Transforming Stories, Driving Change

Join us as we pull back the curtain on the magic, taking you behind the scenes for the launching of TSDC’s new workbook.

Can theatre bring new voices into public debate?

Since 2015, the Hamilton-based research and performance initiative Transforming Stories, Driving Change (TSDC) has worked alongside community partners and performer-advocates to make plays designed to draw attention to the voices and visions of people whose opinions are not often represented in discussions of the future of the City. Through our performances, we have tried to contribute to building the movements that can make public leaders more accountable to people who are affected by their decisions.

We invite you to join us on April 15th 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM as we pull back the curtain on the magic, taking you behind the scenes and launching the TSDC workbook. This digital experience features Can You Hear Us Now? a short pre-recorded performance from our most recent series of workshops, and a live conversation with Sarah Adjekum, Catherine Graham, Jennie Vengris, and Helene Vosters about the TSDC approach and its value and potential in communities.

Tickets are FREE! To register go to the TSDC workbook launch on Eventbrite.

Welcome to 2020! One purpose of the Transforming Stories, Driving Change blog is for members of the research team to reflect on experiences within the project and to make visible some of the methods we engage, and the questions we grapple with. We're excited to launch this new year (and new decade) with a guest post from a member of our TSDC research team, Elysée Nouvet. We hope you’ll join the conversation either by responding to a specific post, by writing a guest post, or by suggesting topics and participating in conversations.

Elysée Nouvet is a medical anthropologist specialized in cultural dimensions of pain and humanitarian healthcare ethics. She is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario, and also holds an appointment as Assistant professor (part-time) at McMaster. Dr. Nouvet has led and contributed to a number projects on contextual meanings and responses to suffering, as well as ‘beneficiary’ experiences of research and care. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from York (Toronto), and a Masters in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College (U.K.).

Winter 2017. We are a couple of months into a series of theatre-based workshops with women with lived experiences of precarious housing. These workshops are part of the “Transforming Hamilton Stories” project (2016-17), a pilot project that layed the foundation for TSDC.

Our research team has just received an additional small grant from McMaster, the home institution of the academics on the project. With the budget a little plumper, the research team decides it makes sense to: (1) increase hours for the artist supporting set design and prop creation for the workshop; and, (2) give women participants in the workshops an honoraria after each workshop. Workshops are 3-hour intense sessions in which group members work towards developing a presentation that took as its point of departure participants’ lived experiences of precarious housing. Up to that point, the provision of lunch, coffee, and bus tickets was what our budget permitted, but now we introduce an honorarium of $50 per workshop per participant.

A few weeks later, the matter of the honoraria comes up in a meeting. Was this going ok, to get people to sign off in the workshop and receive a little envelope of cash? Did we have a sense of how the provision of honoraria was understood and experienced by the workshop participants? We did not.

I volunteer that I feel all is going well. I have done my best to appear casual in getting participants to sign off on receiving their honoraria. As I speak though, I start to feel uncomfortable. Many conversations in the workshops at that point had centered on the women participants’ experiences of feeling routinely belittled, judged, and objectified when they tried to access health, food, and housing resources in the city. I had worked to appear casual, I realized, in an attempt to ensure provision of honoraria not echo those prior negative transactions. I had worried the one-way direction of honoraria, from the research team to workshop participants, also might underline socio-economic differences between the research team and participants so explicitly that this might disrupt any feelings of solidarity built thus far. And what about the fact that the honoraria was given to each participant in front of their peers?

As I sat in the meeting, I realized I had no idea how the women had felt. Had receiving the honoraria felt uncomfortable in any way to any of them? If yes, why? If not, why not?

The discussion in that meeting was the beginning of an unexpected point of enquiry for our research team. It flagged how under-examined the provision of honoraria in research actually is. What exactly does money in the form of honoraria do in the context of research?

Canada’s Tri-Council Policy II (2018), the Canadian reference guidelines for the conduct of research involving humans, does not mention honoraria. It has little to say about incentives and reimbursement, in fact. Article 3.2j states that any payment must be clearly explained to participants as part of their consent process. Article 3.1 of this same document cautions that “[b]ecause incentives are used to encourage participation in a research project, they are an important consideration in assessing voluntariness.” The guidelines recognize the centrality of context in determining whether an incentive offered is appropriate, or an unethical form of “undue inducement”: something that may push individuals to sign on as research participants when really, they would rather not.

Providing money to participants in any amounts that exceed the most basic participation-related expenses (e.g. bus tickets and parking fees in the context of Canadian research) is regarded by many as risky business. The primary concern is that “rewards” of research that are too tempting to refuse will undermine the core pillar of ethical research: Modern research ethics arose after World War II, and in response to the use of concentration camp prisoners by Nazi scientists for cruel and often fatal experiments. The 1947 Nuremberg Code, a key reference point for research ethics today, was named for the international trials that resulted in the conviction of many of the scientists involved in those experiments. The Nuremberg Code outlines 10 principles or conditions that must exist for research with human participants to be considered ethical and legal. Voluntary consent of the participant is the first of these. Freedom to decide whether or not to participate in research, the right to exercise this decision without being coerced, and the right to do so informed of all risks, is embedded in this core principle. It is against the dark legacy of disregard for all humans’ to chose whether or not they are willing to participate in research, that any research practice that potentially limits the freedom of an individual to refuse participation is closely scrutinized.

A related concern is that research participation motivated by self-interest is somehow morally problematic. This has never sat well with me. For one, researchers are not devoid of self-interest or expectations of personal gain. Moreover, and very troubling, is the implication that participants expecting or seeking benefits from research are somehow morally flawed. I have come across in my work the related suggestion that giving too much to participants risks corrupting otherwise “good” individuals. The unstated premise here is that money inevitably corrupts the research relationship. In this argument, the research that must be protected from the corrupting influences of money is idealized as operating outside of the financial economies of its key players (researchers and participants). The bottom line being that money corrupts. Money and voluntarism produce a tension, and risk staining research and research participation where these are idealized as extra-personal activities for the public good.

The Transforming Stories project team had obtained research ethics board approval for the provision of honoraria. We, as researchers, had zero moral distress about providing honoraria. On the contrary. We felt if our budget allowed it, it could be unethical not to do so. All the research team members were on salary when giving our afternoons to a workshop. We had access to institutional power, social recognition, and economic security the participants did not. We certainly could not see any justification for not transferring some of our newly acquired budget cash infusion to participants whose presence in and contributions to the workshop were as essential to its success as our own.

But there was the crux of the matter. Taking an inverse position that in the research ethics policies that warned payments to participants in the context of research could cause harm (e.g. be coercive and impede voluntariness), our research team had assumed the provision of honoraria might do good. In reality, we did not know. Maybe the provision of honorarium, though only $50 for an afternoon, was coercive given many participants were living on very low incomes. Maybe the honoraria did not feel right or good to participants. Did participants view it as a wage, a gift, or what? Did the participants have clear ideas in their minds about why the honoraria was provided, and whether this practice was ethical or not? How did the practice of providing honoraria play into workshop participants’ thinking about their role in the research project, and their relationship to the research team?

Sara Ahmed’s (2012) idea of performative and unperformative acts might help us think about this problem. A performative act recreates as it remakes the world. Ahmed differentiates from such acts unperformative acts. These are acts that assume the appearance of action, movement, but do nothing to shift power imbalances. Where the axis of ethical research aims to uphold a goal of social justice, figuring out how specific research practices contribute to or undermine that goal in specific research contexts is crucial.

The matter of honoraria was only one of the unexpected issues that arose through the work of this research group. We ended up conducting 10 interviews with participants in that first workshop. We asked them essentially: “What did the money [honoraria provided after workshops] mean to you?” We look forward to sharing some responses with you in an upcoming blog.

Works cited:

Ahmed, Sara (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, December 2018.

Wertheimer A, Miller F. G. (2008). “Payment for research participation: a coercive offer?” Journal of Medical Ethics 2008;34:389–392. 

The value of creating a fictional world

“The beauty of creating a fictional world is that we can, just for the purpose of the fictional world eliminate all these constraints that actually exist out there in the everyday world, which I think has the advantage of allowing us to focus in on, “what would we actually like it to be like?”
— Catherine Graham, TSDC Principal Investigator

In this concluding section of our 3-part storycircle blog series Catherine continues where she left off in her discussion of the distinction between documentation and meaning-making in the TSDC storycircles and performances. 

C: In the storycircle some documentation will happen, and by documentation I mean sharing information about the mechanics of how different problems play out in the community. This is always an important part of telling a story. But what we’re really looking for in the storycircle is how things are meaningful to people, not necessarily what happened to them, or what they would like to have happen, but why is it meaningful to you that, for example, you would like to have a forever home? What does that mean to you, why did you choose to tell us about that?

I think a misconception many people have when we first talk about TSDC is that we’re going out into their community to talk to people about how they’re experiencing something like gentrification and we’re going to document that experience. But I think the reason that these performances are so moving to people is because they’re not just about documenting that this percentage of the population is at risk of losing their housing, and this is what kind of problems happen when the elevator doesn’t work, and people are living in fear of eviction, and that’s causing health problems… All that is in there, but I don’t think that’s why these performances are making people sit up and take notice. It’s because we’re showing how the people living in this situation attribute meaning to the situation they’re in, and to the situation they would hope to be in. I think it’s a combination of desire and meaning.

Another interesting thing that can come out of storycircles is a recognition that not everyone wants what you want. Sometimes I think even the misrecognition that can come out in the answers to “this is a story about” is valuable because it allows someone to say “umm?….” If someone says, “This is a person who is so generous and gives everything to her community,” someone else can say, through their response, “Well I don’t think that’s really what that story is about, and that’s not really what I want that story to be about.”

The beauty of creating a fictional world is that we can, just for the purpose of the fictional world, eliminate all these constraints that actually exist out there in the everyday world, which I think has the advantage of allowing us to focus in on, “what would we actually like it to be like?”… and maybe to recognize that we actually don’t agree, we don’t all want the same thing here. Working to create fictional worlds together, people quickly realize that the world is richer when we build it up from different points of view, different desires, and multiple complex reactions to what is going on….

That’s why it feels so important that, the very first time we get together in the storycircle, everybody gets heard and everybody gets told that what they said was meaningful, and yet, there is no authoritative meaning imposed. There is no moment of discussion about whether you got it or not, whatever you got is what needs to be gotten from your point of view. It’s one of the things I love about the idea of the circle, we’re all exactly where we should be, seeing exactly what we should see from that position.

A Poetic, Meaning-Making Public

I really like that quote from Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” where he talks about how the storyteller is offering wisdom, or “counsel woven into the fabric of real life,”[1] as opposed to information. Wisdom is about is what makes life meaningful.
— Catherine Graham, TSDC Principal Investigator

In this second section of our 3-part storycircle blog series we discuss the ways storycircles foster collective and poetic meaning-making. 

H: As an opening exercise storycircles have a way of bringing a group together as a kind of meaning-making “public.”

C: I remember many, many years ago when I first started working with the responses, being struck by how the meaning of a story, as well as the cohesion of the group, developed through sharing responses as much as through the telling of the stories themselves. Michael Warner’s work helped me understand what might be happening here. Warner tells us that there is a kind of public that comes to see itself as “we” by telling and responding to particular stories in particular ways. We become part of this public not because of who we are, but because of what we do: we talk about the same things, we talk about them in particular ways, and we come to recognize each other as part of the group that will help these stories circulate to create social meaning, perhaps even demanding action by authority figures in response to that meaning.

As Warner puts it, “a public is constituted by mere attention.”[2]Attention is, of course, a very valuable commodity in a busy world and we see this in the reactions in our storycircle. Participants often find the process of telling stories, listening attentively, and hearing others responses to their stories, leads to a profoundly moving experience. I think a part of the reason for the depth of response is that the process offers an experience of building a public together early in the performance creation workshop process.

H: In the TSDC storycircle there’s a clear distinction between listening, as in paying attention, and the more habitual ways we sometimes perform listening — like interjecting, asking questions, or relating our own experiences back.

C: … which is interesting in the way the storycircle structures time. The storycircle structure creates different moments in which to do different things, which means you can really concentrate on one thing at a time: you will need to demonstrate that you have paid attention, but not right now. Your role as a listener in the storycircle is just to pay attention and really try to take in what this person is telling you — and there will be another moment when you will demonstrate that the story has been heard by sharing your response to it.

And the form of the response is deliberately constructed. Starting with the question, “what colour is this story?” undermines any notion of an authoritative assessment of what the story means. That was the reason why I put the colour question in, because nobody thinks there is a favorite colour that should be everybody’s favorite colour so without giving people a lecture about how there is no right answer, you just performatively demonstrate that it’s possible to respond to something out of your own feeling about it and to own, “this is my feeling about it.”

H: And exiting that authoritative model allows people to enter into a really different kind of creative and imaginative model.

C: It makes us pay attention to how we make meaning, but also, right from the beginning, it performatively says, everybody will be listened to, everybody’s perspective is important to us, everybody has a right to have an opinion. It’s not just the content of what happens that’s important, it’s the performative learning to be together and to value everyone and to try to honestly respond, but at the same time to try to understand how we’re making meaning together.

One person can say, “This is the story of a person who is really suffering” and someone else can say, “This is a person who is really courageous” and both those things can be true, as we go around the circle we’re getting a fuller picture of what this story might mean. Or sometimes we’re re-enforcing something, for instance if everyone goes around the room and says this is a story of someone who is really courageous and we start to read the story of a single mother who is struggling to raise kids on OW (Ontario Works, a form of social assistance) as a story of courage, not as the story of failure it is often portrayed as in the wider world.

H: People seem to feel, not just heard, but like there’s like there’s a gift being given back, there’s this reciprocity.

C: … that’s an interesting way to think about it.

H: … because the responses aren’t saying, “let me tell you verbatim what you just said’, or ‘let me prove to you that I was listening…”

C: … yes, it’s not a test.

H: … through the responses, a person’s story becomes richer, more layered.

C: Sometimes I hear things in people’s response to my story that help me to recognize an importance in what I experienced — to me that was just something that happened — but the responses help me see that it’s meaningful. That’s something I think we need to talk about in relation to the storycircles, is the difference between documenting what happened and showing what it means to us that that happened.

to be continued…

[1] Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.”Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn; ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968: 86-87.
[2] Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14(1): 49-90

Our in the workshops… blog posts are designed to provide readers with a behind-the-scenes glimpse into TSDC’s performance creation process. In this three-part series, Catherine (Graham) and I (Helene Vosters) discuss storycircles. To get us started, we begin with a brief description of what happens in a TSDC storycircle, followed by part one of our conversation focused on how the storycircle structure is ritualized to invite participants into a collective creative process.

What a TSDC storycircle looks like

 The storycircle begins prior to the first workshop when we send participants this prompt:

Imagine what Hamilton might be like ten years from now if it were to become a much better city. What do you imagine life would be like in that much better Hamilton for people with experiences like yours? Please bring an object that will help you tell a 1-3 minute story about something a person with experiences like yours might do in a much better Hamilton 10 years from now. How would life be different for them?

At the first TSDC workshop gathering, after checking in and sharing food (something we do at all TSDC workshops), the group sits in a circle. At the centre is a small cloth-covered table for everyone to place their object on. The facilitator (usually Catherine or Melanie Skene) briefly explains the process and then models it by picking up her object and telling a story based on the prompt. Throughout the storycircle, only the person holding the object speaks. Everyone else is asked to listen, and after the speaker completes the story everyone else in the circle has the opportunity to respond.

After each story, each listener is invited to hold the storyteller’s object. The object is passed around the circle until everyone, including the storyteller, who goes last, has a chance to respond to the following questions.

What colour is this story?
What emotion do you associate with this story?
Complete the sentence: “This is the story of the person who…”

Once each person’s story has been shared and responded to, the group brainstorms responses to the fill-in-the-blank sentence, “These are stories of people who _________ in a city where ____________.” The sentence and responses are written on a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper and become the foundation for a post-storycircle discussion exploring the questions: “What do the statements on the whiteboard tell us about the kinds of stories we want to tell and the kind of city we want to live in?”

Storycircles: Time-outside-of-time

I like to have a low table with a cloth over it, which makes almost an altar for the storycircle objects… because I think an altar says, “These things are important.” And isn’t that what the sacred is? It’s that which deserves our attention.
— Catherine Graham, TSDC Principal Investigator

H: While storytelling circles are practiced in many communities, you’ve developed a way of working with them that includes a prompt, an object, and a feedback structure that make the circles feel kind of ritualized.

C: I deliberately developed storycircles in a ritualized way in the sense that performance studies understands ritual,[1] not necessarily in the sense that religious studies understands ritual…

H: …ritual as in creating a space outside of the day-to-day?

C: Creating a space outside of everyday time strikes me as important, which is kind of interesting in terms of theatre because I also think that that’s what stages or performance areas do. They create a space-time that is out of everyday space-time in which you can explore possibilities that might get ruled out in everyday existence. A basic rule of theatre is that what happens on stage won’t have immediate effects in the world of the audience. One of the most obvious examples of this is that, if we see someone pull a knife on stage, we react very differently than we would if we saw someone pull a knife in the lobby.

So in the ritual, participants are working in this time-outside-of-time, but the material object links it to their everyday life in some way. Particularly with the TSDC project, this strikes me as important. You don’t have to invent a new world out of whole cloth — there are things in your life, in your world, in the stories that you tell that could be the material for building this new world, for building this new vision.

H: Another element of how you facilitate storycircles is by using a prompt. Rather than an open invitation to share whatever comes to mind in the moment, or asking them about past experiences, the prompt asks participants to tell a future-focused “story.”

C: It’s a way of saying, “We are now entering creative space.” I think that’s something that’s quite particular about what we’ve done with TSDC. People often assume that because we are working with people who have lived experience of the situations we are staging, they will simply act out a replica of what they have experienced. With TSDC we very deliberately said, we’re not going to do that. We want to focus on what people want to happen, not on what has happened.

One of the reasons for our emphasis on future goals is that when we first heard from participants during the recruiting process, they kept saying over and over, “you need to realize how painful it is for us to tell stories of the bad things that have happened to us.” So that’s why the TSDC storycircle prompt is important to our project: we want to be clear that we are not just asking about their experience of a particular situation, or their proposed solutions to a particular problem, we are asking about the kind of world they imagine creating together.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been thinking about the relationship of desire and subjectivity. Can you be a social subject in the world without being encouraged or allowed to articulate desire? It does strike me that it’s hard to see yourself as a subject, as someone who can act on the world, if you are never invited to think about what you want the world to look like.

to be continued…

[1] See Schechner, Richard. Chapter 3 “Ritual” in Performance Studies: An Introduction (second edition) Routledge: New York, 2006.

The youth discussed wanting to see places that they frequented, like malls and art galleries, being refitted with resources for youth who need them. This reimagining of existing spaces illuminated the potential that they saw.

Sarah Adjekum

Sarah Adjekum is a social worker, PhD student in the Health and Society program at McMaster University and a research assistant with Transforming Stories, Driving Change. She is a longtime Hamilton resident who has been involved with community organizing on various issues including issues of racial discrimination. Her passions include social inequality, spatial justice, poetry and sketching. In this contribution to the TSDC blog Sarah reflects on her experience as part of the TSDC performance creation workshop team working with youth from Good Shepherd Youth Services. 

Working with Transforming Stories, Driving Change’s youth cohort on their production Choose Your Destination provided an opportunity to examine the relationship between youth and the cities they live in. In order to study cities, it is often easy to examine the environment. What kinds of neighbourhoods is the city comprised of? What forms does the built environment take? And what kinds of policies make these possible?

Transforming Stories Driving Change sought a different approach. They work with residents directly to hear their stories and create spaces for them to unfold. Good Shepherd Youth Services connected us with four youth who were eager to share their stories and their knowledge of what life in Hamilton is like for youth in circumstances similar to theirs. Our participants shared their experiences through words, and through movements, and reflections. Every story has represented a small glimpse of each individual, and their role in their community. These roles have included their occupations, their interests, their relationships and their aspirations for the communities they identify themselves as being a part of.

Many of the youth described themselves as precariously housed. While many associate housing with a place of belonging, the youth discussed belonging through other means as well. Relationships with friends and family, favourite places to hang out, and the homes they hoped to live in all represented how they identified the city as a part of them.

These reflections are valuable for researchers and community members alike. They remind us that cities don’t simply exist external to us. Nor are they spaces that we simply reside in. Phenomenological research examines how the world is experienced by people and draws on their reactions, perceptions, and experiences as sources of data. As a research method, it works well with examining the lived experiences of people in specific places and spaces. It has also been used by researchers in theatre who study human experience by looking at distilled movements and speech on stage. The work of phenomenological researchers recognizes that the spaces we inhabit and our selves interact. By examining how participants see themselves, we can also examine how they embody the qualities of their environment. Further, we can use their experiences to distill a clearer image of what the city is like. Theatre based research is uniquely capable of capturing these embodied experiences as participant stories are performed on the stage.

As ‘hope’ was a feeling discussed frequently by TSDC’s youth participants, it suggests that Hamilton is a city with room for growth. The youth discussed wanting to see places that they frequented, like malls and art galleries, being refitted with resources for youth who need them. This reimagining of existing spaces illuminated the potential that they saw. For example, they discussed having spaces in art galleries on James Street to experiment with art. The ‘dream scene’, a powerful image of hope, emphasized comfort, warmth and stability. That familiar image of being nestled around a television conveyed their hope for a city that can change to adapt to the needs identified by some of its most vulnerable.

The title, Choose Your Destination, had many meanings to all of us involved in the project. But among them was the idea that as people navigate the everyday hustle and bustle of the city, they are employing agency. That agency can be constrained by the city and the barriers that it imposes, but it can also shape the city itself, how it is viewed and how it is experienced. For me, Choose Your Destination has a more literal meaning. It is an invitation to think about the kinds of spaces we create and to think carefully about the impact on the young lives forming here. It is an invitation to build spaces centered around comfort and warmth, learning and growth. It is an invitation to build spaces that can turn into meaningful places for everyone.