Performing the city: street plays, affect, and decolonising knowledge with young people in Mumbai

Abstract

The vision of decolonising research with children and young people remains unrealised when particular forms of knowledge production continue to be privileged while others are marginalised. Decolonisation entails recognising plural epistemologies and examining how knowledge is produced, transmitted, and legitimised. It also requires attention to the deep interconnections between knowledge, identity, and lived experience. In India, young people’s engagement with knowledge–both as producers and recipients–is mediated by intersecting structures of caste, religion, gender, and class. These hierarchies shape their capacities to access, generate, and circulate knowledge. Drawing on a collaborative research project with young people in Mumbai, this paper examines how participants conceptualise and communicate urban knowledge through arts-based methods, with a focus on street theatre and performance. We argue that street plays not only express lived experience but also generate affective atmospheres and agonistic spaces that unsettle dominant epistemic hierarchies. By centring affect, emotion, and collective voice, youth performances operate as decolonial interventions that render visible silenced urban narratives and articulate alternative imaginaries of the city.