Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ethnographic Research on Knowledge Production and Applied Theatre in Post-Apartheid South Africa

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Doctoral student Jessica S. Ruthven (Washington University in St. Louis), with the guidance of Dr. Carolyn Sargent, will investigate the potential for culturally-specific applied theatre programs to contribute to HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and care efforts. In several countries, theatre has provided an important space for popular expressions of resistance, education, and collective consciousness-building. Applied theatre genres have emerged as central venues in articulating local struggles against the effects of the epidemic. While audience reception and engagement with HIV/AIDS theatre has been studied quantitatively, its emerging importance remains understudied from a qualitative perspective. The research, which will be based in Johannesburg, South Africa, is driven by three primary concerns: (1) to determine the mechanisms by which applied theatre acts as a vehicle for health communication, promotion, and knowledge production about HIV/AIDS; (2) to determine the impact, as defined by both theatre-makers and audience members, of the two main contemporary HIV/AIDS applied theatre genres in the communities and personal lives of those involved; and (3) to investigate how the content and aesthetic forms of community-level applied theatre have shaped conceptualizations of health inequity, subjective illness experience, and definitions about what constitutes healing in South Africa. Through participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and analysis of cultural products such as scripts and live applied theatre performances, the proposed project will investigate theatre-makers' and audience members' ideas about theatre as an institution involved in HIV/AIDS interventions. This research is important because it will contribute to understanding the culturally specific ways in which people affected by HIV/AIDS engage with national, international, and NGO efforts to produce and communicate knowledge about the epidemic. The project will provide data on how theatre interventions shape public health discourse, which may be directly considered in future development of public health strategies for engaging communities in HIV interventions. In addition, the research bridges the theoretical fields of medical anthropology and performance studies to provide an integrated perspective on contemporary applied theatre practices within South African health provision. Supporting this research also contributes to the education of a social scientist.