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In exploring the impact of reflective and work applied approaches, the authors are curious how vivid new insights and collective “Eureka” momentums occur. These momentums can be forces for work communities to gain competitive advantages. However, the authors know little of how learning is actively involved in the processing of creating new insights and how such a turning to learning mode (Pässilä and Owens, 2016) can be facilitated. In the light of cultural studies and art education, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the method of dramatising characters (DC) in a specific innovation culture can be facilitated. In this viewpoint, the authors are suggesting one approach for this type of turning to learning which the authors call Beyond Text, outlining its theoretical underpinnings, its co-creative development and its application.

In this Beyond Text context, the authors are introducing the method of DC and the method of iStory both of which are the authors’ own design based on the theory of the four existing categories of a research-based theatre.

The findings of this viewpoint paper are that both iStory as well as DC methods are useful and practical learning facilitation processes and platforms that can be adopted for use in organisations for promoting reflexivity. Especially they can act as a bridge between various forms of knowing and consummate the other knowledge types (experiential, practical and propositional) in a way that advances practice-based innovation.

The originality and value of iStory and DC is that they can be utilised as dialogical evaluation methods when traditional evaluation strategies and pre-determined indicators are unusable.

Interactive storytelling can be based either on explicit plot representations or on the autonomous behaviour of artificial characters. In such a character‐based approach, the dynamic interaction between characters generates the actual plot from a generic storyline. Characters’ behaviours are implemented through real‐time search‐based planning techniques. However, the top‐down planning systems that control artificial actors need to be complemented with appropriate mechanisms dealing with emerging (“bottom‐up”) situations of narrative relevance. After discussing the determinants that account for the emergence of narrative situations, we introduce additional mechanisms for coping with these situations. These comprise situated reasoning and action repair: we also illustrate the concepts through detailed examples.

The study of accounts, corrective practices, or aligning actions has grown to constitute a significant sub-discipline within everyday life sociology. Most work in this field starts with an assumption of order and assumes that accounts reestablish broken sociality. However, much accounting activity resists against alignment efforts, and alignment efforts can be used as a means of conflict. The present chapter aims to survey situations in which actors resist and negotiate alignment and the power and status conflicts involved in these negotiations. With these conflicts, participants also negotiate responsibility, which is here seen not as an internal attribute of actors, but a socially negotiated meaning as well. On a larger level, the present chapter shows how levels of meaning are intertwined in alignment situations, making them much more than mere tools to produce and protect order.

In the drama of the evidentiary process, it would hardly be thought exceptional that the judge’s intuition of the formal order of things – which is to say, their sufficient standing-to-reason – should falter when confronted with the sprawling and confused immediacy of stubborn matter-of-fact. The circumstantial given is a bewildering Gordian Knot of data; the analytic legerdemain of localising our attention and following one of its threads cannot reduce the tangle into which it soon recedes. And in comparison to the knot’s multiplicity, our scope for unifying abstraction, or “large-scale” comprehension, is limited and flickering. We possess fragments of intuition, and fragments of formal connection between these fragments. But the panorama is merely agglutinative – the fragments do not congeal into one perfect, self-evident totality. And an offhand remark amongst the lectures of Alfred North Whitehead suggests that this defect is of more than methodological significance – even when one takes one’s example from arithmetic: “the snippet of knowledge that the addition of 1 and 4 produces the same multiplicity as the addition of 2 and 3, seems to me self-evident” (Whitehead, 1968, p. 47). And yet we would disclaim any such self-evidence were larger numbers involved – only skeptically could we hazard a guess. So, he continues, we have recourse to “the indignity of proof,” securing our opinion through the rationality of calculation. Nor is it so much that proof and method are chastening of themselves – the nemesis, the sting of the creatural condition is rather having to prove, the imperfection of finite judgment and the infinite possibility of perfecting it. This predicament was already known to Sophocles; if humanity “holds out” against the overwhelming by its inventiveness, by finding a means in to mêchanoen technas, the machinations of technique, it is because our ultimate condition with regard to the overwhelming is amêchanôs, aporos, resourceless and without means.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a possible way for service providers to learn from their customers' experiences and bridge gaps between their and their customers' perspectives. The research question is as follows: how can users' experiences be transformed through research‐based theatre, in particular Forum Theatre, into a utilizable format in the front‐end of interpretative, user‐driven service innovation in public health care organisations?

Research‐based theatre (RBT) is introduced in the study as both an artistic intervention technique – aiming to develop public health care services – and as a qualitative research method for interpretative user‐driven innovation processes.

The study provides a path for the application of Forum Theatre in interpretative user‐driven innovation and highlights the role of “the Joker” as a host of the interpretation.

Further studies could be based on international longitudinal participatory research and combine qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The study contributes to the discussion on the potential of innovation triggered in practical contexts. The potential itself seems to be relatively widely understood, but practical measures to exploit it still seem to be missing to a great extent. This study provides an example of a Finnish application of RBT as it explores the role of Forum Theatre as a sensemaking process in a fuzzy front‐end of innovation.

The study improves the understanding of the implementation of artistic interventions within a user‐driven service innovation in public health care services.

Zandile is an autobiographical play about Mlophe’s childhood. It begins with her living with her Gogo (her grandmother) in Durban and then being forcefully removed to live with her mother, Lulama, in the Transkei. The play focuses on Zandile and her development as she becomes an adult woman as well as her awareness of the tensions between traditional and Western expectations, political conflicts and social pressures. Zandile, Gogo (Zandile’s grandmother), Lulama (Zandile’s mother), Bongi (Zandile’s imaginary friend) and Lindiwe (Zandile’s friend) are women whose lives are directly and indirectly affected by the rules of the apartheid regime. The play skews the emphasis away from the oppression of African men and provides a space for the women to tell their personal stories of struggle, identity, harassment, dreams, expectations and journeys. Throughout the play the men are mentioned, but are not seen. Zandile provides the reader with an insight into the lives of three generations of African women, and the impact of the political situation on their disparate reactions highlight the conflicting interpretations of the African woman’s role in theatre, at home, as an activist, and the woman’s duty – to her husband, family and the struggle.

The purpose of this paper is to study how several brands like Poulain, Liebig and Guérin have helped to disseminate the French roman national through their chromolithographs at the beginning of the 20th century. By doing so, the paper highlights the participation of brands in the co-construction of the French roman national, a historical narrative that articulates state-supported collective memories.

A total of 1,106 historical trade cards have been collected and analyzed. Historical studies of the roman national have been used as secondary sources to aid in the interpretation of the motifs conveyed in those chromolithographs.

Chromolithographic images produced by various brands at the beginning of the 20th century contributed to the roman national. They provide an ethnocentric, patriotic and linear view of history but are also crossed by political fault lines, opposing secular and Catholic visions of history.

The chromolithographs produced and disseminated by companies have so far only been analyzed as promotional tools, aimed at popularizing brands and stores. By studying roman national motifs, this paper helps us understand what role businesses have played in building other narratives and forging a national spirit.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the use of drama in the context of professional learning for sustainability, and specifically, a drama workshop on sustainability for in-service teachers. The workshop was designed to explore environmental problems from several perspectives, by using drama techniques like bodily expressions, visualisations and role-play.

Data are drawn from questionnaires evaluating the effects of a drama workshop delivered in Helsinki in 2017. In total, 15 in-service teachers answered open-ended questions. Responses from experienced teachers were chosen as particularly interesting in relation to work-based learning.

The findings demonstrate that drama work contributes to education for sustainability in terms of increased self-awareness, critical reflections and signs of transformation; experienced professional learners bring their workplace context into the university, which enriches teaching and learning; and sustainability is a non-traditional subject in need of non-traditional teaching approaches.

The results of this small-scale study are only valid for this particular group.

The study gives an example of how applied drama can contribute to learning for sustainability in higher education.

This paper contributes to a growing literature concerning how drama allows participants to work on real problems, from a safe position in a fictive situation, providing both closeness and distance. When students become involved in an as-if situation, it leads to increased motivation and practice-oriented learning. As the content of sustainability can be challenging, drama work offers a meaningful context in which concepts and issues can be explored. Fictive situations may contribute to more realistic learning experiences.

In 1983, in typically Parisian manner, J. F. Lyotard claimed that redistributive conflict had gone out of fashion, with the focus of postmodern conflict revolving increasingly less around issues of resource allocation. Contemporary societies were having to deal with le différend, with horizontal conflicts rooted in heterogeneous languages, instances, and rules. The concern and claims of one group could not be understood within the languages of the other (Belohradski, 1990; Lyotard, 1983).