My Stage – sharing and creating a story of our past, present, and future in Finnish Lapland

This article addresses the ‘My Stage’ participatory theatre project for women with
an immigrant background in Rovaniemi, Finnish Lapland. One of the fundamental
ideas underlying the project was the conviction that multidisciplinary dialogue can
be helpful in supporting social integration processes in an increasingly multicultural society. Based on our experience and research, we propose that participatory
theatre workshops can offer a creative space for these dialogues. In this article,
we analyse those experiences by combining social work and socially engaged art education approaches. We address ethnic, cultural, and gendered ‘otherness’ and aim at understanding the impact of unequal power relations, social privileges and
hierarchies in the integration processes.

The main research question that connects social work and art-based research in this
project is “to what extent does taking part in art and design workshops promote
social integration?” The empirical data was collected using ethnographic and participatory theatre methods. The multidisciplinary team of authors behind this text
includes a theatre practitioner plus, service design,art education, and social work
researchers, as well as a workshop participant.