Where is Your Home?

This reflective presentation built upon a completed Master’s thesis in drama therapy grounded in my lived experience as a third-culture individual. Informed by Robert Landy’s Role Theory, the original bilingual autoethnographic performance used the stage as a therapeutic “third space” to embody, examine, and release roles that were no longer serving me. The performative process functioned as an act of “liberated voice,” allowing culturally silenced and internalized roles to be witnessed and re-authored through embodied expression. One year later, this presentation revisited the work to explore how role theory may be creatively and responsively applied within cross-cultural contexts, inviting clinicians to consider culturally integrative, mission-aligned applications when working with third-culture, diasporic, and multilingual populations.

I am an East Asian drama therapist trained within Western-European academic frameworks and currently working in an inpatient psychiatric setting with culturally diverse adults experiencing acute mental health crises and chronic mental illness. Cultural humility was practiced through reflexive self-location and an understanding of Role Theory as a responsive rather than fixed system. In response to the current political climate and the lack of nuanced research on TCK experience, I wanted to emphasize the creation of “third spaces”—the therapy room, hospital, stage, and dramatic reality—as sites capable of holding complexity, contradiction, and multiple truths. In my thesis, I described myself as a “bird of passage”; this work sparked dialogue on how to co-create sanctuaries for “migratory birds” amid fear, violence, and uncertainty.