South African Theatre Journal

Reimagining Justice and Human Change: Global Ideals, Local Realities, and Applied Arts

The South African Theatre Journal invites submissions for a Special Issue on Applied Arts, inspired by the 17th Drama for Life Conference and Festival (2025) under the theme Human Change! From Global Ideals to Justice?

As global crises intensify, political rupture, ecological instability, systemic inequity, proliferating authoritarianism, and territorialism also escalate. Artists, educators, scholars, therapists, and cultural workers continue to interrogate what it means to enact human change and justice in our time.

This Special Issue invites contributions that explore justice not as an abstract/intangible ideal, but as a situated, relational, and co-created practice that emerges from community wisdom, embodied engagement, and creative inquiry. We encourage work that examines how Applied Arts navigate the tensions between global ideals of justice and local realities through frameworks and, various artistic practices, and epistemologies (various knowledges).

Through this issue, SATJ aims to create a platform where established and emerging voices can speak across disciplines, methodologies, and geographies toward renewed understandings of justice, humanity, and change.

Thematic Orientation

We invite submissions that respond/ed to questions at the heart of the conference - contemporary global justice and human change, that address:

• What does it mean to be human now amid systemic violence, repression, and socio-political upheaval?
• How do the Applied Arts function as tools of resistance, restoration, and collective care?
• How can meta-universal, including indigenous, ways of knowing reshape our understanding of justice, ethics, and transformation?
• How might the Applied Arts respond to the cultural and existential ruptures of our time: ecological collapse, migration, precarity, disconnection, and rapidly evolving AI-driven futures?

Key Areas of Focus

Submissions may engage with (but are not limited to):

• Applied Drama and Theatre, Arts Therapies, and other Applied Arts,  responses to justice, transformation, political trauma, repression, conflict, or authoritarianism
• Rethinking humanity and embodiment in digital, virtual, and AI-mediated environments
• Applied Arts practices  within health, education, mental health, migration, and displacement
• Community-anchored arts interventions and collaborative methodologies
• Arts therapies in justice work and community healing
• Creative or hybrid research methodologies for justice and human change

Who Should Submit

We welcome submissions from:

• Applied Drama and Theatre, Dance and Movement, and Drama Therapy artists, therapists and practitioners
• Creative, expressive, and performance artists
• Community arts facilitators, cultural workers, and activists
• Human rights practitioners
• Students and emerging researchers
• Interdisciplinary teams working across performance, psychology, education, anthropology, digital humanities, health, and social justice