Kathleen Gallagher
Biographic Data
| ID | 4876132 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kathleen Gallagher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kathleen |
| FAMILY NAME | Gallagher |
| SIGNATURE | GALLAGHER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8739-2673 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Sensory and digital ethnography for a relational climate education
This article examines how sensory and digital ethnography can enrich climate education through relational, arts-led methodologies. Conducted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our ethnographic project, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics, engaged over 500 secondary and university drama students across six global sites. As pandemic restrictions necessitated a shift to virtual spaces, we embraced sensory ethnographic approaches, focus…
Harnessing speculative fiction to reimagine and rewrite our relationships to the climate crisis and the future of our local environments
In this article, we examine the fraught task of doing drama-based work on the climate crisis with youth in schools at a time of increasing climate fatalism. We focus on what a virtual, speculative fiction writing and performance workshop achieved with students in Coventry, Kaohsiung and Bogotá by inviting them to rewrite the futures of local environments. We harness the concepts of agency, memory, desire, repair and care as part of a deeply situa…
Vulnerability, care and hope in audience research
This article considers the theatre as a vital site for the formation of an ‘intergenerational polis’ through its examination of the verbatim play, Towards Youth: A play on radical hope, by Andrew Kushnir. Performed in Toronto from February to March, 2019, at Crow’s Theatre, Towards Youth attracted a uniquely intergenerational audience. Our audience research on this production, consisting of post-performance interviews, conducted in the lobby of C…
Trans/Queer representation and drama
A dialogue between Taylor, a trans male Turkish-Canadian theatre student and Kathleen, a queer, cis-gendered female Scottish-Canadian theatre researcher considers some questions that queerness and trans identities in the drama classroom invite. Based on their mutual engagement in a virtual drama club in a Toronto high school in the 2020–2021 school year, they recall together experiences of performance, performative writing, and the strangely inti…
U.S. CDC support to international Sars-CoV-2 seroprevalence surveys, May 2020–February 2022
SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence surveys provide critical information to assess the burden of COVID-19, describe population immunity, and guide public health strategies. Early in the pandemic, most of these surveys were conducted within high-income countries, leaving significant knowledge gaps in low-and middle-income (LMI) countries. To address this gap, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is supporting serosurveys internationally…
The ecology of global, collaborative ethnography
This article explores the nature of ethnographic collaboration during the harrowing and unpredictable times of a global pandemic. Documenting Year Two of a five-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, which necessitated virtual fieldwork in global drama classrooms (in Canada, India, Colombia, Taiwan, England, Greece), we offer a theoretical picture and practical illustrations of the ‘metho-pedagogical’ adaptations and observations made by the Toron…
Arts-led, youth-driven methodology and social impact
This paper considers the social role of collaborative ethnographic research amid our current intersecting social, political and ecological crises. It investigates how the multi-sited, arts-based, ethnographic study, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019–2024), adopts drama as a tool to at once respond compassionately and imaginatively to crisis, and envision alternative social, pol…
Building new publics
This article considers research as inquiry and social intervention through the lens of building theatre audiences. Detailing a research and creative collaboration with a Toronto-based theatre company, and their verbatim play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope created from the data of a global ethnographic research project, we extend Schechner's (1988, 2003. Performance Theory. London: Routledge.) notion of gathering and dispersing to illustrat…
Reports
Melissa Fleming, A Hope More Powerful than the Sea: The Journey of Doaa Al Zamel (New York: Flatiron Books, 2017), 288 pp. Omar Dewachi, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), xviii + 239 pp. Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, Sonita (Zurich: Xenix Film, 2015), 90 min. Ron Bourke, Terror and Hope: The Science of Resilience (Portland: Collective Eye Films, 2019), 36 min
Census-taking and theater-making
This article explores the unexpected discovery of a significant divergence between the strong feelings of safety and belonging reported in a school and neighborhood safety survey, and the discursive, contradictory, and complex narratives about safety revealed by students’ storytelling through theater and narratives shared with researchers in a Toronto classroom. The authors highlight how institutionalized definitions of safety most often reflect …
Lifelines
As anthropologists, much of our professional and personal life is configured around our field site
Finding What’s Real in Research and Theatre
Distinguished Professor Kathleen Gallagher spent years collaborating with Toronto-based playwright Andrew Kushnir on a project exploring the lives of young people in multiple global sites through the lens of drama experiences. In this interview, the co-editors ask Gallagher about the origins and nature of this unique collaboration, as well as about one of its special outcomes: Kushnir’s play Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope, staged at Street…
Response to Covid-19 – losing and finding one another in drama
This article engages with the sudden pivot to online learning and research in a Toronto high school drama classroom during the COVID pandemic, revealing a complex portrait of youth, connection, and the digital world at a time of physical distancing. In light of these shifting 'personal geographies', we reflect on what drama practices might be mobilised to invite intimacy into online learning
Performing care
Gallagher and Sahni elaborate on their decade-long collaboration, focussing here on their latest multi-sited ethnographic study, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: an intercultural investigation of drama pedagogy, performance and civic engagement (2014–2019) and the pedagogy and theatre work carried out at Prerna School for girls in Lucknow, India. In particular, they elaborate on Prerna’s feminist and performance pedagogy an…
The Methodological Dilemma Revisited
Beyond mimesis to an assemblage of reals in the drama classroom
In this paper, the authors argue for novel, less mimetic, ways to harness ‘the real’ in drama practices. They study particular youth theatre-making practices in a Toronto secondary classroom, both successes and failures, to make the case for an untethering of ‘the real’ from realism’s representational aesthetics. They further track the more relational aesthetics at play for a group of young theatre-makers in their context of a multi-sited, global…
The Decline of Monarchy in Nepal, the Ascendancy of the Professional Middle Class and the Event that Transformed Them
In the years leading up to the dissolution of absolute monarchy in Nepal in 1990, resistance to political authority proceeded fitfully. Opposition to the crown gained momentum after the involvement of the professional middle class. Using Max Weber's theory on legitimate power and class, this paper analyzes the erosion of the legitimacy of absolute monarchy, the ascendancy of the professional middle class, and how one event, a peaceful forum that …
Anthropology, the Military, and the Risks of Ethical Inertia
This article examines military-related teaching venues that do not fit forms of educational engagement traditionally conceptualized in the anthropological literature to date. The analysis was prompted by commentary from anthropological peers and colleagues regarding a teaching assignment I completed at Fort Hood, Texas. The article examines disciplinary responses to this form of teaching by situating the engagement within a larger narrative of an…
Performing to understand
Collaborating with Project: Humanity, an acclaimed socially engaged theatre company, we mobilized, over 16 weeks, an applied theatre methodology of drama workshops and traditional qualitative research methods to explore issues of spatialized inequality and localized poverty with a youth shelter community in Toronto, Canada. Observations gleaned through drama activities provided graphic evidence of the multiple and overlapping socio-economic press…
The gendered labor of social innovation
The Conundrum of Kamaiya
The following article seeks to explain how the relocation of former bonded laborers ( kamaiya) into a preexisting Nepalese squatter settlement confounded conventional approaches used by local leaders in profiting from the controlled distribution of unregistered government land. I argue that while liberated bonded laborer populations provide an exceptional moral high ground from which to defend the use of land in the absence of legal tenure, the b…
Drama Education in the Lives of Girls
Epidemiology of rubella virus cases in the pre-vaccination era of Ethiopia, 2009–2015
Based on our analysis, rubella was found to be endemic throughout Ethiopia. Children below the age of 10 years were the most affected. The burden of rubella cases varied from year to year but had a seasonal peak in March. To better understand the magnitude of rubella prior to vaccine introduction, establishing rubella surveillance system, conducting sero-prevalence studies among child bearing age females and establishing CRS sentinel surveillance…
The social habitus of drama
In this article, the author considers the place of drama in the formal curriculum in Ontario, Canada by considering its position in relation to curriculum theory and the texts that formally articulate it as a discipline to be taught in schools. The drama curriculum in Ontario aims to engage young people in activities and experiences that invite them to contemplate the diverse world in which they live and learn, to examine and question perspective…
Performing counter-narratives and mining creative resilience
As part of a nationwide study of growing socio-spatial inequality, researchers collaborated with a Toronto youth shelter and a theatre company, Project: Humanity, to use drama methods to explore local manifestations of poverty and social polarization. Together, shelter-dwelling youths and researchers challenged understandings of 'resilience' beyond their normative framings that fail to consider youth perspectives. Provoking affective encounters, …
Effectiveness of Respondent-Driven Sampling for Recruiting Drug Users in New York City
The ecology of global, collaborative ethnography
This article explores the nature of ethnographic collaboration during the harrowing and unpredictable times of a global pandemic. Documenting Year Two of a five-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, which necessitated virtual fieldwork in global drama classrooms (in Canada, India, Colombia, Taiwan, England, Greece), we offer a theoretical picture and practical illustrations of the ‘metho-pedagogical’ adaptations and observations made by the Toron…
Performing care
Gallagher and Sahni elaborate on their decade-long collaboration, focussing here on their latest multi-sited ethnographic study, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: an intercultural investigation of drama pedagogy, performance and civic engagement (2014–2019) and the pedagogy and theatre work carried out at Prerna School for girls in Lucknow, India. In particular, they elaborate on Prerna’s feminist and performance pedagogy an…
Multi-site ethnography, hypermedia and the productive hazards of digital methods
This article explores the possibilities and frustrations of using digital methods in a multi-sited ethnographic research project. The project, Urban School Performances: The interplay, through live and digital drama, of local-global knowledge about student engagement, is a study of youth and teachers in drama classrooms in contexts of schooling marked as ‘disadvantaged’ in research sites in Toronto (Canada), Lucknow (India), Taipei (Taiwan) and B…
Performing counter-narratives and mining creative resilience
As part of a nationwide study of growing socio-spatial inequality, researchers collaborated with a Toronto youth shelter and a theatre company, Project: Humanity, to use drama methods to explore local manifestations of poverty and social polarization. Together, shelter-dwelling youths and researchers challenged understandings of 'resilience' beyond their normative framings that fail to consider youth perspectives. Provoking affective encounters, …
Arts-led, youth-driven methodology and social impact
This paper considers the social role of collaborative ethnographic research amid our current intersecting social, political and ecological crises. It investigates how the multi-sited, arts-based, ethnographic study, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019–2024), adopts drama as a tool to at once respond compassionately and imaginatively to crisis, and envision alternative social, pol…
Reports
Melissa Fleming, A Hope More Powerful than the Sea: The Journey of Doaa Al Zamel (New York: Flatiron Books, 2017), 288 pp. Omar Dewachi, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), xviii + 239 pp. Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, Sonita (Zurich: Xenix Film, 2015), 90 min. Ron Bourke, Terror and Hope: The Science of Resilience (Portland: Collective Eye Films, 2019), 36 min
Becoming a networked public
The following article describes a research context that has privileged both virtual and placed-based ethnographic fieldwork, using a hybrid methodology of live and digital communications across school sites in Toronto, Canada; Lucknow, India; Taipei, Taiwan; and Boston, USA. The multi-site ethnographic study is concerned with questions of school (dis)engagement, as experienced by young people often marked as ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘marginal’ to the …
Dying to Teach
One never knows what may jump from the displays of books at American Educational Research Association (AERA) meetings and find itself in one’s arms. It is a veritable sea of publishers at the annua
How Does Knowin’ My Business Make You Any Safer
The article is an account of the second year of a three-year research project titled, Drama Education, Youth, and Social Cohesion: (re)constructing identities in urban contexts, examining the experiences of youth in urban drama classrooms, and the dynamic forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced there. The researchers contemplate findings based on a methodological shift, in which they dramatically engage the students in an exploration of the…
The Everyday Classroom As Problematic
The title of this article is borrowed and adapted from Dorothy Smith’s authoritative text, “The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology.” The basic premise of Smith’s work is that sociology, as a discipline, has operated largely outside women’s experiences and has, despite this, been used as a means of measuring, understanding, and articulating the experiences of women. Likewise, the “everyday classroom” has traditionally operated wit…
The Everyday Classroom As Problematic
The title of this article is borrowed and adapted from Dorothy Smith’s authoritative text, “The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology.” The basic premise of Smith’s work is that sociology, as a discipline, has operated largely outside women’s experiences and has, despite this, been used as a means of measuring, understanding, and articulating the experiences of women. Likewise, the “everyday classroom” has traditionally operated wit…
How Does Knowin’ My Business Make You Any Safer
The article is an account of the second year of a three-year research project titled, Drama Education, Youth, and Social Cohesion: (re)constructing identities in urban contexts, examining the experiences of youth in urban drama classrooms, and the dynamic forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced there. The researchers contemplate findings based on a methodological shift, in which they dramatically engage the students in an exploration of the…
I.D.ology and the technologies of public (school) space
This paper explores spatial theory, and particularly a Foucauldian analysis of space, power, and the subject, as a frame within which to examine moves toward security in North American urban schools. We bring into play empirical data from an ethnographic study of New York City and Toronto schools where policies and technologies of record-keeping, identification-verifying, and spatial arrangements are producing altered experiences of subjectivity …
Pondering ethics
Effectiveness of Respondent-Driven Sampling for Recruiting Drug Users in New York City
Behavioral Surveillance among People at Risk for HIV Infection in the U.S.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in collaboration with 25 state and local health departments, began the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance System (NHBS) in 2003. The system focuses on people at risk for HIV infection and surveys the three populations at highest risk for HIV in the United States: men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and high-risk heterosexuals. The project collects information from these three populati…
Surveillance of HIV Risk and Prevention Behaviors of Men Who Have Sex with Men—A National Application of Venue-Based, Time-Space Sampling
In collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, participating state and local health departments, universities, and community-based organizations applied venue-based, time-space sampling methods for the first wave of National HIV Behavioral Surveillance of men who have sex with men (NHBS-MSM). Conducted in 17 metropolitan areas in the United States and Puerto Rico from November 2003 through April 2005, NHBS-MSM methods inclu…
When drama praxis rocks the boat
This article examines the particular strength of theatre to raise questions about relations of gender and race. The authors consider the ‘rights’ of youth and teachers in schools to use drama to critique their cultural contexts and connect these educational struggles to those of broader political, cultural, and social democratic life. The empirical work examined addresses the implications of challenging normative constructions of racial and gende…
Effectiveness of Respondent–Driven Sampling for Recruiting Drug Users in New York City
The Methodological Dilemma
Introduction Part I: Representation and Contexts 1.The Politics of Making Claims: Challenges of Qualitative Web-Based Research, Megan Boler 2.Linking Global Trends and Local Lives: Mapping the Methodological Dilemmas, Kiran Mirchandani and Roxana Ng 3.Coming to Terms: Methodological and Other Dilemmas in Research, Kari Dehli 4.The Art of Methodology: A Collaborative Science, Kathleen Gallagher Part II: Representation and Relationships 5.Performed…
Dying to Teach
One never knows what may jump from the displays of books at American Educational Research Association (AERA) meetings and find itself in one’s arms. It is a veritable sea of publishers at the annua
Traversing Territories
Applied theatre at the heart of educational reform
This article reports on an impact assessment study, conducted between 2007 and 2009, of the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario's (ETFO) Poverty and Education Project, an intervention which encouraged educators to challenge their assumptions about poverty and explore collaborative opportunities to mitigate the effects of poverty in their schools. A touring theatre production (Danny, King of the Basement), professional development in drama,…
It could have been so much better’
In this paper, the authors consider early results from their ethnographic research in urban drama classrooms by parsing the aesthetic and social imperatives at play in the classroom. Moved by the observation that teachers and students alike seem to be pursuing elusive aesthetic and social ideals, the authors draw on Judith Butler's notion of ‘melancholia’ to explain the feeling of disappointment that sometimes follows difficult drama work – the s…
Drama and theatre in urban contexts
Which New Literacies? Dialogue and Performance in Youth Writing
Measurements of literacy learning in schools, the authors argue, have settled into static and individualized understandings of what should be the most invigorating and social aspect of schooling for youth. By contrast, this article explores the place of aesthetic, dialogic, and performative forms of literacy in the adolescent classroom by excavating ethnographic data from an urban multicultural high school. Close examination of student writing, f…
Multi-site ethnography, hypermedia and the productive hazards of digital methods
This article explores the possibilities and frustrations of using digital methods in a multi-sited ethnographic research project. The project, Urban School Performances: The interplay, through live and digital drama, of local-global knowledge about student engagement, is a study of youth and teachers in drama classrooms in contexts of schooling marked as ‘disadvantaged’ in research sites in Toronto (Canada), Lucknow (India), Taipei (Taiwan) and B…
A Functional Public Health Surveillance System
Lenert and Sundwall identify opportunities and challenges of the Meaningful Use (MUse) incentive programs that advance standardized electronic reporting to health departments at a time when there is limited funding to upgrade systems. We concur that cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a possible remedy. However, we disagree with their conclusion that “the security risks inherent in BioSense 2.0’s public cloud implementation may make this …
Between the frames
In this article, we consider the aesthetic, political and pedagogical strengths of a verbatim theatre performance, The Middle Place by Project: Humanity, a play that explores the experiences of shelter youth in Toronto, Canada. This ethnographic study moved from drama classrooms into theatres and charted audience responses to the production, its pre- and post-show programming and the company's curation of the theatre space. Using data from post-p…
Becoming a networked public
The following article describes a research context that has privileged both virtual and placed-based ethnographic fieldwork, using a hybrid methodology of live and digital communications across school sites in Toronto, Canada; Lucknow, India; Taipei, Taiwan; and Boston, USA. The multi-site ethnographic study is concerned with questions of school (dis)engagement, as experienced by young people often marked as ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘marginal’ to the …
All gender is a performance, all performance gendered
Note on contributorKathleen Gallagher is a professor and the Canada Research Chair in Theatre, Youth and Research in Urban Schools at the University of Toronto. Her books include The Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and Drama Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities (University of Toronto Press, 2000)
Addressing Barriers to Minority Ethnic Students’ Learning in a Performative Culture
Beckoning hope and care
The call to make a short contribution to RIDE's 20th anniversary issue was impossible to ignore. The chance to reflect on the place of this journal in my scholarly career and in those of my student
Drama Education in the Lives of Girls
Epidemiology of rubella virus cases in the pre-vaccination era of Ethiopia, 2009–2015
Based on our analysis, rubella was found to be endemic throughout Ethiopia. Children below the age of 10 years were the most affected. The burden of rubella cases varied from year to year but had a seasonal peak in March. To better understand the magnitude of rubella prior to vaccine introduction, establishing rubella surveillance system, conducting sero-prevalence studies among child bearing age females and establishing CRS sentinel surveillance…
Sociology (36 works) · Drama (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (17 works) · Visual arts (17 works) · Art (15 works) · Pedagogy (15 works) · Ethnography (11 works) · Gender Studies (11 works)