Narration, expectation, experience of possibilities: interactive communication of the project results with the support of a digital game

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Hartwig
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429281822

The aim of the project is to systematically present the effect of theatre performances and films with actors with learning difficulties on perceptions of intellectual disabilities. To this end, the project adopts three analytical perspectives of ‘narrative’, ‘expectation’ and ‘experience’. Narratives form the context that structures the perception of people with learning difficulties. Depending on the narrative and narrative pattern, perceptions can be completely different. Expectations, in turn, arise from the audience’s prior knowledge and the structure of the texts. Surprises always result from expectations. There are extra-textual and intra-textual expectations. Ultimately, viewers gain experience through the cognitive and emotional appropriation of the narrative. Everyday perceptions of intellectual disability are generally negative and stigmatising. Disability is considered a problem and not a special way of life with its own options. Theatre performances and films can create alternative concepts. Positive perceptions are effectively initiated 1) by raising awareness of (often hidden negative) perceptions in order to offer a conscious confrontation with them; 2) by embedding the disability in surprising contexts, which expands the possibilities of experience; 3) by disturbing automatically applied stereotypes and therefore leading to an experience with their contingency. The most efficient narratives are the ones that do not provide clear evaluations of what is perceived, but disrupt common ideas and concepts in surprising ways. The analysed theatre performances and films cover almost the entire range from mainstream performances and films to arthouse film and off-theatre. Each work is a tightrope walk between representations that trivialize disability and problem frames that stigmatise people with disabilities. Innovative images are most complex when the disability appears neither as an unsolvable nor as an already solved (and therefore irrelevant) problem. Theatre and film have each one their own ways of walking this tightrope. The aim of the EEEM follow-up project was to communicate the results of the research project to a broad public in a low-threshold way. In a workshop with the Berlin game developer Playing History a sketch for a digital game was created and then presented in an anthology on the topic of “Digital games about disability” published in Paidia – Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants