ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out several guiding principles informing audio drama inquiry and discusses specific processes used while developing Tuning into child and youth care. Audio drama inquiry is an experimental risk-taking form well suited towards understanding, chronicling, illuminating, and transforming, given its ability to not only document and reflect but in its capacity to imagine and refract. Research-based theatre might be thought of as an umbrella term encompassing all the above theatre-based inquiry processes. Audio drama inquiry is a dialogic process which creates opportunities for multiple perspectives and participants. Audio drama lives in recorded audio and exists sonically. Audio drama inquiry breathes in the realm of fiction, while living in reality. Fiction allows emotional and intellectual distance, while simultaneously bringing the listener closer to the subjects investigated. Aesthetics are a useful guiding frame for anyone embarking on an inquiry process, be it arts-based or otherwise.
