contribution to social change by creating spaces for agonistic
discourse and dialogue. Taken together, the three chapters interrogate how the cyclical
appropriation, dilution and de-politicisation of the language and ethos of socially engaged
art practices by dominant powers within the cultural sector and an absence of critical selfawareness and reflexivity has maintained systemic inequality and undermined the
possibility of realising cultural democracy.
Chrissie Tiller 