Cross-Racial Coalitions: Supporting the Next Wave of Changemakers

My name is Courtney E. Colligan, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Theatre Arts. My dissertation, “‘Weary of the Worldly Bars’: The Praxis of Postcarceral Performance in the United Kingdom and the United States,” explores the relationship between organized artistic practice, social justice, and individuals who have experienced incarceration. My work articulates the emergence of a new performance practice, postcarceral performance, that serves formerly incarcerated populations. Within the past decade, theatre organizations and similar performance non-profits have cultivated new employment-based programs to assist this marginalized population of former prisoners, particularly Black and women/femme populations. These programs function as a means of therapy, employment, and reconceptualization of the self post-incarceration. My other research interests include archives and museum studies, Early Modern performance, and gender and sexuality studies. My research and future career goals address the complex and often unequal relationship between institutions and communities, particularly those touched by the carceral state.

This summer, I am fortunate enough to be supported by a Humanities Engage immersive fellowship to work with GirlGov again to help with a curriculum research project launching in the 2021-2022 school year. GirlGov is a program “designed to ignite high school-aged women and femme’s passion for social justice […] and prepare them as our next generation of voters, leaders, and change-makers.” Their work has led to the passage of anti-stalking bills at the state level and campaigning for comprehensive sex education across Pennsylvania. Last summer, I had the privilege to work with Dr. Beth Sondel and GirlGov in a summer immersive to develop their alumni impact report on the efficacy and influence of this political-centered organization on its young women and femme members. I’m thrilled to be working with them once again with a YPAR project.

YPAR, Youth Participatory Action Research, is a methodology that centers youth experiences and knowledge and uses said understanding to act on social issues in communities. This summer, under the direction of Ph.D. Psychology student Nabila Jamal-Orozco and Dr. Josefina Bañales, we will first develop a literature review to trace the efficacy of YPAR methodology from its relatively recent conception. We aim to address the broad question of how girls and femmes of color and White girls and femmes build cross-racial coalitions and how these coalitions generate and transmit new forms of knowledge. We will then develop a curriculum for the larger project in GirlGov’s 2021-2022 school year from the lit review. Due to the length and scale of this project, my role this summer is to help develop and craft the GirlGov YPAR curriculum from a humanistic perspective.

GirlGov’s dedication to building critical consciousness in young women and femmes through social justice work at the state and local level make this work particularly exciting to me. As a Theatre and Performance Studies scholar, I critically examine cultural knowledge and engagement through individuals’ embodied and repetitive behaviors. GirlGov’s continued work in building youth-led committees within the program speaks to my interest in how groups can actively enact social change. After completing my degree, I aim to work in Pittsburgh communities through non-profits or similar organizations. Part of the training for this type of work has inarguably come from my coursework, comprehensive exams, and research. Still, another part arises from developing interdisciplinary relationships with other scholars and activists.

Part of the development of interdisciplinary relationships takes shape through workshops and symposiums. During the Engaged Scholarship Summer Initiative (EDSI), Walter Lewis (President & CEO of Homewood Children’s Village) articulated how academics research local communities without directly establishing a dialogue with community members: “Too often people conflate research with inaction.” In other words, many times, academics enter into communities to develop their own research without reporting back to the community on the results or efficacy of the project. This remark and the substantive discussion that followed spoke to the many interests of fellow academics and community members who strive to deconstruct unequal power structures within the academy. I attended the ESDI workshops as part of my summer fellowship with GirlGov to learn how to develop a community-based, centered, and driven project with GirlGov members. Following the Initiative, those of us working on the YPAR project met with Dr. Sondel and discussed how to activate the framework and research questions for our project. We have many goals: centering the knowledge youth have gained from their experience, centering the voices of the community, and destabilizing the scholar-student/community member binary. There is much to come with this project, and we openly embrace its shifting dynamics. We will continue to challenge our own methods of knowledge formation in order to radically build a curriculum and experience that allows high school women to lead the way. And we will stand by as their fervent supporters. 

Courtney Colligan
Theatre Arts
June 2021

Learn about all the Pitch Your Own Summer Immersive Fellows and Curated Immersive Summer Fellows and their experiences with their host organizations.