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The gendered labor of social innovation: Theatre, pedagogy, and the girl-child in India

In this article, I will examine how a pedagogical and creative practice in one school for lowest-caste girls in Lucknow, India was harnessing the imaginative affordances of theatre—in particular, its ensemble-building and its capacity to hold the present open for investigation—to leverage these practices for understanding the political economy and deconstructing the structural forces of gender oppression in times of growing social and economic inequality. The concept of social innovation has, over recent years, provoked much academic and policy debate across a range of disciplines, yet it has been relatively under-studied in the field of education. This article makes a case for theatre specifically, and education more broadly, as a critical driver of social innovation and change, and uses an empirical example from ethnographic research in Lucknow, India where the ongoing gendered oppression of young women urgently calls for radical societal reform. Although definitions of social innovation across disciplines abound (de Bruin and Kickul 2011; Pol and Ville 2009; Phills et al. 2008; Mulgan et al. 2007), for the purposes of this exploration, I propose the following: Social innovation is innovation in social relations within both micro and macro spheres, to satisfy unmet or new human needs identified by different sectors in society. For me, this operational definition comes at the intersection of public pedagogy, socially engaged research, and collective and creative political action. The following article will draw from the artistic and social practices and feminist pedagogies of Prerna, a girls’ school in Lucknow, India, with whom we have been collaborating on a long-term ethnographic study titled, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: An Intercultural Investigation of Drama Pedagogy, Performance and Civic Engagement (2014–2019). The notion of “radical hope” is a central feature, for me, of education and social innovation aiming to redress historical inequities and the growing none defined