Imagining an ecological right to the city in Toronto through drama-based research

ABSTRACTThis article explores the possibilities in harnessing drama-based research methodologies in examining youth’s ‘right to the city’ during the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency [Lefebvre (1996). Writings on Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers]. Using ‘auto-topography’ [Heddon (2007). “One Square Foot: Thousands of Routes.” PAJ 29 (2): 40–50. doi:10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.40] as a drama-based methodological prompt, the research considers how the right to the city is summoned, imagined and articulated by youth in one virtual Grade 6 classroom amid the alienation and isolation of a COVID lockdown in Toronto in November 2020. Specifically, this article attends to how auto-topography brought the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ city into the virtual classroom, via Deleuze and Guattari’s [(1985). “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression.” New Literary History 16 (3): 591–628] concept of ‘the minor,’ to contest majoritarian constructions of ‘nature,’ ‘culture,’ and urban citizenship. In particular, such ‘minor’ desires for the city, made appreciable by the imaginative and affective capacities of theatre and performance genres, gesture towards a politics of co-flourishing, where enchantment, generosity, gratitude, strangeness, surprise and hilarity– and, crucially, obligation and reciprocity – are integral to youths’ right to the city in these times of pandemic and ecological instability.KEYWORDS: Youthdrama-based researchright to the citypandemicecologies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 According to Watts (Citation2013, 21), an Indigenous onto-epistemology is an embodied understanding of the world, of ‘Place-Thought:’ ‘Thought is the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated.’2 Ethical approval for this research was provided by the University of Toronto’s Research Ethics Board in January 2020, and from the Toronto District School Board External Research Review Committee in July 2020. As all participants were under the age of 18, parent/legal guardian and student consent was obtained in writing in separate consent letters.3 Students were invited to select their own pseudonyms and write down any ‘identity descriptors’ (Gallagher Citation2017 and Turner-King Citation2018) (pertaining, for example, to race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic status) that they would like to be referred by in the research. Students could identify themselves by many or as few descriptors as they wished. Permission to use students’ creative work was obtained in writing through media release forms.4 By integrating Indigenous perspectives into conceptualizing an ecological right to the city, it is not my intention to create false equivalences between Lefebvre’s Euro-Western ‘right to the city’ framework and Indigenous onto-epistemologies of self and place. I agree with Watts (Citation2013) that such moves can constitute a form of epistemic violence in which Indigenous frameworks are eclipsed by Western theory. Rather, Indigenous knowledges provide me with important vocabulary with which to articulate and describe the reciprocal ethics, as part of an ecological right to the city, that the students’ stories gestured towards.5 Recent legal developments have, through the efforts of Indigenous populations, conferred legal personhood to natural entities. For example, in Canada in June 2021, the Muteshekau Shipu (Magpie River) in Quebec was granted legal personhood by the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Minganie Regional County Municipality (Townsend et al. Citation2021). The Mutsehekau Shipu joins the Whanganui River in Aoteraroa New Zealand, the Atrato River in Colombia and the Klamath River in the United States as rivers that now have legal personhood.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 752-2021-1296].