In our latest Fellow in Focus discussion, we heard from Visiting Research Fellow Dr Tania Cañas (University of Melbourne) who spoke about the evolution of her work on borders and performance among communities that have been forcefully displaced.

In conversation with her Trinity collaborator Dr Erika Piazzoli (School of Education), Dr Cañas said her route to arts research was heavily informed by her own experience of forced displacement. She said that a year-long theatre programme run by a local NGO, brought up a lot of tension and conflict in how she was able to negotiate and voice her own identity and representation in Australia (a “highly contested space”) and this informed her decision to undertake this path of research.

Dr Cañas went on to become the Artistic Director at RISE Refugee, the first organisation to be run, governed and controlled by the Refugee, Asylum Seeker and Ex-Detainee community. It was here where, in 2015, she authored a seminal piece on ethics and representation in response to requests from artists to work with refugees and other members of the RISE community. These ten points have become known as the ‘RISE manifesto’ and have gained international recognition in the field of refugee studies.

The manifesto was also a catalyst for Dr Piazzoli’s collaboration with Dr Cañas here at Trinity. It inspired Dr Piazzoli’s research, Sorgente, which drew on the manifesto to develop a definition of the ethical imagination. The manifesto was also the subject for issue 2, volume 15 of the Scenario journal, co-edited by Dr Piazzoli, with a Call for Papers titled:  "Provocations for ethics in performative language teaching and research".

As part of her fellowship, Dr Cañas’ is using this framework of ethics and representation to examine community-led practice-as-research approaches and evaluate how such process might become platforms of meaningful collaboration.

Taking the theme of ‘absence-presence’, Dr Cañas and Dr Piazzoli have devised a series of creative based workshops with Youthreach, a community-based programme offering a wide range of training and education for young people.

Throughout this process with young participants, they have explored questions including “how are we present?”, “how are we absent?”, "what are the negotiations between both terms?" and "how might we understand this through everyday lived experience?".

Discussing the collaboration at the Fellow in Focus, Dr Cañas said she drew on the established working relationship that Dr Piazzoli had already built with Youthreach through the Sorgente project as she highlighted the importance of "trust" in working with community-based groups.

The theatre workshops culminated in an exhibition by the young people of Youthreach, at the Scenario conference in Trinity from May 9-11,2024, where the researchers hosted Youthreach artists onto campus as part of the conference.

In last week’s Fellow in Focus they shared some of the insights that came from the students through this process, and some of the tools they used to draw out the theme of ‘absence-presence’ among the lives of the participants.

Listen to the conversation now:

Dr Tania Cañas co-edited an anthology of plays about Australia’s border regime Staging Asylum, Again (2024) through Currency Press Australia. She will begin a Banting postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, working with the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador initiative in 2024.