In the past twenty years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in theatre and refugees. Despite this research, little attention has been paid to the performative aspects of asylum hearings. The aim of Staging Injustice is to examine asylum-hearing procedures as a form of courtroom drama in which the policies of many states are not only often played out against the interests of the refugee, but also in secrecy.

Different perspectives are employed to consider the diverse practices of asylum hearings in various countries and the role that theatre can play in responding to them. The collection is interested in how theatre can illuminate, make more transparent, and bear witness to them. It reviews the diverse dramaturgical approaches in specific theatre productions such as verbatim theatre, docudrama, mixed media, and satire, and analyzes the scenography of the hearing and courtroom spaces in performative terms, indicating how they work for or against the interests of the applicant. 

S. E. Wilmer is Senior Researcher in the Faculty of Arts at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania and Professor Emeritus at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he was Head of the School of Drama, Film, and Music. He has served on the executive committees of the American Society for Theatre Research and the International Federation of Theatre Research, and as a visiting professor at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, and as a research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has also taught in doctoral summer programmes for many years at the University of Helsinki and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He co-edited a special topic on ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages in 2016. Recent books are Performing Statelessness in Europe (Palgrave, 2018), Deleuze, Guattari and the Art of Multiplicity (2020), Life in the Posthuman Condition (2023), and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration which he co-edited with Yana Meerzon in 2023. He is co-editing a book series with Yana Meerzon on “Performance and Migration” for Palgrave Macmillan.