Richard Thornton
School Tutor (Anthropology)

Research

My research interest springs directly from personal explorations into my own subjectivity. I notice myself operating, at many points, as a hyper-individualised neoliberal subject. Much of my twenties, as I'm sure is common, was spent trying to understand my social role and community identity within my 'home' country of England, and then as a 'global' citizen in Beirut, Paris, Utrecht and Delhi.

I believe that many of my fears and insecurities, and therefore the violences I produce to manage them, arise from the tension between trying to be accepted as valuable male subject and feeling the insanity that such rigid subjectification would lead to.

As someone who reads Judith Butler, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Bronwyn Davies with hope and love, I believe that thinking and manifesting the world relationally creates gaps or, perhaps 'lines of flight', through which new social possibilities occur.

My experience as a musician, painter, and theatre artist reminds me of the how much the body can be rearranged in the world without adhering to mathematical logic.

My research practice is built around using theatre as an ethnographic tool. I run various theatre and arts workshops for the teachers and social entrepreneurs of educations with which I study. I blend skills learnt as an artist with a pedagogical method based on the work Paulo Friere, Augusto Boal, and Bronwyn Davies.

My aim is to investigate my own subjectivity alongside those of the other educators I work with. I work in public-private partnership school here in Delhi as an activity-based teacher, directly as a way to experience the pressures and concerns of on the ground daily school life for teachers. I am producing myself as valuable assest to those I work with in order to both play with the concept of neoliberal agency, and because my mental health suffers greatly when I don't get to spend time teaching or running workshops.

I am trying to consciously craft my time during fieldwork as a way to keep life meaningful; and think through how the same can be done for teachers in a time where, in the UK at least, teacher welfare seems at an all time low.