Imaging the future: theatre and change within the child protection system

The use of social pedagogy as a paradigm for critically appraising developments within child and family social work has been largely neglected. This paper outlines the work of Augusto Boal and his adoption of social pedagogy as a method for empowering oppres-sed social groups in Brazil. It is argued that Boal’s approach can be adapted by using action research techniques to analyse and effect change in situations where child care professionals face daily contradictions in their attempts to both protect children and support families. To demonstrate its relevance to child care practice, a description is provided of how the approach was used with two groups of social work students – one undertaking qualifying training, the other post-qualifying training. The results of this application suggest a new theoretical framework for practice which aims to establish communicative consensus around the needs of children and a mutual appreciation of roles and responsibilities.

"That a black twisty divil could be hiding under such comeliness": Woman vs woman in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Theatre

This essay investigates representations of womanhood in early twentieth-century Irish theatre, particularly in terms of the disjunction between woman as a physical, social being and the symbolic Woman as an ideological construction promoted by both church and state. It uses Lacanian theory in conjunction with Irish women’s studies scholarship to inform the analyses of plays by dramatists including Maud Gonne, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, and T. C. Murray. The aim is to show how women in Irish society were faced with the impossible task of fulfilling such idealized roles as Woman, Wife, and Mother, and how this situation was variously represented and contested in the theatre during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

When Shiels met Liberace: a skirmish with the canon of Irish theatre

Just Shiels, the product of one of the first practice as research programmes undertaken by a theatre professional within the environment of an Irish university, ‘activates’ in performance the archives of the Northern Irish dramatist George Shiels (1881–1949). The play explores Shiels's marginalization from the canon of Irish theatre on grounds of his embodied position as a disabled person, his status as a Northerner writing plays to be performed across the border in the new free Irish state, his geographical peripherality to the centre of theatrical activity in Dublin and his choice of popular forms in his dramaturgy. Just Shiels was first performed in May 2008 at Queen's University Drama Centre, Belfast. This article seeks to explore to what degree Shiels's choice of popular forms and his serious physical impairment might be implicated in his marginalization. It was first delivered as a plenary session to the American Conference for Irish Studies in New York, in October 2008.