Introduction

This chapter offers a reflexive account of a co-produced, multisectoral, community-based project between Glasgow Open Museum (OM), Glasgow Association for Mental Health (GAMH) and Queen Margaret University (QMU). The project is framed around an accredited Public Sociology module, Identity Community & Society, in which participants explore sociological explanations of identity, community and society whilst engaging with and interpreting art and artefacts from the OM collections. We share our experiences of reaching over the chasms between the worlds of museums, mental health advocacy and higher education. Crucially, we hear from student participants, as co-authors, about the increased selfconfidence and reflexive knowledge resulting from participation in the project. In interpreting different art works, participants consider a range of sociological concepts, debates and theories, that frame their interpretation of art, but also facilitate the development of a critical consciousness about social issues that they have direct experience of themselves or that impact participants’ communities.

Widening participation is at the heart of this project; the adult learners, most of whom have limited recent experience of formal learning, became associate students of QMU, with full access to institutional resources whilst learning in a safe community space. In the presentation of our narrative here, we draw upon a combination of personal reflexive accounts, participant feedback and theoretical inspirations. More specifically, later in the chapter, we unpack the underpinning ethos of the project as theoretically framed by Freire's (1970) dialogical ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, and we conceptualise the practice of our participants as Gramscian organic intellectuals (Gottlieb, 1989). We take the opportunity to weave critical reflection on the utility of Burawoy's (2005) theses for public sociology as a channel through which to interpret and problematise ‘for whom’ and ‘for what’ public sociology is, as well as our positions as value committed, partisan public sociologists, who are committed to creating a sociological space in which community-based adult learners mobilise their own sociological praxis. The focus in this chapter is explaining the meaning of (and need for) a public sociology as a particular style of practising sociology in an engaged, community-focussed way; and which speaks to, for, and with publics in their own communities.

This chapter explores an ambiguous precedent in the histories of applied theatre: theatrical entertainments in the Victorian workhouse in Britain. Historical conceptions of Victorian workhouses have characterised them as ‘Poor Law Bastilles’, imprisoning vulnerable populations in shaming and repressive regimes of discipline and punishment (Engels 1993 [1845]: 292). In the workhouse, the poor were categorised according to the extent to which they were deemed able to work, with a time and place regime crafted to condition the able-bodied poor into habits of work and good character by, for example, following a strict daily routine and performing monotonous forms of labour. However, the Victorian workhouse was also part of the first centrally and systematically administered welfare system, and it focused on improving the care and education of neglected and orphaned children, and providing comfort for elderly, ill and vulnerable adult members of society. On the one hand, the workhouse entertainments examined in this chapter were compliant with a disciplinary regime that recognised life as valuable only when it works, that is, when immersed in capitalist systems of productive labour. On close inspection, however, the permitted forms of sociality exemplified by visiting entertainers also show how the workhouse regime opened up to the economically excluded in ways that prefigure egalitarian and progressive forms of cultural practice.

Here, I examine three theatrical performances – a glee concert, temperance entertainment and Sunday School amusement – taking place in a workhouse in Rochdale (Lancashire, UK) between 1877 and 1887. As theatrical forms of rational recreation and missionary education, each is embedded in the Protestant religious culture predominant in Britain at the time which, as Max Weber famously asserted in his classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, accelerated the historical development of capitalism across Europe and its colonies (2002 [1905]). Although an exploration of the colonial trajectories of the theatrical encounters with the poor explored here cannot be the focus of this chapter, it is important to note that, as cultural practices embedded in discourses of workfulness, respectability and self-help associated with the development of capitalism, their significance extends far beyond the specific spatial and temporal context examined. It is also important to draw attention to the way each example exhibits what might seem surprisingly imaginative and social modes of religiosity concomitant with Protestant religious culture.

At high tide on the Thames on 13 June 2015 at 11.53 am a group of art activists began an unsanctioned twenty-five hour durational performance in the expansive Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, a large art gallery on the gentrified South Bank in London. Entitled Time Piece, this was the latest in a series of interventions by Liberate Tate, an art collective who stage performative protests against the oil industry's sponsorship of cultural organisations. Described as a ‘textual intervention’, seventy-five performers used charcoal to inscribe the concrete floor with passages and quotations from dystopian novels, environmental reports, slogans and non-fictional works about art, climate change and fossil fuel. Each performer scribbled silently, veiled and dressed in black, and when the gallery closed at 10 pm, twenty activists continued their carefully choreographed work through the night, unimpeded by security guards or the police. By morning, when Tate Modern re-opened its doors, the Turbine Hall remained closed to visitors. When the tide turned at 12.55 pm on 14 June, the performers left and the cleaning staff moved in.

We begin with this performative protest not because it is representative of all applied theatre, but because its concerns resonate with many of the ideas explored in this book. As a piece of activist art, Time Piece both invokes a long history of performative protest and also captures contemporary anxieties about the relationship between climate change, global capitalism, neoliberalism and the arts, all of which are debated by authors in this book. Beyond the substance of its environmental message, the performance illuminates deeper cultural responses to the contemporary landscape that are also articulated in this collection of essays. Time Piece re-imagined synergies between time and the material world, recognising that temporality is experienced in multiple ways. Liberate Tate capture this impulse on their website, describing how Time Piece draws attention to the different temporal registers that affect lives as ‘lunar time, tidal time, ecological time, geological time and all the ways in which we are running out of time’. The hunched figures dressed in black veils, quietly creating a rising tide of words on the floor, were like mourners marking a space by inscribing its relationship to lost time, a performative memorialisation of material life destroyed by practices of industrial excavation and economic exploitation driven by fossil fuel economies.