Law’s a Drag: Forum Theatre and Research Principles Lab

On Friday 4 April 2025, the School of Law hosted Law’s a Drag: Forum Theatre and Research Principles Lab, an engaging and collaborative event exploring socio-legal research with drag artists.

Led by researchers Dr James Greenwood-Reeves, Dr Rosie Fox and Dr Joy Twemlow (Durham), the event brought together academics and artists to examine ethical, effective, and impactful research practices.

Dr Greenwood-Reeves said:

We want to grow our network to be as inclusive and representative as possible, so that more artists can have their say on what research they want us to undertake. Then, we can use that research to make a case to policymakers and lawmakers to seek positive change – we ultimately want our work to have real impact for drag artists.

The day featured two key sessions:

• Forum Theatre Workshop (10.00–13.00): Forum theatre – also named Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal  –  is an interactive theatrical form designed to empower audiences to work through and resolve real-life situations of oppression. Spearheaded by drag artist and forum theatre expert Jean Evans (AJ-47), this interactive session explored the challenges artists face when collaborating with academic researchers. A scene was acted out by Dr Greenwood-Reeves, Dr Fox and Dr Twemlow, and then repeated to the audience, during which any audience member (or ‘spect-actor’ according to Boal) could shout ‘stop’ and step into the scene, taking the place of one of the characters. The scene then continued in a different way, showing how that audience member could change the situation and gain a better outcome. The final piece acted out all the audience’s suggestions and created a far richer conversation than the original piece.
• Research Principles Lab (13.00–16.00): Through a series of creative exercises, participants worked together to develop principles guiding future research collaborations, covering ethics, methods, and research outputs. This event was funded by the SLSA Impact Grant Scheme. 

Of the sessions, Dr Greenwood-Reeves said, “Among the various activities, we made a journey plan of the research process, indicating at each stage (from coming up with a research question, through to disseminating final outputs) how drag artists want to be involved. We created a ‘methods menu’, to which artists added their comments on the ethical considerations for each method, so that we know better how to design research in a way that protects and empowers artists. We also made a Drag Outputs Manifesto, which makes clear statements about how artists want to take charge of making creative and uncompromising artistic pieces, based on our work together.”

The day fostered meaningful discussions and creative exchanges, contributing to the ongoing development of ethical research practices within the field.

Drs Greenwood-Reeves and Fox say:

Next steps for the Law’s a Drag team include processing the data from the forum theatre recording, before working with drag artists to design final outputs for this. The research team will also start putting together a plan for a larger research project on artists’ lived experience of law, ready for artists in the network to review: making sure that drag artists themselves are included at every stage of this process.

You can find them on their website, or on Bluesky @lawsadrag.bsky.social.