Performing Welfare

Sarah Bartley is a Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research examines the intersections of work, participation, and performance at play within socially engaged and applied theatre practices. She has previously published in Contemporary Theatre Review and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre.

• 1. Introduction: Performing Welfare.- 2. Arts and Employability: Migrating Discourses of Skills, Creativity, and Competition.- 3. An Aesthetics of Dependency: Reflecting a Rhetoric of Individualism and Promoting Practices of Collectivity in Community Performance.- 4. Visibility, Invisibility and Anonymity: Materialising Communities and Navigating the State in Collective Action.- 5. Biopolitics and The Unemployed Body in Applied Performance: Staging Labour, Disrupting Productivity, and Contesting Categorisation.- 6. Female Unemployment, Social Reproduction and Economies of Labour in Applied Performance.- 7. Conclusion: Reimagining Creative Acts Under Austerity.