Sarah Bartley

I am a community theatre practitioner and scholar and I joined Central as Senior Lecturer in Applied and Community Performance in 2023. Prior to this role, I taught across theatre and performance programmes at University of Reading, Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Leeds. In my research, I explore the intersections of performance with social and economic policy, with a particular focus on the welfare state, justice systems, and grassroots collective action.

My monograph Performing Welfare: Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Participation was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. This book examines the aggressive erosion of the UK welfare system and identifies the implications of such an erosion for applied performance. I have two forthcoming co-authored books Living Newspapers and Crisis Theatre (with Sarah Mullan) and Clean Break Theatre Company: Origins and Practices (with Caoimhe McAvinchey, Deborah Dean, and Anne-marie Greene) due to be published by Cambridge Elements.

A new strand of my research, examines the resurgence of People’s Theatre’s during austerity in regional, national, and European contexts. This work explores ways in which people’s theatres participate in a revisioning of community resources through practices including: solidarity economies, space sharing, re-purposing community sites, cooperative models of practice, voluntary and amateur labour and new kinds of public-voluntary partnership.

A central part of my current practice and research is centred around broad concepts of justice, abolition, and community accountability. My work has particularly focused on Transformative Justice and the potential of arts practice to enable people to imagine, experiment, and rehearse alternatives to the state-sanctioned justice system, both on an everyday level like practising accountability in their own relationships, and at a structural level such as reimagining systemic responses to violence.

From 2019-2023, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC Funded project ‘Clean Break: Women, Theatre, Organisation and the Criminal Justice System’. The project was a collaboration between scholars from Performance and Business Studies and explores the 43-year history of the company.

Between 2022-2024, I was a Co-Investigator on Transformative justice, women with convictions and uniting communities. Funded by the British Academy and Nuffield Foundation, this project worked across arts practice, criminology, health economy, and social work to explore the potential for communities to support the wellbeing of women with convictions and intervene in cycles of harm. I led the arts-based community workshops, which illuminated the value of community arts practices in building the capacity of communities to engage with questions of justice, accountability and harm.

In 2023 I was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for a two-year project exploring the history and interdisciplinary practices of UK based arts and criminal justice organisation Rideout Creative Arts for Rehabilitation. Given the cultural, social, and critical complexity of carceral sites, this fellowship investigates the potential of Rideout’s interdisciplinary practice as a model that enables engagement with divergent and shifting prison ecologies. More broadly, the histories and distinctive creative practices of prison arts organisations in the UK are at risk of being lost if they are not documented. During this fellowship, I explore the strategies archival practice can offer to capture the acutely ephemeral nature of prison theatre practices and consider ways in which contemporary arts and criminal justice practitioners can be supported to engage with the emergent histories of this field.