Ethics in Research-Based Theater: Why Stories Matter

What is RbT?

RbT is an umbrella term for a variety of approaches that combine research methods and theory with theater traditions and practices (Lea, 2016). RbT can be a form of inquiry that is used to do research (Fels, 2015; Norris, 2009) as well as doing knowledge translation that shares research findings and other types of knowledge with the audience. There is no standard way to do RbT (Mienczakowski & Morgan, 2001; Saldaña, 2003, 2006). Projects range with respect as to who is on the team, what data are used, the topic(s) explored, the target audience, theater-making practices utilized, and how the theater experience is structured for audiences (Beck et al., 2011; Mienczakowski & Moore, 2008). Although each project is unique, there are some elements commonly seen in RbT practice. RbT typically involves artists collaborating directly with researchers in the theater-making process and sometimes involves others, such as community members or decision makers. Primary and/or secondary research is used to inform the process and final product. RbT projects generally are anchored in a commitment to honoring the voices and contributions of research participants and the stories they generously share. Projects often culminate in a theater piece being performed in front of a live audience.

RbT is an interdisciplinary process. It requires team members to navigate a new terrain where individuals’ professional norms and expectations intersect in unfamiliar (and sometimes conflicting) ways. This raises both new possibilities and novel tensions for researchers, artists, and audiences. RbT also requires vulnerability and bravery from those involved. Team members need to be willing to explore taken-for-granted assumptions and risk failing in front of one another. Individuals are asked to engage with imagination and playfulness while handling uncertainty as they explore embodied ways of knowing (Gray & Kontos, 2019). This is demanding (and often exciting) work! Relationships and collaboration are foundational in the RbT process as teams come together to explore, question, and reimagine the potential of this amalgam of research and theater (Boydell et al., 2016; Gray & Kontos, 2015, 2018; Mienczakowski, 2001; Rossiter et al., 2008). Regardless of the project, ethical tensions will arise and teams will be faced with the complex task of negotiating how to forge ahead.

Ethics in RbT

It has been a daunting task to choose among many possible ways of structuring this special issue, as the contributions highlight many different forms of theater, areas of research, and uses of data and personal experience. Our focus is, however, the intersection of RbT and ethics and so we have settled on foregrounding unique aspects each contribution offers and arranged the papers in a sequence that we hope will further our collective understanding of the complex space that constitutes this intersection.

The word ethics resonates very differently for different RbT practitioners, conjuring for some the sometimes cumbersome requirements of institutional review and for others the tricky business of navigating through or around the power dynamics inherent to research. So, too, is the practical application of ethics entangled in diverse commitments, from adhering to detailed policies and procedures that govern the world of scholarly research to interrupting colonizing narratives and evolving methods of collaboration that prioritize an ethic of care, the necessity of slowing down and holding space for relations to form in a positive and respectful way. And, if this ground is not already rugged enough to require the axiological equivalent of a land rover, we might also layer in recognition of distinctive disciplinary cultures of aesthetic, research, and/or professional ethics, all of which sit in some tension with one another when doing RbT. Fortunately, the papers in this collection offer a range of vantage points from which we may locate ourselves and, like an orienteer, forge a way forward.

Adopting the metaphor of a road trip, Nichols, Cox, and Guillemin build on practitioners’ stories from the RbT field to identify a series of ethical guideposts that can usefully inform planning and decision-making in RbT. The guideposts are not prescriptive, but rather are intended to signal, like signage on a highway, that there is a decision point approaching. Varied ways of engaging with ethics, drawn from the worlds of institutional and applied research ethics, professional ethics, and theater and aesthetics, each draw attention to different aspects of the ethical terrain in RbT and contribute to the formulation of questions that sit, sometimes uneasily, at the intersection of these diverse forms of ethics. The utility of the guideposts is demonstrated through a fictional RbT project that illustrates how one could use the guideposts to navigate common RbT challenges.

Identifying ethical tensions as “generative” and “nonbinary,” Michalovich et al. offer an insightful adaptation of Elliott Eisner’s framework for ethical tensions in arts-based research to enable RbT-specific reflections on the ethical terrain. The paper makes use of data drawn from interviews with team members involved in developing and performing Alone in the Ring, a play exploring experiences of health care providers with disabilities in health practice and education. The adapted framework identifies RbT’s emphasis on interpersonal relationships (the social dimension) and the evolving nature of a performance over time or across multiple iterations (the diachronic temporal dimension), aspects that were not part of Eisner’s original contribution.

Several other contributors, who identify strongly with the impetus to ground the ethics of RbT in the practice of RbT, share stories of their evolving ethical principles, values, and commitments through specific RbT projects that have had a formative influence. Sallis shares his E.T.H.I.C.A.L. principles and how they evolved from his work in education in light of tensions arising in verbatim theater between the playwright’s/researcher’s responsibility to the truth and accuracy of story and to respect for participants. Three case studies attest to the need to remain mindful of unforeseen ethical challenges and attentive to creative modes of resolution, and thus the iterative nature of ethical principles and praxis.

Building on their “eight Ps ethical framework” (People, Purpose, Place, Power, Permission, Protection, the Performers, and Participation), Sinclair and O’Toole invite consideration of ethical issues from the perspective of performers, audiences, and informants. Creatively weaving their experiences into partially fictionalized scripts, they invite readers into three lively unfolding scenes to witness emergent ethical challenges and consider how they might be effectively foreseen and/or addressed. Many components of their framework are in dialogue with the wider literature and effectively bridge to their praxis.

Other contributions offer an explicit challenge to the norms of institutional ethics boards. Schnellert, Tidey, and Hole critically reflect on a project about romantic relationships that employed RbT as a means to decenter ableist assumptions about disability and sexuality. Tackling the need to reveal relationships of power, representation, and the privileging of some voices over others, the authors examine practices of consent both on and off stage, and offer recommendations for future work in co-creating RbT through the lens of disability justice and critical disability studies. There are many insights here that could inform revisions to institutional ethics protocols.

D’Alessandro’s contribution explores ethical challenges through insights gleaned from Ed’s Story: The Dragon Chronicles, a piece of verbatim theater based on a teenage oncology patient’s journals and interviews with Ed’s family and health care team after his death. The paper speaks to the powerful impacts of RbT for audience and locates many practical suggestions for considering consent, identifying risk, and mitigating potential harm when the viewing of such work becomes a mandatory part of curriculum in the training of health care professionals.

Sharing her experiences as a playwright for an RbT play about dementia (Cracked: New Light on Dementia), Gray recognizes the value of learning from our failures and using the insights gleaned to enhance and extend RbT practice. Highlighting the value of relational accountability, Gray suggests that collective work and embodiment (including all of the senses and emotions) allows us to recognize our vulnerabilities and shift from an exclusive focus on the avoidance of harm toward the development of practices that extend and support an ethic of caring. Thus, ethics in RbT also becomes a question of the ability to maximize good through RbT practice.

Whether it is an alternative to, or an extension of, ethical principles that are central to institutional ethics, the importance of an ethic of care emerges as a salient thread in many of the papers. Drawing upon evolving insights from creating and performing a verbatim theater piece titled Out at School, Owis, Baer, Sallisbury, and Goldstein share moments of discomfort that led to their collective process of evolving “a slow ethic of care.” Offering extracts from the script and personal testimony about pivotal moments of dissonance within their creative process, they reveal the competing desire for resolution and the corresponding need to sit patiently with ethical tensions to allow an appropriate response to emerge in its own time. Part of what enables this is the network of care that LGBTQ2S+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two‑spirit) theater practitioners enact in creating, performing, and witnessing verbatim theater.

Identifying with the impacts of performance for actors, Balfour and Hassall write about The Return, an RbT play that addresses mental health stigma and encourages help seeking among veterans and the military population. From a dramaturgical perspective, the authors explore issues of authenticity, narrative structure, and decisions around the casting of actors and ex-military personnel in staging stories of personal trauma. They exemplify an ethics of care in creating safety frameworks that maintain distance between the fictional and the personal; in addition, they point to how stylistic choices in how the story is told open opportunities to raise important ontological questions about mental health and military experiences. This points to the transformative potential of RbT: “It was as if the story had become an act of service, rather than a secretive and shameful wound. (see Balfour and Hassall, in this issue)”

The transformative potential of story is also evident in other papers and is indelibly written into ethics, no matter how construed. These papers demonstrate the work of RbT as both shaping and being shaped by the impacts it has for playwrights, performers, and audiences. Braiding together experiences of working through the ethics of respectful representation of characters who are no longer living (in two pieces titled Homa Bay and Unload), Lea and Belliveau draw upon autobiography and narrative as forms of ethical inquiry capable of generating new pathways through the confluence of theatrical and research ethics. The piece articulates both a desire to uphold ethical responsibilities to theatrical form yet also concludes that the “ethical move for the researcher of human social life is to tell the story in ways that will move us toward healing (Poulos, 2008, p. 53)” (see Lea and Belliveau in this issue).

Healing often entails the interruption of problematic narratives. Spring’s paper zeroes in on how RbT can be used to challenge hegemonic biomedical narratives about mental health. Her work draws on mad theory and mad aesthetics to integrate the performance of “weighty ethical conundrums” she encountered during the research and development of The Space in Between: A Research-Based Play About Military Trauma, Moral Injury and Transition. This novel approach of weaving the ethics of RbT into the play itself points to the importance of reflexivity as a practical tool in ethical engagement throughout the RbT process.

Offering an alternative to “damage-centred research” that depicts individuals as broken, Conrad unpacks ethical tensions around youth engagement, authenticity in representation, and advocacy that arose in a forum theater project (Youth Uncensored). The project sparked dialogue between street-involved youth, service providers, students, academics, and community members and demanded that the team think carefully about how the work performed within larger sociopolitical contexts. Adopting “survivance-intervention” (Carter) as an ethical stance in doing this work, Conrad’s piece illustrates how a project that prioritizes youth’s agency and care can support vibrant resistance to dominant discourses that perpetuate harm.

Morrissey’s contribution also identifies as ethical the obligation to generate dialogue. Offering a retrospective look at the development and performance of a one-woman play, Goldilocks’s Testimony, Morrissey describes how her ethical obligation, in performance, “extended beyond exposing the taken-for-granted practices that marginalise women in workplaces to opening spaces for dialogue around them.” The play was inspired by Morrissey’s experiences in academia and, in addition to offering insights about how to create safer spaces for dialogue, Morrissey identifies the importance of self-care as an ethical issue in autoethnographic theater.

Vachon and Salvatore’s contribution takes the form of a dramatic dialogue between the co-authors who discuss ethical issues in their ongoing work in audiodrama and verbatim theater, respectively. They note there are “multiple ethical responsibilities of creators” and that these are not extractable from aesthetics: “The two, ethics and aesthetics, are symbiotic in verbatim work, and we think in all forms of research-based theater, and one element cannot thrive without the other.” They are not afraid to adopt radically different positions on contentious ethical issues (such as casting and artistic license in verbatim theatre) and their writing contains many provocations that offer positive disruption to taken-for-granted assumptions. One thing they seem to agree on, however, has to do with maximizing the impacts of their work through focusing on what the audience will learn the most from.

Woodland, Bell-Wykes, and Godwin situate their discussion of ethics within the observation that relationality infuses all aspects of RbT. Exploring the complexity of relations within the project The Score, as a means of bringing to light the need for respectful, accountable, and decolonial theater-research praxis, the piece employs “yarning-up” as a means of displaying the collaborative and generative process of meaning-making they engage in. Their project intends to create a community-engaged, participatory model for theater in health education that will address sexual health in Indigenous communities, schools, prisons, and community health settings. To do so, however, it is vital to ensure that the power imbalances and exploitations brought about by colonization are not replicated within the project itself. The piece is gritty and speaks to the importance of non-Indigenous theater practitioners taking responsibility for “making space for processes to unfold and expand as they will.” (see Woodland et al in this issue)

Authors in this special issue reflect on their personal and collective experiences in creating and performing RbT so that we can learn from both their missteps and successes. Reading across the range of RbT approaches and resulting ethical entanglements, three salient themes emerged. These concern various forms of voice and their relevance to ethics in RbT, time and the temporal dimension as a neglected axis for understanding ethics, and practices of reflexivity that can be used to better inform ethical decision-making in RbT.

Voice and Ethics in RbT

Voice is at the very heart of ethical practice in RbT. What is the purpose of this method if not to hear voices that are too often unheard, left in silence? This section looks at how voice form functions in theater and traces these forms with examples from this issue. There are four core voice forms in the theater, each of which has a specific purpose. The first type of voice we see and hear in theater is soliloquy, generally understood as a dramatic character speaking internally to themselves, usually in a deep existential moment of awareness. Think of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy as an example, when he ponders suicide. Soliloquies invite the audience to hear a character’s inner monologue, their thoughts spoken aloud. In the context of RbT, it is important ethical practice to foster deep truth-telling, but never at the expense of trauma. Soliloquies offer potent theatrical moments and can do so in an RbT context as well. However, to ensure that participants are not retraumatized in soliloquizing, it is recommended that stories are switched up in the ensemble, so that no story is told by someone to whom the events occurred. This aesthetic distancing allows for some emotional space for the original teller and the actor to see and hear their soliloquy in a safer and more ethical way. In this issue, we hear soliloquies in Lea and Belliveau’s writing about how they represent loved ones who have passed on. Their ethical sensitivity toward these family members, and how they are represented in their RbT work, reflects the deeper existential voice that is heard in soliloquizing. Likewise, in D’Allesandro’s article, the voice of Ed is soliloquized as this young cancer patient faces the end of his life. Themes of “adolescent development, escape from illness, changing relationships, symptoms, and spirituality” (see D’Allesandro in this issue) are the kinds of existential voice heard most clearly in soliloquy.

The second voice form in drama is monologue. Different than soliloquy, monologues are most often public speech, either to another character or to an imagined audience, or occasionally in direct address to the actual audience. A good example of a monologue play is Willy Russell’s (1988) Shirley Valentine, a comedy in which a frustrated housewife leaves her husband for an adventure in Greece. Throughout the play, Shirley speaks to her kitchen wall, which is of course the fourth wall that the audience is seated behind. In RbT contexts, monologue can be thought of as a form of testimony that the audience is witnessing. Here, as above, we recommend that no participant shares their own story but rather that monologues are shared and performed by others in the cast. Monologues can also be fictionalized through the process of conceptual blending (Turner, 1997): “conceptual blending is a fundamental instrument of the everyday mind, used in our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific” (p. 93). In an RbT process, conceptual blending would involve the blending of personal stories into a monologue that is owned by no one person, belonging rather to the ensemble in collective ownership and sharing. Monologue is used to good effect in Spring’s article, in particular when we hear a powerful voiceover monologue in her play about returned military veterans:

PSA Voiceover: If your matter is urgent, call 1800 Canadian soldiers have been wounded in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, we are experiencing a higher than normal call victims and all our representatives are busy helping other killers. Please hang yourself and try again later. (see Spring in this issue)

Also, Michalovich et al.’s article reflects on an RbT project on disability that uses monologue as its form: “The stories of four different characters were shared by way of creative monologue (an occupational therapy student, a physiotherapist, a social worker, and a nurse)” (see Michalovich et al. in this issue). These authors draw on Eliot Eisner’s writing to explore the ethical tensions experienced in the creation and performance of this monologue play.

Third is the most prominent voice form in drama, dialogue. Dialogue is understood as a conversation on stage between two or more characters. Dialogue has its roots in philosophy, as in Plato’s capturing of Socrates’s dialogues with his students in Ancient Greece. Subsequent influences on philosophy include Martin Buber’s (1958) I and Thou, Mikhail Bakhtin’s (2016) dialogical relations, and Paolo Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy. Buber (1958) writes,

The It world hangs together in space and time.

The You world does not hang together in space and time.

The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course.

The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation. (Biemann, 2002, p. 186)

In Buber’s philosophy, the I–Thou relation is at the core of existence. Thus, opening ourselves to the other is an essential aspect of life. In the theater, we witness dialogues between characters that offer us opportunities to build interpretation, empathy, and understanding. Bakhtin (1987) resonates with Buber in arguing that “Understanding is always dialogic to some degree” (p. 111), saying,

Any truly creative voice can only be the second voice in the discourse. Only the second voice— pure relationship —can be completely objectless and not cast a figural, substantive shadow. The writer is a person who is able to work in a language while standing outside language, who has the gift of indirect speaking. (p. 110)

Here, Bakhtin clearly echoes Buber in his thinking about dialogue as “pure relationship” with the “gift of indirect thinking” made visible in the theater as dramatic dialogue. Freire (2014) continues this discourse in his writing in a more consciously activist way:

Dialogue is meaningful precisely because the dialogical subjects, the agents in the dialogue, not only retain their identity, but actively defend it, thus grow together. Precisely on this account, dialogue does not level them, does not “even them out,” reduce them to each other. Dialogue is not a favour done one for the other, a kind of grace accorded. On the contrary, it implies a sincere, fundamental respect on the part of the subjects engaged in it, a respect that is violated, or prevented from materializing, by authoritarianism. (p. 107)

Researchers engaged in RbT would benefit from considering this kind of philosophical thinking about dialogue and potentially sharing some of this thinking with participants. Conversations about the nature of dialogue, and its role in theater, can deepen the shared understanding of how dialogue is fundamentally about the encounter with the “other” made public in performance.

One article in this issue is entirely dialogical in form. Vachon and Salvatore stage their article as an ongoing dialogue about their respective RbT work, a dialogue that addresses ethical issues of representation and identity through the lens of ethics. They share what Conquergood (1985) would recognize as a “dialogical performance”: “The aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and other together so that they can question, debate and challenge one another” (p. 9). In Sallis’s article, he includes a dialogue with a participant that allows him to consider ethical tensions in his practice:

Negotiating with participants, through dialogue, around what goes into an RbT play, and (perhaps more importantly) what gets left out, is a key aspect of ethical praxis.

Finally, the fourth voice from in theater is chorus, first seen in the theater of Ancient Greece and understood to represent the voice of the community affected by the actions of the heroes and antiheroes in various plays. For example, in Sophocles’s (2020) Oedipus Rex, in which King Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, the Chorus representing the Theban elders petitions their king to help them in the face of the curses brought upon Thebes by Oedipus’s unwitting crimes. In this way, a dramatic chorus can be understood as standing in for the audience, reflecting their shared concerns and attempts to ensure their survival in the face of uncertainty. Beckerman (1990) reminds us of the original role of the chorus when he says the function of chorus is

in effect giving a performance for the audience. Their expression is usually iconic in that they crystallize a set of values or concretize an observation in an autonomous, detached manner. Their closeness to the audience is further heightened by contrast with the characters. . . As a result, the chorus mediates between the events and the audience. . . We are addressed by the chorus and address ourselves simultaneously. (pp. 123–124)

For RbT, the choral voice can be seen as the collective voice of the ensemble. As Sophocles and Beckerman suggest, ethically speaking, the chorus offers audiences an understanding of how dramatic action can have an impact on more than the central characters. The social effects of drama are seen in the consequences the chorus can face, as when a king brings death and disease on his people in Oedipus Rex. Crystallizing a set of values, or offering observations in an autonomous yet detached manner, as Beckerman suggests, is where the power of the choral voice lies. RbT practitioners can consider how the choral voice might heighten an audience’s sense of shared social impact in terms of what the project is presenting. An example of effective choral voice is heard in Conrad’s article in which a labeled “at-risk” youth says,

I went to Uncensored (project name) and met a lot of good people, friends that I still talk to outside of Uncensored. . . Everyone was really nice to me. I’ve never been so freely accepted in my life. . .When I came here [racism] didn’t exist. I didn’t feel like I was judged. . . They gave me a lot of support, I guess, the whole community—taught me a lot of resilience-ness. Getting introduced to Uncensored . . . got me involved with good people. (see Conrad in this issue)

Research shows that social connection is a key indicator of good health outcomes (Gordon-Nesbitt & Howarth, 2020). An RbT project that offers a strong sense of belonging for participants, as expressed above, may lead to potentially better lives for participants. The dramatic ensemble may be viewed as a microutopian space (Becker, 2012) within which participants and facilitators may glimpse the nascent possibilities of better lives, better worlds. In Woodland et al.’s article “Yarning up relations,” the three co-authors enter in to a choral dialogue in which they consider that “relationality is at the core of artistic practice in a First Nations creative space” (see Woodland et al. in this issue). As co-author Kamarra comments, “As I am facilitating the work, the work is facilitating me,” a quote that effectively highlights the inherently social act of theater creation and the choral voice it calls on in response.

This section has addressed how dramatic voice can be better understood by RbT practitioners to deepen their ethical understanding of how voice functions in RbT. Soliloquy, monologue, dialogue, and chorus all offer effective ways to understand how voice performs as ethical expression, both on stage and in post-show conversations with audiences. We continue with a consideration of time, another key aspect of RbT practice.

Time and Ethics in RbT

Time is a common thread that runs through most, if not all the papers in this collection. We see examples of time in a linear temporal sense, but also as relational and iterative. We offer four reflections garnered from our authors’ contributions. In posing these reflections, it is interesting to consider the relationship of time and ethics in RbT, and its significance.

Our first reflection that will not come as a surprise to readers who have embarked on RbT journeys of their own is that RbT takes time; this is not a quick endeavor. Substantial time is required to fully engage and enable the research, development, performance, and evaluation stages of RbT. Examples from our authors highlight the often years-long duration required between initial idea and planning to performance and review. For example, both Gray in her discussion of Cracked: New Light on Dementia and D’Alessandro on Ed’s Story discuss the decade-plus time spent to reach their current publication stage of the process. This reminds us of not just our professional obligations but also our ethical obligations when engaging in RbT, particularly around developing and maintaining relationships with the communities with whom we engage. In committing to RbT, we need to do so with the full knowledge that considerable time will be required.

This takes us to our second reflection that this lengthy time requirement is often associated with institutional and organizational constraints. Different stages and activities are required that often need close planning and defined outcomes. First is the time required to plan and design the project, followed by the need to source funding. Once funding is secured, it often comes with strict limits on when it needs to be spent. For those projects requiring institutional ethics approval, time must be allocated for writing, reviewing, and often revising of ethics applications before research can commence—all this before the data collection and analysis can even begin. Schnellert, Tidey, and Hole, in their work on the sexual agency of people with intellectual disabilities, discuss their extensive negotiations with their institutional research ethics board about negotiating consent with their participants. Nichols, Cox, and Guillemin, in their outline of the RbT journey, discuss the “middle activities”: producing, rehearsing, performing, witnessing, documenting, and evaluating, in addition to possible publication. It is not surprising therefore to read of the many numbers of years taken to realize the initial RbT plans from our authors. Many of these institutional constraints are familiar to all researchers, not just those involved in RbT. However, RbT researchers and practitioners work closely with community members who may not be aware of these often lengthy and complicated processes. Not only do we have ethical obligations to ensure that we meet these institutional and organizational requirements but we need to consider how we best involve our community partners in this process.

This notion of planning and temporality is linear in nature, with a beginning, middle, and end to the process, with each stage having a planned desired outcome. However, not all the contributions in this collection followed this planned and linear process. Morrissey discusses the 5-year development trajectory of Goldilock’s Testimony as serendipitous; it was not a play that she intended to write or perform. Morrissey’s decision to perform Goldilock’s Testimony was an ethical one, to open up a dialogue about power and women’s marginalization at work through performance; Morrissey felt she had an ethical obligation to disrupt the power relations in which she was entangled.

In contrast to this planned and linear mode is the iterative process discussed by many authors. With this third reflection, the iterations and their outcomes are not predetermined; diversions occur along the RbT journey; what you started out to do may change and evolve over time. Many authors, including Gray, D’Alessandro, and Lea and Belliveau, discuss their iterative RbT process. In a number of these cases the original idea for the RbT project evolved into different performance genres, educational resources, and personal and public endeavors. The challenge here is ensuring that participants are involved and consent is sought as the process evolves. Too often consent is only considered as a once-off at the beginning of data collection rather than a process of ongoing engagement as the RbT project evolves through its iterative stages.

Our final and perhaps most salient point considers the opportunities that are offered by taking time to reflect on the ethical tensions in RbT. Owis, Baer, Salisbury, and Goldstein use the term slow ethic of care in their work on the experiences LGBTQ2S+ families face in schools. Although they suggest this term in the context of creating a queer and trans slow ethic of care, we believe that it has broader applicability. This term aptly describes what other authors in the collection experienced as they reflect back on their RbT journeys. We have discussed the lengthy and sometimes frustrating time required to navigate organizational hurdles and ethical tensions in the moment. However taking a slow ethics approach provides us with an opportunity to review, reflect, and reconsider.

We may experience ethical tensions as discomfort or unease and our authors provide us with poignant examples of this. For example, Spring describes her experiences working with military veterans and their sometimes challenging responses; Conrad discusses her experiences with youth and needing to be flexible in prioritizing their needs with those of the project; O’Toole discusses the unsettling experiences of power not being in the control of the RbT practitioners, but sitting with the audience or sponsors. Owis, Baer, Salisbury, and Goldstein urge us to resist the desire for resolution and to sit with these ethical tensions. This is not easy; we are often driven to resolve the problem as quickly as possible and move toward the planned outcome. It requires courage to be vulnerable and reflect on our frailties; Sallis reflects on this in his description of being lured by a tantalizing story from one of his participants, which turns out to be untrue. We are reminded to grant ourselves permission to sit, reflect, and take a “slow ethics” approach. Being open to our vulnerabilities provides space for reflection and allows things to change as a result of reflection. The time taken to reflect engenders an ethics of care, for ourselves, our research participants, team members, audience members, and communities we seek to engage with.

It is interesting to consider these four reflections in terms of retrospective accounts of time, in contrast to the more prospective account of time required by institutional research ethics boards. When applying for institutional ethics approval, we are asked to critically consider what ethical risks could happen when undertaking research and propose how these risks could be minimized or mitigated. To do this, we need to look to the future and apply a prospective ethical lens. This is clearly important but it is not always possible to predict all the possible ethical challenges that could occur. As our authors have shown, there is much to be gained by also adopting a retrospective approach. Taking time to look back, review, and reflect offers an opportunity for a different type of ethical reflection. As we go on to discuss, taking the time to be reflexive requires us to pause, and take the time to reflect on our roles and practices in RbT, and importantly, to learn from these.

Reflexivity and Ethics in RbT

Reading across the projects discussed in this special issue highlights the wide range of ethical tensions and dilemmas that arise when doing RbT. Although no two projects grapple with the same ethical challenges, they all encounter unanticipated ethical issues that affect their work. This is not surprising given the interdisciplinary nature of RbT, which asks all team members to work in unfamiliar ways at different points in a project. Established ways of working, underlying assumptions, and professional standards are therefore put to the test as teams negotiate how they will move forward. Resolutions to ethical challenges need to be project specific and there are no checklists or defined protocols with universal relevance. How then can projects both embrace the inherent uncertainty and still attend closely to ethics?

We believe it starts by accepting that ethical tensions and dilemmas will arise in all RbT work. This is true no matter how detailed the planning is, the number of existing relationships among the project team, or the level of prior RbT experience. It is a fundamental part of the RbT process. When we embrace this fact, we can acknowledge that professional standards for ethics in both research and theater are important but not sufficient for doing RbT ethically. For example, institutional ethics that govern research can help RbT teams design their projects with attention to important elements like consent, confidentiality, and harm. They are less able to support teams as they navigate ethical tensions that unexpectedly arise during RbT within a specific context. Attention to ethics must therefore be integrated throughout the RbT process. When we acknowledge that ethically important moments will emerge in surprising and unpredictable ways (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004), we can then design RbT projects in ways that support reflexivity and ongoing learning to better navigate these tensions.

Reflexivity involves discerning lessons learned that can be incorporated into next steps to improve the RbT process and/or final product. This starts with an awareness of ethically important moments and an understanding that ethics requires attention throughout a project (it does not end in the design stage!). Building upon this awareness, teams must build trusting and respectful relationships that support reflection and dialogue. Addressing power imbalances, fostering co-learning across individuals, and establishing a shared goal can all help teams do this (Israel et al., 2005). Reflexivity also requires the necessary resources to capture reflections and use this wisdom to inform next steps. Starting in the design stage, teams can allocate resources for both individual and collective reflection activities. Teams can also decide who will be responsible for facilitating these activities and establish a procedure to use the data collected. Team leaders can champion reflexivity by setting the expectation that ethical tensions are a normal part of the RbT process and by prioritizing ongoing learning in the project.

Future RbT projects may benefit from adapting some of the frameworks and ideas described in the articles within this special issue. For example, the ethical guideposts laid out by Nichols, Cox, and Guillemin can be used to support dialogue and transparent decision-making around ethical issues throughout a project. Gray describes an aesthetic of relationality as a frame to refocus RbT toward caring practices that inform accountability to a range of relations and aesthetic considerations. Future work can use this framework to help identify ethically important moments and to define ways in which a team wants to practice accountability in their RbT work. Owis and colleagues describe a slow ethic of care as a way to sit with ethical tensions and encourage teams to iteratively reopen decisions and processes through their RbT process. Their article can help teams adapt a new outlook for identifying and understanding ethical tensions within their work. Finally, reflexivity will need to adapt alongside project implementation. What works at the outset may become less relevant as the project progresses. Having periodic check-ins to evaluate the utility of reflective activities provides an opportunity to adapt them as necessary. Such increased attention to ethics and reflexivity during the RbT process encourages teams to make the space needed to address ethically important moments when they inevitably arise.

As RbT continues to evolve as a methodology, we would like to offer two final thoughts to continue this conversation about ethics in RbT. First, we need more opportunities to share stories from the field. It is through this storytelling that we can glean important insights often only available with time and distance from a project. For those who have completed RbT work, think about how you might share your stories with others. We would all benefit from learning from missteps, ah-ha moments, and reflections that emerge through reflexive storytelling. Second, we acknowledge ethical entanglements will always happen during the RbT process and some tensions will remain unresolved. Navigating ethics within an RbT process will always be hard work. Although this special issue offers practical examples and tools that can help support navigation and reflexivity, we want to emphasize that there is no single fix. There will always be surprises and stumbles that emerge when doing RbT. We hope this body of work emphasizes the importance of an ongoing practice of reflexivity and dialogue when doing RbT. This “ethical mindfulness” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2006) can be woven throughout the project to inform project design, help teams navigate emergent ethical tensions, and provide opportunities to reflect on what was done.

Conclusion

When we first issued the call for papers for this special issue, we were uncertain what the response would be. In inviting contributors to reflect and explore ethical challenges that they had encountered in their RbT practice, we were asking authors to expose their vulnerabilities and areas that potentially remained raw and fragile. We were aware that this would be confronting and hard work. Despite this, we were delighted to receive a strong enthusiastic response from many contributors.

For us, this is an indication of the importance of this work and the need for further examination of ethics in RbT. We have titled this collection “stories from the field,” pointing to the power of narratives and the importance of examining ethics embedded in practice. Together with many of our contributors, we are committed to the idea of the story as “an act of service, (See Balfour and Hassall in this issue)” in terms of making a contribution to public consciousness and the wider good. The papers in this collection emphasize social justice, exposing and reconfiguring oppressive relations, claiming and celebrating identities, and re-storying colonizing narratives. RbT emphasizes the notion of stories being gifted by research participants and this confers a sense of responsibility. Stories shared through RbT are written and rewritten, which entails close attention to relationship and reciprocity; this highlights the ethical significance of how the story unfolds, who gets to tell the story, and how it is told. It also draws on the importance of voice, time, and reflexivity as part of ethical RbT practice.

We are appreciative of the range of contributors in this issue, comprising researchers and theater practitioners, both novice and more experienced, drawing from across different geographical and cultural areas. However, we are conscious of some missing voices. These include community members and research participants who have been involved in RbT, as well as members of institutional research ethics boards. We are acutely conscious that their stories are absent and would otherwise provide yet another important dimension to ethics in RbT. These limitations highlight that this is ongoing work, requiring further engagement from all involved.