This volume explores whether theatre pedagogy can and should be transformed in response to the global climate crisis. Conrad Alexandrowicz and David Fancy present an innovative re-imagining of the ways in which the art of theatre, and the pedagogical apparatus that feeds and supports it, might contribute to global efforts in climate protest and action. Comprised of contributions from a broad range of scholars and practitioners, the volume explores whether an adherence to aesthetic values can be preserved when art is instrumentalized as protest and considers theatre as a tool to be employed by the School Strike for Climate movement. Considering perspectives from areas including performance, directing, production, design, theory and history, this book will prompt vital discussions which could transform curricular design and implementation in the light of the climate crisis. Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of climate change and theatre and performance studies.

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

This book radically reimagines theatre/performance pedagogy and dramaturgy in response to the accelerating climate crisis. This text is founded upon the principle that the theatre is the most anthropocentric of all the arts: the means of its representation, the human figure, is identical with its conventional object, the human narrative, broadly considered. In order to respond ethically to the climate crisis, it must expand its range to include performing as/in response to the nonhuman. Conrad Alexandrowicz concisely explores theoretical approaches to the other‐than‐human, found in the work of, among others, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Rosi Braidotti, and Cary Wolfe. The implications of this move are far‐reaching and commence with displacing realism from its traditional position of dominance. The practices of 20th century physical theatre visionaries such as Tadeusz Kantor, Jacques Lecoq, and Jerzy Grotowski are revisited and reconsidered for their applicability to forms of theatre that might serve the needs of establishing storytelling deriving from nonhuman phenomena. This logically leads to the matter of responding appropriately to Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The work finds guidance in Indigenous, pre‐scientific ways of knowing and being, such as those articulated by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013). In contemplating our kinship with vegetative life, the work finds inspiration in the latest research into the ways tree communities communicate, collaborate, and share resources, including the work of Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree, 2021). It next imagines transformations in how theatre is situated, delivered, and received and considers the ways in which the performer/spectator binary may have to be reconfigured, with particular reference to Grotowski’s experiments in participatory theatre. It poses an even more provocative question: is such theorized performance work pointing in the direction of some re‐imagined version of ritual and ceremony that may find antecedents in pre‐Christian European belief and practice? Finally, it locates such eco‐theatre in the realm of healing: climate anxiety, depression, and grief on the part of instructors, students, and artists will require us to consider and activate the healing power of the art form; perhaps, the core purpose of all the arts will shift to support the need to generate solace in times of fear, anger, and uncertainty. This book is intended for instructors, both scholars and performance pedagogues, in theatre and performance studies, as well as graduate and undergraduate students in these areas.

This book lays out the principles and practices of transformative sustainability education using a relational way of thinking and being. Elizabeth A. Lange advocates for a new approach to environmental and sustainability education, that of rethinking the Western way of knowing and being and engendering a frank discussion about the societal elements that are generating climate, environmental, economic, and social issues. Highlighting the importance of Indigenous and life-giving cultures, the book covers educational theory, transformation stories of adult learners, social and economic critique, and visions of changemakers. Each chapter also has a strong pedagogical element, with entry points for learners and embodied practices and examples of taking action at micro/meso/macro levels woven throughout. Overall, this book enacts a relational approach to transformative sustainability education that draws from post humanist theory, process thought, relational ontology, decolonization theory, Indigenous philosophy, and a spirituality that builds a sense of sacred towards the living world. Written in an imaginative, storytelling manner, this book will be a great resource for formal and nonformal environmental and sustainability educators.

This edited collection tackles “unsettling” as an emerging field of study that calls for settlers to follow Indigenous leadership and relationality and work toward disrupting the colonial reality through their everyday lives. Bringing together Indigenous and non- Indigenous scholars and activists, Unsettling Education considers how we can reconcile and transcend ongoing settler colonialism. The contributors reflect on how the three concepts of unsettling, Indigenization, and decolonization overlap and intersect in practical and theoretical ways. Questions are raised such as how can we recognize and address historical and current injustices that have been imposed upon Indigenous Peoples and their lands? How can we respect the fundamental and inherent sovereignty and rights of Indigenous Peoples as we work toward reconciliation? And how do we work collectively to build more equitable and just communities for all who call Canada home? Unsettling Education is well suited for college and university courses in Indigenous studies or education that focus on decolonization, land-based learning, Indigenization, unsettling, and reconciliation.

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.

In Staging and Re- cycling , John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen re-visit and reappraise a selection of their work to explore how the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer pathways for new work and new thinking. The book includes a collection of reprinted and first-published (although previously presented) textual material interspersed with editorial material – reflective essays from John and Knut on these pieces from the archives and original essays from invited scholars that explore the theme of repetition and re-cycling. The project has a number of aims: to suggest how the status of ‘new’ with regard to academic and staged dramaturgical materials may be reframed; to re-examine these through certain lenses and concepts (re-cycling; re-working; the spectator; landscape, post- and other dramaturgies); to explore the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic; to offer further provocations to received ideas; and to retrieve and re-approach material, once published or presented, that becomes ‘lost’ in archives or on library shelves. As shown here, the role of the hyphen acts as an indicator to the status of ‘re-’ in relation to the ‘new’. Written for scholars and academics, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners working in all forms for theatre and performance, Staging and Re-cycling suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers, and draws out threads that extend back into the past and potentially forward into the future.