A R T I C L E

RESPONDING TO RACIALIZATION
THROUGH ARTS PRACTICE: THE
CASE OF PARTICIPATORY
THEATER
Christopher C. Sonn, Amy F. Quayle,
Belinda Belanji, and Alison M. Baker
Victoria University

This article describes two participatory theater projects undertaken by

Western Edge Youth Arts in Melbourne and aimed at challenging
racialization and fostering belonging among culturally diverse young
people. Drawing from interview and archival data, we suggest that
participatory theater provided the young people the opportunity to share
and reflect on their lived experiences and re-present themselves, as well as
gain resources for responding to the different issues associated with
racialization. In the settings created, participants were able to disrupt
taken for granted and common sense understandings of self and other and
create new stories of identity and belonging. These disruptions into the
symbolic context of social identity construction are important for personal
and social change, including for decentring whiteness. However,
participatory theater is not a panacea, nor is it free of power relations.
We discuss some of the challenges and limitations of the different projects.
C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Globally, there are many who continue to advocate for the development of socially re-
sponsive and transformative psychological research and action that is committed to de-
colonization, collective empowerment, and liberation (Montero & Sonn, 2009; Nelson
& Prilleltensky, 2010; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011). Community arts as a “form of cultural
practice in which art is produced and used by local people within their communities

We thank the reviewers for feedback provided on an earlier draft of this article.
Christopher Sonn is a Visiting Associate Professor at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Please address correspondence to: Christopher C. Sonn, College of Arts, Victoria University, Footscray Park
Campus, PO Box 14428 Melbourne, Victoria 8001 Australia. E-mail: Christopher.sonn@vu.edu.au

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 43, No. 2, 244–259 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jcop).
C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/jcop.21676
 Racialization and Participatory Theater r 245

as an instrument for social change” (Madyaningrum & Sonn, 2011, p. 358) has gained
increasing interest within this broad body of work, often discussed as critical community
psychology. Community arts practice involves working in partnership with communities to
create social settings that bring people together for shared meaning making and action.
Such spaces provide opportunities to identify, examine, and reflect upon experiences
of oppression in everyday life, and to effect change at the personal, interpersonal, and
political level through the cycle of liberation (Moane, 2003).
In this article, we discuss two participatory theater projects undertaken by Western
Edge Youth Art (WEYA) based in Melbourne’s West. The On the Radar project used
Playback Theater as the medium for exploring and responding to young people’s experi-
ences of racial profiling, while the Chronicles project used oral history theater to explore
and affirm cultural diversity and belonging, problematize fixed categories of identity and
what it means to be “Australian,” and foster an awareness of and connection to Australia’s
Indigenous past and present.

RACE, BELONGING, AND IDENTITY IN AUSTRALIA

As has been the case in different countries in the global south, the ideology of race has
played a central role in nation building in Australia (Hollinsworth, 2006), and it contin-
ues to shape understandings of self, other, and everyday interactions between differently
racialized groups of people. Australia’s ongoing history of colonization has entailed the
dispossession and marginalization of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the
exclusion of non-White immigrants through the enforcement of the “White Australia” pol-
icy, which was not abandoned until the 1970s. Since this time, there have been significant
social and political changes in relation to the treatment of Indigenous people and an os-
tensible shift from assimilationist models of integration to multiculturalism (van Krieken,
2012). Arguably however, the “White Australia” legacy continues to regulate politics of
belonging in the nation (Hage, 2000).
As emphasized by Colic-Peisker and Farquharson (2011), multiculturalism is under-
stood as more than simply policies for managing cultural diversity; it also refers to the
demographic reality of diversity, “an ideology that recognises and discursively normalises
ethnic diversity,” and the everyday practice of interaction between culturally diverse groups
of people (p. 580). Demographically speaking, Australia is indeed a multicultural nation
with approximately 26% of the population born overseas, and a further 20% with at least
one parent born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2012). In Melbourne,
one of its largest and most culturally diverse cities, the 2011 census showed that approxi-
mately 37% of the population was born overseas, and for 45.9% of the population, both
parents were born overseas (ABS, 2013).
Despite this demographic reality, official policy and political rhetoric espousing the
virtues of multiculturalism, academic studies and reports in media have highlighted how
racism continues to pervade the life worlds of Indigenous (VicHealth, 2012a) and eth-
nically diverse communities, particularly those who are visibly different (Dolic, 2011;
Forrest & Dunn, 2010; VicHealth, 2012b). People from refugee backgrounds and in
particular African, Middle Eastern and Muslim racial/ethnic groups experience various
forms of racism and exclusion, from not being recognized as belonging (Nelson, Dunn,
& Paradies, 2011; Noble, 2005) to racialization (and misrepresentation) in the media,
public policy, and policing (see e.g., Baak, 2011; Gatt, 2011; Hatoss, 2012; Ndhlovu, 2011;
Nolan, Farquharson, Politoff, & Majoribanks, 2011; Nunn, 2010; Smith & Reside, 2010;

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Windle, 2008). These experiences not only regulate possibilities for affective belonging
but also are reflected in indices of health and social and economic participation (Man-
souri, Jenkins, Morgan, & Taouk, 2009; Nelson et al., 2011). Within the perpetual project
of nation building then, multiculturalism as an “ideology that recognises and discursively
normalises ethnic diversity” (Colic-Peisker & Farquharson, 2011, p. 580) continues to
come up against the ideology of race and its legacy in Australia.

Diversity Issues and the Lens of Whiteness

Responses to managing some of the issues that arise with increasing social and cultural
diversity have not always incorporated an adequate understanding of the sociopolitical
context within which these issues arise (Garcı́a-Ramı́rez, de la Mata, Paloma, & Hernández-
Plaza, 2011; Sonn & Lewis, 2009). For example, the role of historical practices and pro-
cesses such as colonization and racism and their continuing influence on contemporary
intergroup relations within the Australian context are often not adequately addressed in
approaches to antiracism and Indigenous empowerment (Sonn & Quayle, 2012).
Within countries such as Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, South Africa,
and the United States, different authors have highlighted the need to examine the taken
for granted power, privilege, and normativity attached to whiteness in institutional, orga-
nizational, and everyday settings (Fee & Russell, 2007; Frankenberg, 1993; Green, Sonn, &
Matsebula, 2007; Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Smith, 2012; Tascón, 2008). Many have shown
how, as a settler colony, a legacy of Anglo privilege and cultural dominance (Forrest &
Dunn, 2010) continues to inform national identity and belonging, shaping constructions
of who belongs and who does not within Australia (Green et al., 2007; Hage, 2000).
Central to these critiques is a psychosocial conception of the person, where stories, as
individual, social, and ideological, are understood as important resources for individual
and social change (Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013).

Conceptualising Identities: Stories, Narrative, and Discourse

How we understand the self in relation to others and how we approach difference (i.e.,
diversity) is a fundamental part of identity and community-making processes, which are
conceived as socially constituted and constitutive and as taking place within historically
specific dynamics of power (Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011; Tappan, 2005). Within this con-
ception, identities are narratives, “stories people tell themselves and others about who
they are (and who they are not)” (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 14, see Bruner, 1991). Thomas and
Rappaport (1996) have noted: “The shared narratives that people tell again and again
about their own and other communities are instrumental in maintaining these communi-
ties and in shaping the way that people think about themselves in these communities” (p.
320). Dominant cultural narratives and discourses are therefore seen to play an impor-
tant role in establishing the boundaries between “us” and “them,” of who can belong and
who cannot, and have implications for everyday interactions between different groups
of people in an increasingly diverse society. For this reason, the social and symbolic re-
sources available in communities can be a key element in individual and social change
(Rappaport, 2000).
Due to histories of colonization, racism, and other systems of oppression, some groups
have less influence and control over dominant cultural narratives, which may be in conflict
with their own personal and community narratives and can be experienced as disempow-
ering (e.g., Fanon, 1967; Thomas & Rappaport, 1996). Within this conceptualization,

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 Racialization and Participatory Theater r 247

power is not viewed as one-way or monolithic, but as contested and contestable, repro-
duced, challenged, and/or renegotiated in the everyday through community and cultural
narratives and discourses and categories of self and other. Given this, storytelling is un-
derstood as “a central site for the production of counter-narratives as well as for exposing
ways in which racialized oppression is normalized” (Sonn et al., 2013, p. 295). The two
projects described in this article both create social settings for young people and adults to
collectively grapple with race and intergenerational difference, while using performative
arts as a creative medium for counter-storytelling and challenging stereotypes.

Participatory Theater as a Methodology for Change

The arts are commonly used as a means of surfacing stories and experiences of minoritized
and excluded communities and fostering dialogue across difference (Boal, 1998; Freire,
1970). Bell and Desai (2011) state:

The arts play a vital role in making visible the stories, voices, and experiences of
people who are rendered invisible by structures of dominance. Equally important,
the arts confront how we have learned to see and provide new lenses for looking
at the world and ourselves in relation to it. (p. 288)

Indeed, the telling of everyday stories by ordinary citizens is central to participatory

theater or community-based performance, which “not only empowers people to share
and reflect upon their experiences, but also acts as a vehicle for social change. Playback
Theatre is part of this genre” (Fox, 2007, p. 92). As articulated by Jo Salas (1993), one
of the creators of Playback Theater: “People need to tell their stories. It’s a basic human
imperative. From the telling of our stories comes our sense of identity, our place in the
world, and our compass of the world itself” (as cited in Fox, p. 92). Playback Theatre
centres on improvised acts based on audience led storytelling with individual stories from
the community “used as beacons to illuminate more general patterns and situations” (Fox,
p. 92). It is an informal everyday theater that brings people together providing a forum,
a voice, for individuals who are often invisible or ignored to share, celebrate and explore
their stories (Fox, 2007).
Specifically, playback involves audience members (the tellers) sharing personal nar-
ratives to be retold and performed by actors. Strategies of Playback Theater can also be
used to inform other types of participatory theater, such as oral history theater, where
stories are not performed on the spot, but instead themes from stories are gathered and a
performance developed based on the major themes (C. Buhler, personal communication,
October 22, 2013).
Madyaningrum and Sonn (2011) have shown how, through a participatory theater
project, people were able to challenge social representations attached to particular social
identities. They argued that the positive outcomes associated with community arts are
linked to a project’s ability to foster individual and social awareness about different groups
within the broader community. The authors emphasized that there must be an explicit
engagement with power, privilege, and normativity in the settings created for participation
to challenge power emanating from the macro level, which is ultimately experienced at
the micro level in terms of identity, belonging, and everyday social relations (see also
Johnson & Martı́nez Guzmán, 2012).
Kaptani and Yuval-Davis (2008) have also discussed the value of participatory the-
ater as a research method for exploring narratives informing identities, particularly of

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marginalized groups, and to highlight the perceptions and experiences of social positions
and power relations of different groups. Specifically, the authors used playback and fo-
rum theater in the context of their work with refugees in London, and described how
such techniques enable the researcher to gather different types of data and information–
information that is embodied, dialogical, and illustrative.
In this research we examined how the social and symbolic resources available for
identity and community-making processes are potentially disrupted, reconstructed, or
strengthened through participatory theater projects.

Examining the Role of Participatory Theater for Racialized Young People

WEYA is a not-for-profit organization that works with culturally and linguistically diverse
young people who live in economically and socially disadvantaged communities within
the Western suburbs of Melbourne. The agency’s arts-based projects aim to facilitate the
empowerment of young people and improve intergroup relations within community and
school contexts. The first author was contacted by one of the artistic directors of the
WEYA projects to provide research support and explore the young people’s experiences
of participation in the different projects.
In this research role, we have been interested in examining how the processes as-
sociated with participatory theater might contribute to changing personal and social
representations and, specifically, how they disrupt “naturalized conceptions of the people
and of their capacities and possibilities: of their place in society, and of their abilities
and inabilities” (Montero, 2009, p. 151). We first discuss the On the Radar project and
findings from the research, before describing the Chronicles project.

On the Radar

During 2009 in the suburb of Braybrook in the Western suburbs of Melbourne, a com-
munity consultation took place in response to a rise in negative encounters between
African Australian youth and the police. During the consultation, community members,
including the police and African Australian young people, shared their experiences, in-
sights,and concerns. The young people wanted to address the issue. Following this, WEYA
received funding to engage African Australian youth, particularly young men in a long-
term Playback Theater-based arts project designed to facilitate dialogue between young
people and police, improve safety, and increase community connection in the Western
suburbs of Melbourne (http://www.westernedge.org.au/on-the-radar/). This was the On
the Radar project. The particular iteration of the project we report here took place over
a period of 5 months in 2010, while the pilot of the project was undertaken in 2009. The
project consisted of a range of activities including a youth camp with Victoria Police, a
series of playback workshops, a public playback performance, and the development and
screening of a short film.
Research participants were recruited through WEYA and by their peers, and included
12 African Australian males, mostly of Sudanese and Somali background, aged 13 to 23
years who were participating in the project, as well as four facilitators (three females
and one male). One African Australian male who became a mentor for the project
brought important tacit knowledge through his past experiences with police during his
adolescence. Females were not included in the project because of parental concerns about
mixed gender participation. Additionally, young males are more likely than females to
have encounters with the police (Dolic, 2011).

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In the workshops, the young people were able to use storytelling to recreate and retell
the different experiences that they have had with the police. During these workshops,
the young people spoke about their marginalized status within the community, media
misrepresentation, and their encounters with the police, which have been overwhelmingly
negative. The stories that were shared during these workshops formed the basis of a
live playback performance and the development of a short film, which were both later
shown to an audience that included members of the local police. The director of the live
performance produced dialogue that drew upon the young people’s terms of reference
and experiences to ensure that creative outcomes were collaborative and re-presented the
experiences of the young people authentically.
The young people were also invited to participate in interviews to share their insights
and experiences of participating in the project. The research involved participant obser-
vation and informal interviews conducted by the third author (Belanji, 2013). During the
initial stages of the research process, it became apparent that some of the young people
were not comfortable with the structured nature of the original semistructured interview
process, largely because they were concerned their disclosures would be passed on to
the police, despite assurances that this would not be the case. The project facilitators
also advised that participants have been subjected to numerous inquiries from agencies
about their experience with the police. Given these challenges, the first and third au-
thors decided that less formal conversational style interviews should replace the planned
structured interviews (see Belanji, 2013). Although this process took longer, the young
people were much more comfortable and willing to share their thoughts. In addition to
interviews and participant observation, project reports and the short film were also used
as data sources.
Standard procedures for thematic analysis were used to analyze the data. Given the
focus of the project, the notion of citizenship as conceived by Montero (2009) was used to
understand what the young people were saying. For Montero, citizenship is the exercise of
democratic and collaborative participatory action and the means through which people
develop a collective and critical voice. Two key themes developed in the analysis by Belanji
(2013) were about challenging dominant stories and gaining knowledge and skills for
intercultural communication.

Speaking back, challenging dominant stories. The On the Radar project provided a space for
the participants to retell their stories and accounts as well as to re-present themselves
within a context in which they are often racialized and criminalized. The everyday uncivil
attention these young people receive by police is captured well in the dialogue taken from
the short film: “The police think Africans are trouble makers. They see us as visitors, not
Australians. That’s a problem.” Another participant said: “Police mistreat you, [because]
they think they know what you’re like” (Maahir). Maxmed said: “They sort of separate
us. They think that if you hang around in groups, they think you’re gonna make, start
trouble. Even if they don’t know what we are up to.”
Similarly, Abaskuul emphasized the importance of creating an alternative story about
African youth as a means of challenging the pervasive and negative images that are
presented in the media: “Doing something . . . letting them understand the other side
of us. It’s not all about the wrong picture by the media.” Maxmed reflected that the short
film provided them the opportunity to challenge stereotypical representations and show
that they are normal, equal, and just like everyone else, which could potentially shift the
way they are viewed by the police: “That we are all like normal, we are all equal and that

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Braybrook is a good place. We were shooting hoops too and that had a symbolic meaning,
like, we just like to have fun. Yeah like everyone else.”
Sharing their experiences of encounters with the police in a public forum provided
the young people the opportunity to make known an alternative story to that of “cultural
incompatibility” and culture blame; it enabled them to take social action in response
to their experiences of racialization. Reflecting on their common experiences of being
racialized through sharing and performing stories in the space created through the
playback workshops, the young people were able to speak back to the broader community
and, in so doing, create an opportunity for dialogue on the issue. By taking this social
action, the young people could experience a sense of agency in relation to this issue,
which had previously left them feeling powerless, as if no one would listen to or believe
them. In the social settings that were created through the project, they were able to enact
their citizenship, and this was made possible through the support provided by the project
facilitators who brokered relationships between the police and the young people.
Participatory theater processes provided these young people, whose voices are often
silenced, an opportunity to share their concerns in a nonconfrontational environment.
This opportunity for re-presentation and to speak back to “mainstream” society was rec-
ognized by Maahir, and is captured in the excerpt below:

I came for the experience, to express myself. To express how we feel when the
police come to us and approach us in the streets. It was really clear and it was
really strong and, you know, they couldn’t ignore it.

For Maahir, the setting created using playback as the medium meant that his, and
others, grievances could be expressed to the police in an illustrative, embodied, and
public way that could not so easily be ignored.

Gaining knowledge and skills for intercultural communication. Through their participation in
playback performances about their experiences of being unfairly treated by the police and
discussions that followed about citizenship rights, the young people gained knowledge of
what was reasonable and unlawful behaviour in their encounters with the police as well as
confidence and skills in interpersonal communication. Learning how to interact with the
police was considered important by the young people, as was the provision of education
about their rights, as captured in the excerpt below:

At the end of the da,y it was about young people’s rights, you know. That was the
bottom line. Lack of education yeah, that’s it, you know. They go to school, they
learn all this stuff, but at the end of the day, they don’t know how to interact with
the police. (Aadan)

Through Playback Theater practices, the participants were able to communicate to the
police in a way that elicited dialogue and in a forum that promoted mutual understanding
and recognition. The project therefore provided the opportunity for the young people to
have positive encounters with the police. It created a setting in which the young people
could say what they needed to about their experiences of racialized policing to the police
and the public, a setting that was not “out on the street,” where saying these things would
not escalate the situation but rather (and ideally) facilitate understanding from the police
of their experiences. Abaskuul remarked: “You get to know about the police and what

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they have to do and then they can hear what we have to say in a formal way rather than
meeting out on the street and having like an argument.”
Along with these benefits, there were also challenges within the project. In particular,
trying to maintain and fulfil the projects’ intentions in spite of continuing hostility, and
even brutality, was a constant challenge. The excerpt from Jeyte highlights the asymmetries
of power that continue to operate outside the playback setting:

There’s nothing you can do about it, you know? They got the power. They didn’t
have any badges on them and I wanted to get their ID [identification]. Three
officers bashed me, three of them. I was like 14 bro.

While the young people may have an understanding of the power structures and
hegemonic discourses of Australian society, they are not necessarily able to escape them.
Although the project provided them an opportunity to narrate their experiences to a
broader audience, this did not necessarily lead to change at an institutional level. This
tension is highlighted in a facilitator’s reflection on the young people’s experiences with
police.

The young people said, “You know, who is going to be believed?” That was, like, the
first position, like, what’s the point, in that who is going to believe us? The police
are going to get believed and no one is going to believe us. So that experience of
just not being believed is obviously really profound. (Grace)

Further highlighted here, is the importance and difficulty of creating safe spaces
for young people, spaces where they can have a legitimate voice and dialogue can be
established as part of a necessary and longer term process aimed at shifting the prob-
lematic narratives that currently govern interactions between police and young African
Australians.

Chronicles

The Chronicles project used oral history theater as the medium for exploring issues of
identity, community, and belonging. Specifically, the project aimed to connect a culturally
diverse group of young people from the Western suburbs of Melbourne with their own
personal family histories as well as with Aboriginal ways of knowing, doing, and being
through storytelling and performance. It was hoped that this process would facilitate
the deconstruction of taken-for-granted assumptions, affirm silenced stories, and create
new stories of identity and belonging. This intercultural dialogue was seen as important
within a context where migrant issues and indigenous issues are often siloed despite
the shared experiences of being displaced and othered and because of the agency’s
acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty.
Chronicles involved young people who were involved in WEYA’s Playback Theater
program, Playback West, which was initially formed as part of the On the Radar project.
The first stage involved exploring their own families’ cultural history and experiences by
interviewing their parents and retelling stories through theater performances (Search-
ing for Songlines: http://www.westernedge.org.au/community-chronicles/). Reflecting
the culturally and linguistically diverse demographics of Melbourne’s Western suburbs,
participants included young people from newly arrived communities, second-generation

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Australians from migrant backgrounds, young people from fifth-generation “Anglo” (i.e.,
White) backgrounds, and young people with Aboriginal ancestry.
The second stage of the Chronicles project (Beagle Bay Chronicles:
http://www.westernedge.org.au/BeagleBayChronicles/) involved these young people
and their parents travelling to Beagle Bay, an Aboriginal community located in North
Western Australia. Beagle Bay is often written about in relation to missionary activities
of Church and State (Choo, 1997). In this second stage, young people from Melbourne
and Beagle Bay collected oral histories from Aboriginal elders based on memories of the
precolonial and mission periods, as well as stories based on Aboriginal cosmology (i.e.,
dreamtime stories). These stories were then used to create a theater performance, which
was performed by the young people for the community.
As part of this research,1 one of our research team members (Pruitt, 2012) engaged
as participant observer at the WEYA center in Melbourne during the initial phase of
the project and conducted semistructured interviews with 9 of the 10 participants upon
their return from Beagle Bay. While there are other data sources (e.g., performances,
workshops) and different issues to explore, we draw on interview data with the nine
young people (six females and three males) about their experiences of participation in
the project. Interview questions focused on how understandings of themselves and others
might have changed, why they became involved in the project, and how different groups
fit into the broader process of reconciling with Indigenous Australia.
We focused our analysis on identifying participant responses that related to the en-
counter with Aboriginal Australia. We used a question-ordered matrix to organize the
data. Then we worked through the information first individually and then as a group to
look for recurring and unique themes. Our analysis and interpretation of participant’s re-
sponses was informed by whiteness studies, with a focus on broader societal narrative that
informed individual personal stories, and how those stories are potentially transformed
in response to the encounter experience in Beagle Bay. For each person, the encounter
with Aboriginal people and stories on country was significant but had different meanings.
Some emphasized the new understandings of Aboriginal people that they developed,
others focused on ways of seeing their own social identities, and some reflected on the
implications of their social location for changing race relations. This is presented under
the broad theme of developing new understandings of self and other.

Developing new understandings of self and other. Each participant’s story shows unique ways in
which they negotiated cultural narratives and constructed new meanings about Aborigi-
nal people and themselves, resulting from the embodied encounter. These new meanings
opened opportunities for thinking about social action, friendship formation, connect-
edness, and belonging in Australia. For example, one participant commented that the
direct, embodied encounter enabled her to have a deeper understanding of history and
of Aboriginal people:

I didn’t understand much about the Aboriginal culture until, you know. I done
the history of it, I’ve studied history, Australian history, you know, stolen genera-
tion, you know, the reconciliation, their riots, and all that . . . I learned that in
school . . . . But this is the first time I’ve ever sat down and really understand what

1 This specific study was part of a larger project that was supported by a Victoria University Researcher Develop-
ment Grant.

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their, that history really meant to them, and it just, it just concretes everything.
(Female, born to Vietnamese parents)

Another participant with Aboriginal and Greek ancestry referred to how through
the experience she reconstructed her understanding of society and the meaning of land.
These reconstructions made her realize the future work she wants to do.

It’s made me stronger, it’s made realize what I actually want to do with my life . . .
it’s pushed me forward to fight for my people. I want to go back to my country
and do workshops with the kids and go back to Beagle Bay and work with the
kids there, and I want to travel to all the communities to help in some way . . . .
It’s made me change my way of thinking about this whole entire society . . . . I was
thinking about home, and it made me see like all this concrete has actually buried
the land that was here . . . the purity and the essence of the ground underneath
this earth that we are on right now. (Female, Aboriginal mother and Greek father,
born in Australia)

The next excerpt shows how a participant with Aboriginal background reconnected
and, through the process, strengthened his own cultural identity. His interaction with the
elders was affirming and the tacit knowledge they shared about being Aboriginal provided
a sense of reassurance about the future.

I learnt so much, hey, I just learnt a lot. It was overwhelming . . . finding out about
myself and talking to the Indigenous elders there . . . them helping me out and
telling me to keep strong and hold my head up, you know, and everything is going
to be alright. (Male, born in Australia, Aboriginal with an English grandfather)

Other participants hearing from Aboriginal people about the country reflected on
the “Eurocentric kind of view” of dominant Australian culture. This also highlighted how
sharing diverse histories can disrupt understandings of self and others that are fixed. As
reflected in the excerpt below, deeper understandings of history and encounters with
difference are understood as central to fostering a more inclusive Australia:

It makes me feel like a different type of Australian. . . . My Australian ideals were

very Western, very Eurocentric kind of view, but when I went to Beagle Bay . . .
you know, doing the whole project of Chronicles made me much more broader,
like a broader idea of what’s Australian to me. So, like, all my beliefs in other
people were so concreted, but now it’s like . . . everything started to open up . . . .
So more of these lessons and these experiences I’ve learned and the histories
I understand what Australian history is, um, makes me feel a much more open
Australian. (Female, born in Australia to Vietnamese parents)

The next excerpt is from a fifth-generation Anglo Australian male who recognized his
position as a privileged White male. He reflects on the significance of his social positioning
from which he articulates a respectful listening position for non-Indigenous Australians.
He speaks of openness to others and the need to disrupt the monological viewpoint, that
is, “a monopoly of wisdom”:

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I found myself in the first week of the project up in Beagle Bay just thinking
the best thing I can do is, is listen and, and shut up and not say anything . . .
and just allow myself to kind of hear and learn. I think that is something on a
wider scale [laughs] . . . . White Australia needs to do massively and definitely in
terms of learning from Aboriginal Australians . . . . Yeah, that’s, like, the first step
that needs to happen in any kind of real reconciliation between White and Black
Australia, is that White Australia has to sit down and get told, get told, you know,
get taught and own some, own some failure and own some kind of, the fact that
. . . we don’t have a monopoly kind of wisdom or, or vision, or, um, anything. . . .
We really need to kind of let ourselves be shown a lot more than what we think we
know. (White male, born in Australia, family has been here for FIVE generations
after coming from England and Ireland)

Finally, one of the project directors also touches on how dominant cultural narratives
have obscured Australia’s history of race relations, meaning that we still “haven’t fixed
the problem.” She highlights the need to be accountable for the problems that have their
origins in the history of colonization:

We just all share that history . . . that is something that is a bit obscured. It’s sort
of seen as being a White person’s issue, um, and I don’t mean to diminish that at
all. I don’t think it should be diminished at all. I think all White people should
see it as being their issue and all people of other cultures should also see that.
Like, I think that is the thing, the bottom line is we haven’t fixed the problem.
(Female, born in Australia to parents from a mix of European cultures)

DISCUSSION

In this article, we used two brief case studies to provide an exploratory account of the
role of community arts practice, specifically participatory or community-based theater,
as a means of responding to issues of race, identity, and belonging. Given the view that
stories, narratives, and discourse inform identity and community-making processes, we
emphasized the relevance of the sociocultural context for examining oppression and
its transformation. Both projects engaged young people in storytelling about the past,
present, and future, and involved young people telling personal stories to make visible
different life experiences. These diverse stories formed the basis for collective stories
that were performed using playback or oral history theater. This storytelling and group
performance was understood as a vital part of naming experiences, reflecting on the
everyday, and for creating new meanings in dialogue with others.
Recognizing identities as relational and fluid, stories as individual, social, and ideolog-
ical, we argued that participatory theater engages participants in processes that explicitly
value their stories and lived experience and provides opportunities for exploration, cele-
bration, and critique of issues of community, identity, and belonging (Bell & Desai, 2011;
Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011; Smith, 2012). This praxis opens up opportunities for shared
meaning making, which can be viewed as a form of action to address challenges in the life
worlds of the young people, or simply to create a space where young people can share,
explore, and celebrate everyday stories, a process that can “provide new lenses for looking
at the world and ourselves in relation to it” (Bell & Desai, 2011, p. 288).

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 Racialization and Participatory Theater r 255

The On the Radar project was created in response to widespread negative repre-
sentations of young African Australian males, perceptions of racial vilification, and ex-
periences of police brutality. The young people wanted an opportunity to highlight the
issue of racialized policing within their communities, to challenge stereotypes about
them, and to produce counter-stories that reflected their lived experiences and positive
re-presentations of the African diaspora. Young people produced knowledge through
workshops, performance, and a short film, which were then used to communicate their
stories to a broader audience. In the Chronicles project, storytelling was also central to
young people retrieving family histories and learning with, about, and from Aboriginal
people. Reflections from the young people highlighted the way in which the embodied
encounter in a remote Aboriginal community was a key catalyst for reworking stereotypes
and representations, learning about Aboriginal people and culture, and, for some, to
reconnect with their own Aboriginal heritage.
Consistent with findings reported by other researchers in different countries (Bell
& Desai, 2011; Johnson & Martı́nez Guzmán, 2012; Howarth, Wagner, Magnusson, &
Sammut, 2013; Kaptani & Yuval-Davis, 2008; Madyaningrum & Sonn, 2011), both projects
allowed for sociopolitical action by disrupting homogenizing discourses about racialized
groups. Using arts as the medium, this work has demonstrated how social representations
attached to social identities can be challenged, which can contribute to individual and
community awareness about belonging and dynamics of exclusion.
The Chronicles project also highlighted how the experience of displacement and
physical emplacement into a different life world can help to disrupt taken-for-granted
ways of being and present new possibilities or pathways for belonging. This form of
engagement means deep learning with Aboriginal people in a specific place and in
dialogue with Aboriginal conceptions of identity based on place, land, and connectedness,
which can provide different resources for identity and belonging not tied to notions of
race or ethnicity.
While this work has opened up new avenues for research and action for community
psychology, including the use of arts as method, arts for dissemination, and arts as a means
to evoke and challenge people in very powerful ways (Savin-Baden & Howell Major, 2013),
community-based arts practice is not a panacea and the settings created are not exempt
from relations of power and privilege. Indeed, there were many challenges associated
with the On the Radar project particularly, as well as limitations in terms of the extent of
change possible through disruptions into the symbolic sphere.

LIMITATIONS

There are also inherent issues associated with the fact that these projects were focused
on those marginalized from relations of power, rather than on those in positions of
dominance and privilege and the creation of more receptive social environments for
change (Campbell, Cornish, Gibbs, & Scott, 2010). While On the Radar provided a
space for the young people as a collective to raise community awareness through creative
practices (Montero, 2009) in an embodied, dialogical, and illustrative way (Kaptani &
Yuval-Davis, 2008), it is not clear whether and to what extent the performance might have
influenced the police officers perceptions of young people of African background. This
is worth exploring in future projects.
Moreover, even if individual police were moved by the performance, and their in-
dividual perceptions shifted, this does not necessarily mean that everyday institutional

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256 r Journal of Community Psychology, March 2015

practices of policing will shift. Daniel Haile-Michael, one of the young African Australian
men involved in the landmark racial discrimination and racial profiling case against
Victoria Police, which resulted in a settlement in 2013, said:

I myself have been beaten up but . . . it is not a personal thing. We understand

it is a systemic issue and that is why we are trying to address it in a systemic way.
It’s not about one police officer, it’s about changing a whole system. (Chadwick,
2013)

This also raises questions about how safe these spaces are when the external realities
remain unchanged. Similarly, while witnessing the performance of the Aboriginal elder’s
stories might have been a positive experience for both the Beagle Bay community and the
young people from Melbourne, Aboriginal disadvantage and the power, privilege, and
normativity of whiteness remains deeply entrenched in Australian society.

CONCLUSION

Our research into these projects of arts-based action on issues of race, identity, and belong-
ing has been informed by critical race and whiteness studies. Like community psychology,
these frameworks seek to address issues such as racism and, in particular, transform the
symbolic domain within which power asymmetries are reproduced. One shared starting
point is a critical psychosocial understanding of social identities, power, and participation.
Recognizing social identities as historically, politically, and culturally situated and always
“in process,” and power as continuously contested and renegotiated through stories, nar-
rative, and discourse, means that importance is placed on the sociocultural context as a
site for personal and social change. Given this, it is important for community psychology
practice to contribute to the creation of settings for deconstructing and reconstructing
understandings of self and other, which are tied to the ideology of race (and whiteness).
The creation of spaces in different organizations and community-based settings is impor-
tant for bringing differently positioned people together in dialogue to name oppression
and create alternative social and symbolic resources for identity and belonging.
As we have shown, community psychologists can support agencies and communities in
different ways, including by becoming involved in the settings as researchers to understand
the routines and build solidarities across settings, as well as recognize the constraints faced
by these agencies and communities that are dealing with the challenges of exclusion. This
means that we have to commit time and resources because this change work requires
significant long-term and sustained work and cycles of praxis.

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