For nearly 200 years, there has been a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana named Milneburg, which has been constantly reimagined by its inhabitants and others. From its inception as a port of entry in 1832 until the 2011, it has been called a world-class resort, the poor-man's Riviera, a seedy red-light district, a cradle of jazz, a village, a swath of suburbia and a neighborhood. It has been destroyed eight times due to storms, fires, and civic or governmental neglect. Each time its residents have rebuilt it. In its last iteration as a post-Katrina neighborhood, the residents reestablished the Milneburg Neighborhood Association in order to define its boundaries, gain control of its redevelopment and restrict who lived there as well as what activities were permitted. This is a case study of the trajectory of Milneburg and the cultural adaptations of its residents to keep it distinct, vital and respectable.

Focusing on the rising attention towards including the local population in humanitarian action, this study demonstrates how youth participation can produce effective results in a humanitarian response, making use of the post-disaster response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake as a case study. The research was intended to investigate the specific factors that enable youth participation to produce effective results in humanitarian programming, examining the methods that organisations used to involve youth, the benefits and challenges that arose from the process, and how effectiveness could be measured for the purpose of qualitative analysis. After constructing a conceptual framework around the key themes of the study, the thesis analysed the findings from 3 in-depth semi-structured interviews with informants from Restless Development Nepal, an organisation that actively involved youth volunteers in its emergency response. The activities which included these youth volunteers, most notably those that involved working closely with the local community through community mobilisation, benefitted from three main qualities embodied by the volunteers, these being their availability, flexibility and embeddedness within their own localities. The prior expertise of the implementing organisation in working with youth was another factor contributing to the programme outputs, as they possessed the social network and resources necessary to quickly train and mobilise the volunteers. The effectiveness of youth participation, which was measured not only through an examination of the programme results, but also through an assessment of how well the participatory activities managed to achieve the intended purposes of participation discussed in theoretical texts, revealed the possibility of youth participation in humanitarian responses to contribute to improving operational functions while still leading to self-empowerment and inner growth. The actual capacity of each organisation to include youth in their responses, however, is a defining factor in the methods in which youth may be able to use their inherent capabilities to contribute to the effectiveness of any operation.

In this dissertation, I foreground local elders’ epistemology and ontology embedded in sea rituals and traditional fishing methods in a typhoon-battered community in the Philippines. I do this through the practice of applied theatre to explore agency, relationality, and creativity in the aftermath of a disaster. By locating this dissertation within the intercultural, interdisciplinary, and intersectional applied theatre, I mobilize local disaster narratives by using auto-ethnography, Practice-as-Research, and Participatory Action Research towards the co-creation of local/transnational community-based-theatre performances. These applied theatre performances underscore the solidarity and collective creativity of community members, elders, local government officials, local artists in the Philippines and diasporic Filipinos in Canada. The dissertation engages in personal narrative inquiry, reflective memoir, oral stories, ritual performances, collective creations, archives, and in reclaimed objects to address the existing colonial mode of theorizing theatre and organized post-disaster recovery programs in a local island community decimated by Super Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan). Cognizant of the complex networks of post-disaster reconstruction, recovery, and planning in local and international spheres of development work, I formulate an applied theatre performance method as a post-disaster mitigative approach stemming from the specter of Super Typhoon Yolanda and other disastrous events wrought by climate crises. This collective and emancipative method emerges from an affective, hybrid, and cross-cultural mode of inquiry to tackle climate change and bring Indigenous ways of knowing into the center of the climate change conversation. I use this method in co-creating performances on local climate crises that critically examines coloniality and cultural misappropriation in an intercultural milieu. I discuss Indigenous ecological epistemology against the backdrop of climate change processes through autoethnographic inquiry and multi-narrative discourse on agentic, performative, and collective performance creations. I argue that Indigenizing the performance method mobilizes a decolonial theatre that broadens, equalizes, and diversifies the climate change dialogue. Informed by the vernacular concepts of affective and intersubjective criticality (Abat), relational collaboration (Pakiki-pagpulso, Pakiki-pagkapwa, Pagmamalasakit), and shared improvisation (Pintigan), this performance method deploys emancipative subjectivities and considers possible futures. By using applied theatre as a practice of post-disaster recovery, I channel its artistic practice and tools in engaging the local and transnational communities in collective acts of re-centering marginalized narratives and peripheralized bodies of knowledge. Stemming from the wounding memories of disasters, traumatic stories of a super typhoon, and political disjuncture, my collaborators and I mobilized communities, deployed diverse voices, and engaged with non-human subjectivities in sites with histories of environmental destruction and colonization both in local and diasporic communities. Driven by principles of decolonial theatre and emancipated dramaturgy, I aim to offer an ethical inquiry and practice of applied theatre that tackles climate crises in sites with a long history of disasters. These performance principles valorize the Indigenization of theatre’s capacity for social, political, and cultural intervention to re-future climate crises. Finally, this dissertation emphasizes the persistence of Indigenous knowledge, social relationality, and local creativity beyond the incursion of modernity and colonialism. / Graduate