| dc.description.abstract | Based on seven months of fieldwork with The Association of Drama Practitioners Stop Klatka, this thesis is a study of Poland s emerging post communist civil society of NGOs. As a player in the new civil society and as an organisation working with applied drama, Stop Klatka deals with a range of social actors in their projects. I examine the agency it has and the strategies and policies it develops in interaction with some of these actors, on both micro and macro levels. For this purpose, I focus on a particular but representative example of Stop Klatka s projects, Patchwork - The use of applied drama method in working with multicultural community. On a structural level Polish NGOs are faced within an inconclusive legal framework and encounter considerable mistrust in society. While this leaves them with substantial operational autonomy in carrying out their work, it also becomes particularly important for them to gain the trust of the actors they work with. Competition for the limited governmental funding has pushed these organisations to align their policies with those of the authorities. At the same time, this encourages NGOs to turn to foreign donors with their own agendas. One of these is Patchwork s funder, the Open Society Foundations (OSF), which introduces Stop Klatka to the prevalent ethno politics and Roma related issues. Because of that, and spite of Stop Klatka s ethnically indifferent attitude, Roma inclusion becomes of central importance. I show how project leaders negotiate it with OSF, the school where the project was held and the Roma people. They do this based on their own psychological, colourblind approach. This strategy is heavily influenced by the local school environment where the project was implemented and in practice opposes OSF s perspective. As outsiders to the local school environment, Stop Klatka needs to continuously adapt their strategies to gain the trust of a school with a hierarchical bureaucracy, strong focus on academic achievement and ethnic segregation. OSF, on the other hand is a distant actor with an agenda largely unfamiliar to Stop Klatka. Their perspective on Roma inclusion which proposes to promote an image of a cultural, sanitized Roma and increase Roma participation, is therefore not made an integral part of the project. Lastly, the Roma community is too weak to have a real impact on the project. These manoeuvrings by Stop Klatka result in the Roma people and Roma related issues largely being left out of the project. | eng |