Theater and working life studies

Abstract

This article is based on the experiences with mixing theatre and R&D projects within the field of working life and unemployment. Through scenes from the play Little margins and from dramatisations of participants utopian ideas we will try to show how theatre and drama has been used as a tool for developing the field but also for developing the research project. The research area is critical utopian action research and in that context the drama has strengthened our methodological approach in a sense that experiments with going beyond dialogue. The article is theoretically inspired by critical theory with a touch of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. The finding in the article is primarily about work and the subjective experience of work. We find that the participants bring up the importance of having a job not only as an income source, but also at a subjective need to be of societal use.