Kathleen Gallagher

Kathleen Gallagher has garnered over 7.9 million dollars in SSHRC, Canada Foundation for Innovation, and other research funding. Her current SSHRC project is a six-year, multi-sited ethnography, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019-2026) in which she is looking at youth theatre practices and youth activism on climate justice in Canada, India, Taiwan, Greece, England and Colombia. Her newly awarded SSRHC project is titled, The Drama Workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises (2025-2030) through which her team and collaborators will create an international and intergenerational Community of Practice of artist-teachers and artist-students in Canada, Ireland, India, Nigeria and Greece, leveraging the drama workshop as a laboratory for intergenerational and global cooperation, reinvigorating critical questions and dreaming new futures for civic life in an era of polarization, climate-anxiety, and life-limiting economic realities. Please visit dramaresearch.ca for further details.

She has published 4 books, Hope in a collapsing world: Youth, theatre, and listening as a political alternative, with a script by Andrew Kushnir. (UTP 2022); Why theatre matters: Urban youth, engagement, and a pedagogy of the real. (UTP 2014); The theatre of urban: Youth and schooling in dangerous times. (UTP 2007); Drama education in the lives of girls: Imagining possibilities. (UTP 2000). She has also published 7 edited collections, Global Climate education and its discontents: Using drama to forge a new way. New York, London (Routledge 2025); Global youth citizenry and radical hope: Enacting community-engaged research through performative methodologies. (Springer 2020); The methodological dilemma revisited: Creative, critical and collaborative approaches to qualitative research for a new era. (Routledge 2018); In defence of theatre: Aesthetic practices and social interventions. (UTP 2016); Drama and theatre in urban contexts. (Routledge 2013); The methodological dilemma: Creative, critical and collaborative approaches to qualitative research. (Routledge 2008); How theatre educates: Convergences and counterpoints with artists, scholars and advocates. (UTP 2003). She has published 71 refereed articles and 49 book chapters in addition to various creative writing and documentary film and audio projects.

Her award-winning monograph, Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative, is based on the ethnographic project which also produced Towards Youth: a play on radical hope, a Verbatim play by playwright-collaborator Andrew Kushnir, co-produced by Project: Humanity and Crow’s theatre, premiering at Crow’s Theatre in 2019 and Finding Radical Hope, a documentary film directed by Andrew Kushnir and Chris Altorf and screened at Crow’s Theatre in 2020. Gallagher was a Canada Research Chair (2004-2014) and a Harvard Graduate School and Kellogg Foundation-funded Salzburg Seminar Fellow. In 2017 she won the inaugural University of Toronto President’s Impact Award for research impact beyond the academy and in 2018 she won the David E. Hunt Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. 

NOTE: THE FOLLOWING LIST REFLECTS PROFESSOR GALLAGHER'S MORE RECENT PUBLICATIONS.