adele senior

There are three main strands to my research. The first focuses on child activism, transgenerational performance, and the participation of children in UK and European contemporary performance for adult audiences. The second strand of my research is on interdisciplinary collaborations between the arts and biosciences. This builds on AHRC-funded PhD research I undertook at Lancaster University and the arts-science collaborative laboratory SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia. Thirdly, I am currently researching issues of class, gender and race in subcultural drag performance.

For me, research is meaningful in many different ways. At the moment I’m particularly interested in how research can facilitate spaces for lived experiences that have otherwise been marginalised. In particular, my work is deeply committed to making space for children's cultures, knowledges, and lived experiences within both performance scholarship and practice. As part of this commitment, I’ve led and co-led a number of arts-related research projects co-authoring, collaborating and researching alongside children and young people.

Namely, I conceived and co-edited an issue of an academic journal with a family of artist-activists entitled ‘On Children’ (Performance Research), which created space for children to co-edit and author contributions alongside internationally renowned scholars and performance makers. I also organised a conference entitled With Children that included young people as keynote speakers, contributors and chairs. More recently, I devised a workshop to facilitate child-authored manifestoes on ‘making performance with children’ with young people in the UK and Germany. With the support of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion funding, this involved the creation of a UK child-led manifesto by primary school age children of global majority heritage. The manifesto was later shared as a model for child-led manifesto writing with international arts practitioners and academics, including members of the International Association of Theatre and Performing Arts for Children and Young People. With support from ASSITEJ Germany and Fundus Theater/Theater or Research, I also facilitated a child-led manifesto in Germany, which was presented by the young people who authored it on The Square of Children’s Rights in Hamburg. I’m really keen to explore and develop the global potential of such interventions to support child-led activism through arts-based practice and research.  

Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance is about representations of people we call children in performance, how we ‘read’ them, how we collaborate with them, and how we can better involve them in research. The book argues that contemporary performance has the potential to offer more capacious representations of children beyond the dominant narrative that children are apolitical and therefore are in need of patriarchal protection. It focuses on specific case studies of children’s participation in performance in the UK and Europe and identifies performance-led strategies that invite audiences to engage with young people beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within many mainstream theatre contexts.

The book includes writing, interviews and post-performance workshop material coauthored by children and young people themselves in order to give them a meaningful stake in archiving their own experiences of participating in professional practice. Motivated by performances with children that play with age norms, I’m offering a new approach to reading age that affords the people we call children the same depth of performance analysis as adult bodies: that is, as gendered, raced, classed, and intersectionally disadvantaged. I hope the book will be of interest to students, scholars and artists who are looking for more equitable modes of researching and collaborating with children and young people. 

I’m currently co-editing The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science with Professor Paul Johnson (University of Chester) and Dr Simon Parry (University of Manchester), which is due to be published this year. The book will make an important contribution to the study of inter/cross/multi disciplinarity and includes chapters by scientists, theatre makers, science communicators, choreographers, performance historians, playwrights, and practitioners. The Companion offers a range of different perspectives on the relationship between performance and the sciences and is global in scope, with contributing authors from Brazil, Finland, Spain, Australia, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Israel, South Africa, Austria, UK and the US.

I’m also working on a research project called Kings of the North which focuses on issues of class and class representation within Drag Kinging practice in Leeds and West Yorkshire. My research on and with children continues to grow. I’m currently collaborating with Heart of Glass, as an Arts Council England-funded researcher in residence on a project by Andy Field and Beckie Darlington with primary school children in St Helen’s, Merseyside. I also have a couple of projects in the pipeline around children’s activism and arts-based approaches to improving young people’s access to mental health support. I’m excited to see how these projects evolve.