Outlined below are methodologies and principles underpinning Collective Encounters’ approach to Creative Participatory Research.

Theatre For Social Change: Theatre for Social Change uses a set of eclectic practices drawn from the work of Brecht, Boal, New York Theatre of the Oppressed, Rustom Barucha and others that engage marginalised communities to tell untold stories and to tackle local and international concerns. The practice is trauma-informed, embodied, and works to ‘make strange’ the rules of every day life that people may not be aware of, but are used to enact oppression.

Embodied Popular Education: Building on the work of Paulo Freire, Collective Encounters Theatre for Social Change are developing ‘Embodied Popular Education’ which gives space to tacit, somatic exchanges of knowledge as well as those which are privileged by speech.

Understanding Place: Understanding Place is a ‘Land Pedagogy’ for Liverpool and beyond inspired by the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Henri Lefebvre. Combined with the other methodologies it fosters ‘embodied conscientisation’, by which the role of participatory drama in questioning and making strange can be combined with creating ‘spatial vocabularies of power’. This enables facilitator/participants and participant/facilitators to build on processes of co-regulation within the group, reclaiming embodied ‘knowing’, de-internalising power relationships and generating awareness of oppressive environments as being susceptible to transformation.

We are currently engaged in a number of creative research partnerships:

– University of Liverpool

– Liverpool John Moores University

– Edge Hill University

– ReCite Consortium

– Liverpool City Region Theatre Network

– The Care Aesthetics: Research Exploration with the University Of Manchester and Birkbeck College

– Poverty Research and Advocacy Network at Liverpool Hope University