Hadeel Abdelhameed’s and my new article ‘Cultural governance in post-carbon economies: Forging the new Saudi citizen through theatre education’ is now published open access in Comparative Education. A critical policy analysis of the role of culture – and particularly theatre – in education in Vision 2030 reforms in Saudi Arabia, it is based entirely on publicly available sources, from official international consultancy and government reports, local and international research, Saudi media and press reports and situated in our analysis of the broader context of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries who have been planning for their rather different looking futures post-oil.
The paper takes a cultural political economy approach to the analysis of teacher development reform and so builds on my earlier work with Lauren Gatti, Sarah Steadman, Warwick Mansell, Tom Are Trippestad and others. Our research also benefited enormously from Hadeel’s work on Arabic theatre (specifically Iraqi) in geo-political contexts. You can access the paper here.
Viv Ellis 