WS A: Using drama based research methods to explore how we can build a radically inclusive university

How can we build a radically inclusive university? Utopian and transformative thinking about higher education has been on the rise in recent years (Cantat et al. 2022; Ivancheva, 2023 and Barnett, 2017), despite rising authoritarian, marketization and austerity driven pressures on higher education. This is a key moment to re-investigate the university and how to think about its transformative potential in relation to social relations both within and outside the university. This is why in this workshop, we would like to invite scholars to think about how to make a radically inclusive university. 

Methodologically, the workshop will build on sociodrama and action methods. Sociodrama is a specific application of the group work method developed by Jacob L. Moreno, in which participants explore social, political and cultural processes through role-play and action techniques (Sternberga&Gracia, 2000; Wiener, Adderley & Kirk 2011; Blaskó et al., 2024). The participants of this workshop are invited to explore in an embodied and participatory way what a radically inclusive university means and what structural and institutional elements could enable it. The workshop will conclude with a collective reflection on what the group’s dramatic imagination created. Furthermore, we will think about how action methods can be used as intersectionally inclusive research methodologies in education research, and in particular, in researching the educational transition and higher education inclusion processes of underserved groups and communities. In this regard, the workshop will build on the work carried out as part of the Horizon Marie Slodowska Curie Staff Exchange Project Ecosystems of Higher Education Inclusion and most specifically its aims at contributing to enhancing intersectionality inclusive participatory research methods in higher education studies. We see the workshop as a pilot in the broader ecology of this project and its contribution to reflective transformative practices in higher education. In this regard, participating researchers will receive a basic immersion and training on one way of using drama based methods in participatory research.