Transforming Stories, Driving Change

Transforming Stories, Driving Change (TSDC) is a performance-as-research project that is designed to collectivize and mobilize the power of experience-based stories while evading common troubles with the reception of stories of experience in public settings. Over the past two years, self-advocates, educators, social service workers and artists have come together to create stories and make theatre about living in inhospitable and precarious housing (When My Home is Your Business), dealing with the narrow mandates and inflexibility of social services (We Need to Talk!), and navigating life as a young person under surveillance and threat (Choose Your Destination). The development of Transforming Stories, Driving Change deliberately draws on Nancy Fraser's theorizing about justice and recognition and what it takes to bring them about. The plays have been performed to community audiences, at conferences, and to university students. Each performance is followed by facilitated post-performance activities. Publications from the project have described the significance of fiction in social change processes and specifically in TSDC; the process of creating WHTT and how the women involved experienced its performance; and social work students' responses to the performances.