"Performing the Right to the City: Embodiment of Visions of Social Justice in Three Performances" offers an account of visions of social justice and the differing troupe and performance practices used to embody those visions in three different socio-historical settings and performances: Jejalan (2008) by Indonesia's theater collective Teater Garasi, Halla Bol (1989) by India's street theater troupe Jana Natya Manch, and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972) by South Africa's anti-apartheid group The Serpent Players. Each of the three performances that I examine highlights the struggle of the urban poor to stake their claim to city space and resources. More specifically, in terms of social justice, each performance dramatizes a version of "performing the right to the city," though each troupe adopts different theatrical approaches in their quest for social justice. The focus of each of the dissertation's three chapters moves along a continuum of the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Chapter 1, "Teater Garasi's Jejalan: Theater as Research and Analytical Tool," investigates the radicalism of experimental theater in Teater Garasi's Jejalan. Chapter 2, "Bringing Theater to the People: Jana Natya Manch and Cultural Activism," explores street theater's ability to produce immediate responses to emerging political issues and social problems. Chapter 3, "Sizwe Bansi Is Dead: Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence," examines that play's strong political and aesthetic statement, and why it continues to speak beyond its time and place of origin. "Performing the Right to the City" argues that certain troupe practices and performance practices - such as performing the right to the city and eliciting response-ability from the audience - enable or seek to enable visions of social justice. I also examine the ways in which performance strategies and the performances themselves can serve as catalysts to encourage the audience to respond not only in the performance space as the play is dramatized but beyond it as well. Ultimately, my analysis of these three troupes and their selected works shows the impossibility of separating the aesthetic - strictly theatrical - on the one hand, and moral/political considerations, on the other.