Co-Producing Knowledge through Participatory Theatre: Reflections on Ethnography, Empathy and Power

This paper is based on methodological reflections from a participatory theatre project with economically marginal youth in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. It offers empirical considerations on the application of participatory methods in reference to three concerns of feminist research: the situated nature of knowledge; the wish to create non-hierarchical knowledge; and the orientation towards emancipatory action. In discussing the potential for meaningful participation to create inclusive research spaces, the paper suggests the importance of acknowledging the necessarily indeterminate and imperfect nature of our efforts to mitigate power imbalances and the challenge of intersubjective understanding in our research encounters.