This website aims to provide a starting point for anyone researching in the field of Theatre, Exile and Migration Studies.
Here, you can access:
— Lists of plays and productions linked to migration;
— Bibliographies of academic literature with links and abstracts related to theatre and/or migration;
— Terms and concepts containing specific definitions about theatre, migration and related organizations;
— Information about our research methodologies.
For more information on our research processes and methods, visit this Research Methodologies section. To learn more about who we are, our aims and why we decided to create this archive, visit our About Us section!
Primary Sources: Productions and Plays
- The research process began with a review of two seminal texts: The Palgrave Handbook for Theater and Migration (2023), edited by Yana Meerzon and Steve Wilmer, and Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (2020), edited by Yana Meerzon, David Dean, and Daniel McNeil. Both works provided an index of plays central to the field.
- We gathered titles from these indexes and proceeded to evaluate each through reviews, excerpts, and play readings.
- This critical assessment was necessary to verify the thematic relevance of migration in these works. Only plays that directly addressed the human experience of migration were included, while those that diverged from this focus were excluded from further consideration.
- We then examined publisher websites where the plays had been published to ensure each reference was trustworthy.
- In the final stages, we utilized major theatre repositories such as Drama Online, Twentieth Century Drama, and Twentieth Century North American Drama —accessed through the University of Ottawa— to locate additional plays. These repositories, along with theatre guides, were instrumental in identifying new works and updating the archive.
- For each reference, we provided an explanatory note, the source, and the author’s name to ensure proper identification of works in the field.
Secondary Sources: Academic Literature
- We used keywords on search engines and library systems (mainly the University of Ottawa’s library system, Omni).
- Main keywords included: Asylum, Asylum-seeker, Exile, Performance, Theatre, Migration, Migrant, Refugee.
- We also searched these key words in the websites listed in the table below.
- The bibliographies listed at the end of each chapter of The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration (Meerzon, Y., & Wilmer, S. E., 2023) was also very useful for finding subject-specific sources.
- We made sure to use verified sources, written by experts in the field or peer-reviewed works.
- To further organize our findings, we sorted them into several collections, depending on either subject or continent to make our research more accessible and easier to find relevant information.
- For each source we provided its full citation, the link where we accessed it and a small abstract briefly describing what it is about.
| Website: | Link: |
| JSTOR | https://www.jstor.org/ |
| Oxford Reference | https://www.oxfordreference.com/ |
| Oxford Academic | https://academic.oup.com/ |
| Oxford Bibliography | https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ |
| HathiTrust | https://www.hathitrust.org/ |
| Internet Archive (free books to borrow online) | https://archive.org/ |
| Project Gutenberg | https://www.gutenberg.org/ |
| Gallica (Plays in French) | https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/en/content/accueil-en?mode=desktop |
| uOttawa Theatre Guide | https://uottawa.libguides.com/Theatre-en |
| uOttawa English Literature guide | https://uottawa.libguides.com/literature_en |
Terms and Concepts
- To create this section, we used (a) the Indexes of The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration (Meerzon, Y., & Wilmer, S. E., 2023) and Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (Meerzon, Yana., Dean, David., & McNeil, Daniel., 2020) to help find key terms and (b) the following websites which provide both terms and definitions.
- We created one overall terms and concepts Google Document and then decided to split it into three separate pages on the website (migration, theatre and performance and organizations for migration) for further clarity. We showed this by color coding terms related to theatre or organizations on the original Google Document to make it clear which terms to sort into each section.
Website
- Finally, after initially using a shared Google Drive to compile our research, we used WordPress to create this website, on which we created different sections to move our research to.
- It was important for us to split our research clearly across different pages and subheadings on our website in order to provide an easier viewing of the vast collection of sources.
- We reviewed numerous templates for the website, ultimately choosing this one for its concise navigation, which aligned with our goal of making a large amount of information easily accessible. We drew inspiration from various archives and repositories, paying particular attention to how they organized their research and sources.
- Initially, we developed a set of general categories based on our own areas of research in the field (primary and secondary sources). From there, we created subcategories, which helped us plan the structure of each category in terms of layout, font, size, and subtabs.
- For building the website, the WordPress editor was an essential tool. We frequently asked external users to access early drafts of the site, allowing us to assess whether the interface and navigation were intuitive.
- For the images on the website, we mainly used images from Pixabay (https://pixabay.com) as they share royalty-free that are free to use.