Augusto Boal in the Asylum Home: Theatre of the Oppressed for Social Entrepreneurship

This chapter delves into the potential for social entrepreneurship to empower asylum seekers in Slovenia through participatory methodologies, aiming to yield emancipatory outcomes. Grounded in a series of workshops convened at the Asylum Residence on Kotnikova Street in Ljubljana, during 2021, wherein diverse stakeholders collaborated with asylum seekers, the study explored an array of practices, interventions and techniques, with the intent of engendering emancipatory advancements within the sphere of labour market integration. Informed by antecedent research and experiences at the Slovenian Migration Institute ZRC SAZU, it discerned an imperative to support asylum seekers and refugees nurturing entrepreneurial aspirations—particularly towards establishing social enterprises in Slovenia—given the post-2015–16 “Crisis of the EU border regime”. This initiative drew inspiration from the educational tenets promulgated by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed. The workshops and methodology provided information that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible to obtain, and their results were useful to all participants, but the process was complex and the progress was slow, as there were constant methodological, theoretical and content discords between all involved.