This ethnographic study explores notions of hope and care by examining how theatre-making with young people might cultivate practices, relationships, and values that support them in engaged, creative, and ethical forms of citizenship.

For young people, the space of the drama classroom can be a space for deep learning as they struggle with common purpose and across difference to create something together. Collaborating across institutions, theatres, and community spaces, the research in Hope in a Collapsing World mobilizes theatre to build its methodology and create new data with young people as they seek the language of performance to communicate their worries, fears, and dreams to a global network of researchers and a wider public.

Using both ethnographic study and playwriting, a collaboration of social scientist and playwright, Hope in a Collapsing World is a ground-breaking hybrid format of research text and the original script built from it – Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope – for reading, experimentation, and performance.