Community Literacy in Theatre for Development: A Framework for Reading Community Power Dynamics

Abstract

Theatre for Development (TfD) has long positioned participation as its central methodological and moral commitment, yet that commitment has deferred a prior question, namely what kind of social space TfD enters and how power operates within it. Communities are not the harmonious, accessible collectives that much TfD scholarship implicitly assumes; they are stratified, contested, and power-saturated spaces in which some voices are structurally amplified and others structurally suppressed. Through conceptual synthesis of critical social theory, African communitarian philosophy, and TfD's practice-based literature, this conceptual and theoretical essay interrogates the romantic notion of community that has shaped the field, identifies a specific conceptual gap left by adjacent participatory frameworks, and develops the essay's central contribution, the Community Literacy Framework (CLF). Community literacy is defined as the capacity to read a community's social, political, and cultural dynamics with analytical depth and reflexive rigour, and is positioned here as a TfD-specific reconceptualisation of a term already used in adjacent fields rather than as an entirely new coinage. The framework comprises seven interlocking analytical dimensions, power mapping, stakeholder identification, conflict sensitivity, gender and generational analysis, participation analysis, cultural protocol analysis, and voice representation analysis, encircled throughout by a meta-dimension of facilitator reflexivity and positionality. A composite pedagogical scenario, constructed from recurring dynamics across student practicums supervised in Ghana's Central Region, illustrates how the CLF operates in facilitation conditions. The essay concludes that TfD training must move decisively beyond technical skill to equip practitioners with the community literacy that genuine emancipatory practice demands.

Keywords: Theatre for Development, community literacy, community power dynamics, TfD facilitation, performative participation, participatory theatre, Ghana.

DOI: 10.7176/JCSD/77-04

Publication date: September 30^th 2026