Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Biography
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Distinguished Professor, Gallagher studies theatre as a powerful medium for expression by young people of their experiences and understandings. She has published 4 monographs and 6 edited collections, In Defence of Theatre (UTP 2016); Drama and Theatre in Urban Contexts (Routledge 2013); The Methodological Dilemma (Routledge 2008/2018); How Theatre Educates (UTP 2003), 46 book chapters and 47 refereed articles at the intersection of youth, theatre, and the social world in journals such as Research in Drama Education; Theatre and Performance Studies; Theatre Research in Canada; Canadian Theatre Review; Pedagogy, Culture and Society; Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies; Ethnography and Education; Journal of Aesthetic Education, in addition to various creative writing and documentary film and audio projects. Her most recent co-edited collection, Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research through Performative Methodologies (Springer 2020) and her forthcoming monograph, Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative (UTP) are based on her recently completed collaborative ethnography on young people’s theatre-making and care-taking practices in Canada, India, Taiwan, Greece, and England. This project also produced Towards Youth: a play on radical hope, a Verbatim play by collaborator Andrew Kushnir, which premiered at Crow’s Theatre in 2019 and Finding Radical Hope, a documentary film screened at Crow’s Theatre in 2020. Previous award-winning books include: Why Theatre Matters (UTP, 2014); The Theatre of Urban (UTP, 2007) Drama Education in the Lives of Girls (UTP, 2000). Previously a Canada Research Chair, and a Salzburg Seminar Fellow, in 2017 Gallagher won the inaugural University of Toronto President’s Impact Award for research impact beyond the academy. In 2018 she won the David E. Hunt Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and has garnered over 7 million dollars in SSHRC, Canada Foundation for Innovation, and other research funding. Gallagher’s current SSHRC project is a five-year, multi-sited ethnography, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice in which she is looking at youth theatre practices and youth activism on climate justice. Please visit dramaresearch.ca.
Note: The following list reflects Professor Gallagher’s most recent publications.
Publications
- Trans/Queer Representation and Drama: engendering new forms of empathy and relationality. (Taylor & Francis : 2023)
- Youth and Play: World-Making in the Real and the Imagined (Springer : 2023)
- The ecology of global, collaborative ethnography: metho-pedagogical architectures and interpretive frames in research with youth (Taylor & Francis : 2022)
- On the Importance of Big Umbrellas: Applied Theatre as a Hopeful Practice in Precarious Times (Routledge : 2022)
- Arts-led, Youth-driven methodology and social impact: ‘Making what we need’ in times of crisis (Taylor & Francis : 2022)
- Losing and Finding Community in Drama: A Methodology-in-Motion for Pandemic Times (LEARN : 2022)
- Hope in a collapsing world: Youth, theatre, and listening as a political alternative (University of Toronto Press : 2022)
- Census-Taking and Theatre-Making: Real and Imagined Perceptions and Experiences of School and Neighbourhood Safety for White and Racialized Youth (Taylor & Francis : 2021)
- Building new publics: Using agile, community-engaged, and applied theatre methodologies as social intervention in audience research (Taylor & Francis : 2021)
- Vulnerability, care and hope in audience research: theatre as a site of struggle for an intergenerational politics (Taylor & Francis : 2021)
- Making and appreciating theatre: Lessons in ethical relationality and prototype expansion (Intellect Books : 2021)
- Art, Collaboration, and Youth Research in a Collapsing World: Conceiving and Enacting a Multi-Vocal Research Project in the Borderland of the Real and the Imagined (Springer : 2020)
- A Situated, Ethical, Imaginative Doing and Being in the Encounter of Research (Springer : 2020)
- After Coronovirus: Global youth reveal that the social value of art has never mattered more (Hellenic Theatre/Drama & Education Network : 2020)
- The Aesthetics of Towards Youth: Making Relations in and through Theatre (University of Toronto Press : 2020)
- Global youth citizenry and radical hope: Enacting community-engaged research through performative methodologies (Springer : 2020)
- Response to COVID-19 – losing and finding one another in drama: personal geographies, digital spaces and new intimacies (Taylor & Francis : 2020)
- Performing a living museum of memories: beholding young people’s experiences and expressions of care through documentary theatre-making and oral history performance (Manchester University Press : 2020)
- Staying the course and 'here to question': Envisioning education at Tarragon Theatre as an integral goal and a reciprocal practice (Springer : 2019)
- Picturing care: Re-imagining gender, personhood, and educational justice (Taylor & Francis : 2019)
- Accuracy and ethics, feelings and failures: Youth experimenting with documentary practices of performing reality (Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, University of Toronto : 2018)
- A reconsideration of social innovation: Drama pedagogies and youth perspectives on creative and social relations in Canadian schooling (The Canadian Journal of Education : 2018)
- Beyond mimesis to an assemblage of reals in the drama classroom: Which reals? Which representational aesthetics? What theatre-building practices? Whose truths? (Taylor & Francis : 2018)
- An ecology of care: Relationships and responsibility through the constitutive and creative acts of oral history theatre-making in local communities shouldering global crises (Palgrave-Macmillan : 2018)
- Staging Our Selves: Towards a theory of relationality, possibility, and creative youth selfhood (Springer : 2018)
- Love, time reflexivity and the methodological imaginary (Routledge : 2018)
- The methodological dilemma revisited: Creative, critical and collaborative approaches to qualitative research for a new era (Routledge : 2018)
- A Review of Urban Youth Policy 1960s-2010s (Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership : 2018)
- Hope despite hopelessness: Race, gender and the pedagogies of drama/applied theatre in precarious times (Taylor & Francis : 2017)
- The gendered labour of social innovation: Theatre, pedagogy, and the girl-child in India (Routledge : 2017)
- Performing to understand: Cultural wealth, precarity, and shelter-dwelling youth (Taylor & Fancis : 2017)
- Drama in education and applied theatre: From Morality and Socialization to Play and Postcolonialism (Oxford University Press : 2017)
- Performing counter-narratives and mining creative resilience: Using applied theatre to theorize notions of youth resilience (Taylor & Francis : 2017)
- In Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions (University of Toronto Press : 2016)