Heinemeyer, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6300-5544 (2025) Grounded Imaginaries: Performance projects and performing potencia in a university Living Lab. In: Theatre and Performing Arts Research Association annual conference, 27-29 Aug 2025, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The idea of a university-based ‘Living Lab’ is primarily associated with the science and enterprise disciplines. For the UK-based EAUC (Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education), they are initiatives:
where real-world sustainability challenges are formally addressed in stakeholder partnerships. A Living Lab encourages co-creation & co-implementation of transformations through transdisciplinary efforts, over a series of learning loops, to sustainably develop a geographically-bounded testbed (Waheed 2017b: 4).
Yet in our small, arts and humanities-focused university, this rather technocratic definition does not seem to address the needs of students (predominantly from underrepresented backgrounds). Contributing to tackling real-life ecological justice issues requires a degree of agency and ‘action competence’ (Jensen and Schnack 1997) which rather needs to be carefully nurtured over time through democratic and dialogic practice. Yet the imperatives and pressures conditioning students’ contemporary university experience hinder curriculum-based attempts to foster this. Since 2020, I have been engaged in collaborative cycles of pedagogical action research with a close-knit team of colleagues, to discover what kinds of invitations to ‘potencia’ (Gago 2020) students can accept.
A precondition for acceptance is a sense of ‘the university otherwise’, as a microcosm of the other world that is possible. We seek to slowly co-construct with students what Dani Celermajer calls ‘grounded imaginaries’ (2021) – instances of a positive future within the present.
Performance and other arts disciplines have contributed disproportionately to this task, lending their operating modes of improvisation, storytelling, and imaginative transcendence of current constraints. In this talk I will discuss the role played within the York St John Living Lab of applied theatre projects such as ‘In The Walled Garden’, ‘craftivist’ projects like the Living Lab Community Quilt and dialogic performance projects led by both students and staff. I will also explore how performance methods have been applied to the wider social infrastructure of the project.

Students needing to build their own in which they are leaders or achieve things collectively. Improvisation, building empowered community, and ‘following the energy’ as the governing principle. Commitment to reliability and an enduring presence continually performing its own story within the university. A continually open invitation aspiring not to remain within the constraints of modules, disciplines, assessments; even as the pressures on students and staff continually haul us back to these.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Status:	Published
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1025-1050.75 Teaching (Principles and practice) N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general > NX456.5.P38 Performance Art
School/Department:	School of the Arts
Institutes:	Institute for Social Justice
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/13748

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