Format/Structure

This participatory workshop explores verbatim theatre as an embodied method for activist research in political ecology. Through collective exercises, participants will experiment with transforming interviews into theatre and reflect on emotions, situated knowledge, and activist methodologies.

Long Abstract

How can research in political ecology engage with emotions, embodiment, and lived experiences of environmental conflict? This participatory workshop explores verbatim theatre as a creative and embodied method within activist action-research. Verbatim theatre is a documentary theatre practice that transforms interview material into performance. By staging people’s words and experiences, it can create spaces where situated knowledge, emotions, and political subjectivities become visible and collectively reflected upon.

The workshop draws on research conducted in the Catalan Pyrenees (Pallars and Girona), where verbatim theatre was used as part of an activist research process with territorial defence movements facing conflicts around energy transitions and territorial transformations. In this context, theatre became a tool to analyse the interviews, return results to the communities involved, opening spaces for collective reflection on conflict, resistance, and emotional experiences linked to the defence of territory.

The session combines short theoretical inputs with participatory exercises. We will first situate the methodology within debates on activist research, relational ontologies, and embodied epistemologies in political ecology. Participants will thus engage in a short verbatim theatre exercise using excerpts from interview material, experimenting with how testimonies can be translated into embodied storytelling. The session concludes with a collective reflection on the possibilities and challenges of performative and creative methodologies for linking research, activism, and political imagination in times of socioecological crisis.