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Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research1
Abstract
“Only middle-class academics could blithely assume that all the world is a text,” writes one of performance studies' leading figures. Conquergood argues for a hybrid discipline that celebrates experience and commingles the analytic and the artistic.
... Richards extends her comparison between the map and the story to cater to the "transgressive travel between two different domains of knowledge: one official, objective, and abstract -the map; the other one practical, embodied, and popular -the story" (Conquergood 2002). The Hip Hop discourse began somewhat around 1973, as a medium of celebration of the Black culture, and a revolution brought about by artistic, performative and intellectual resistance to racism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. ...
... The "local context" in such experiments "expands to encompass the historical, dynamic, often traumatic, movements of people, ideas, images, commodities, and capital" (Conquergood 2002). This offers a sense of exile to performers that belong to a certain diaspora because there lacks a sense of belonging to the culture they were born in, and the one they were raised in, and in that sense of the word it becomes necessary to analyze the socio-cultural performance they put up on a digital stage. ...
... The written texts controlled the narratives and were sanctioned by the state, and further neglected lived experiences of the marginalized communities by excluding spaces of agency and struggle, thereby failing to credit the clothing, architecture, body languages and silence as a credible source of insight into cultures. The performance theory exhibits "performance as a lens that illuminates the constructed creative, contingent, collaborative dimensions of human communication; knowledge that comes from contemplation and comparison; concentrated attention and contextualization as a way of knowing" (Conquergood 2002). ...
Hip Hop has been a cultural wave creating and modifying the revolution started in the 1970s by Black people against systemic oppression, and while it manifests itself as a commodified narrativization against racism, sexism and other equally troublesome oppressive ideologies, it becomes a site for change through ethnographic performativity. Spoken Word poets have used this tool to bring marginal narratives to the center and challenge the heteropatriarchal lens, misogynoir and racist practices all around the world. Spoken word poetry has not been researched analytically or theoretically much previously, and even when it was, the research and statistics were limited to the technical aspects of performance. This paper deals with the idea of culture being a site for performance, and simultaneously performance being the action that precedes stereotypes and false representations of marginalized cultures throughout the global north. The spoken word poets use the stage as a liminal space for a multiplicity of cultures to thrive, and challenge the oppressive tools, including that of language, clothing, and voice used by mainstream cultures to oppress the said communities, and normalize their own traditions and morals. The paper reveals the performative tactics used by spoken word poets in order to deinstitutionalize systems of power, and establish a counter narrative of their own as a form of revolution.
... Performativity is a widely used concept in academic research fields, but it is impossible to explore its roots in this short article. Nevertheless, it is obvious that, since the 19th century, people from disenfranchised groups have seen performances and performativity as means of making their voices heard (Conquergood, 2009;Oikarinen-Jabai, 2008). As Dwight Conquergood (2009) noted, the dominant ways of knowing in academia-"knowing that" and "knowing about," which are based on the Enlightenment view of modernity-have often left those who are considered "others" outside or led to their objectification by those who are considered to be part of the "us" group. ...
... Nevertheless, it is obvious that, since the 19th century, people from disenfranchised groups have seen performances and performativity as means of making their voices heard (Conquergood, 2009;Oikarinen-Jabai, 2008). As Dwight Conquergood (2009) noted, the dominant ways of knowing in academia-"knowing that" and "knowing about," which are based on the Enlightenment view of modernity-have often left those who are considered "others" outside or led to their objectification by those who are considered to be part of the "us" group. By leaning instead on propositional knowledge ("knowing how" and "knowing who")-which is grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connections-performative research enables participants to be active cultural citizens and to participate in negotiations on the transformation of cultural practices (Conquergood, 2009;Oikarinen-Jabai, 2015). ...
... As Dwight Conquergood (2009) noted, the dominant ways of knowing in academia-"knowing that" and "knowing about," which are based on the Enlightenment view of modernity-have often left those who are considered "others" outside or led to their objectification by those who are considered to be part of the "us" group. By leaning instead on propositional knowledge ("knowing how" and "knowing who")-which is grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connections-performative research enables participants to be active cultural citizens and to participate in negotiations on the transformation of cultural practices (Conquergood, 2009;Oikarinen-Jabai, 2015). ...
... Interdisciplinary race scholars have found that racial and cultural minorities in the U.S. perceive themselves as lower on the social hierarchy in terms of political power and efficacy and group status (Sediqe 2020;Wingfield and Chavez 2020). As noted by Conquergood (2002), 'subordinate people do not have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of transparency, the presumptive norm of clear and direct communication, free and open debate on a level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted' (p. 146). ...
... Cuatro anotaciones sobre los estudios de la performance Los estudios de la performance son especialmente adecuados para entretejer formas de conocimiento dispares, especialmente los que provienen de los ámbitos académicos y los ámbitos de la lucha social. Como afirma Conquergood (2002), se puede pensar a través de esa sugerente trialéctica de la realización, el análisis y la articulación. Este proyecto supone como postura más radical abarcar siempre, de manera trenzada, la performance tanto como acción creadora y emancipadora, así como operador de la curiosidad y la investigación, y alternativa para afrontar las batallas culturales. ...
El artículo esboza cuatro anotaciones sobre los estudios de la performance que giran en torno al desarrollo, consolidación, disposición y aplicación de este campo de acción, pensamiento y transformación. Para esto, se exploran algunas inquietudes creativas, investigativas y políticas. A partir de la revisión de aportes de autoras y autores de diferentes contextos culturales, temporales y geográficos, se resalta el carácter multívoco, abierto e inconcluso de los estudios de la performance. Finalmente, se muestra la utilidad que tiene este campo para escapar de los procesos de autorregulación académica y, por consiguiente, para acoger una perspectiva post-disciplinaria que permite crear preguntas situadas, arriesgadas e incómodas.
... It reflects a shift away from colonial, white supremacist thinking about whose minds and bodies should be taken into account. More qualitative approaches to research have been developed and there is a strong move in research culture to foreground the voices of community members and to challenge the colonising influences on practice and research (Conquergood, 2002;Dillard, 2012;Madison, 2019;Pillow, 2019). In postpositivist practitioner research, critical reflexivity is used to explore and challenge the ideological origins of theory and its influence on what counts as knowledge, "normal" and quality in professional practice. ...
Practitioners undertaking research into their professional practice and those involved in evaluating it often struggle to identify distinctions between the professional practice under investigation and the research practice used to study it. This paper identifies ten areas of distinction between professional practice and research practice. It provides some example questions under each of the ten categories. These questions can be adapted for practitioner researchers as both a preparation exercise and to develop documentation to submit with research proposals or research ethics applications. The paper starts with a definition of practitioner research and then gives a brief history of practitioner research followed by reflections on the relationship between academic and professional knowledge and decolonising practitioner research.
The material in this paper was originally delivered at the 7th International Conference on Professional and Practice Based Doctorates, UKCGE, 25th February 2021 (Simon, 2021).
... As Dwight Conquergood puts it, "[w]hat gets squeezed out by… epistemic violence is the whole realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised, coexperienced, covert." 38 Performance studies, in his view, "challenges the hegemony of the text best by reconfiguring texts and performances in horizontal, metonymic tension, not by replacing one hierarchy with another." 39 Going back to Embrace of the Serpent in this light, we might note that it is a genre of performance, which includes the performance of local inhabitants of the Amazon within the idiom of fiction film. ...
Amazon Cinema: Vegetal storytelling is about the challenges of filming in the Amazon and the long history of attempts, which have produced a certain chronotope. THe paper analyzes Lothar Baumgarten's experimental film from 1978 Origin of the Night, and the feature film by Ciro Guerra called Embrace of the Serpent (2015). Drawing on a range of critical literature on the Amazon, including anthropologist Eduardo Kohn and literary critic Patricia Vieira, the paper argues for ecologies of representation that move beyond observational cinema and the realist conventions of ethnography.
... In this case, the purpose is not a folkloric representation, but a corporal reflection resulting from the negotiation of time and space. I recognize the sensory capacity of social actors and researchers -considering myself as both-, focusing on the body as a methodological strategy (Conquergood, 2002). Therefore, my body is actor and agent at the same time, and it produces text and meaning through movement. ...
What makes contemporary art distinctive, global, remarkable and a game-changer is that fuses the diversity of today’s world with the advanced manner of thinking, the expression via technological techniques and brings out courageously.
Sometimes the message is so obvious to see and understand, sometimes it takes time to go within.
But there is always an appreciation of originality, wonder of limitless creation ways, and hope for transforming a better world.
... While we focus on some specific cases of choreographers and performances dealing with the Cyprus conflict, we offer a novel conceptualization of dance as a heterotopia: a counter-hegemonic artistic practice and space. In doing so, we bring Foucault's (1984) concept of 'heterotopia' to performance studies, and contribute to research engaging with the (1) arts as means of resistance and intervention, and alternative spaces of struggle (Conquergood, 2002;Taylor, 2016) and (2) role of the arts in divided societies (Gold, 2006;Zelizer, 2003Zelizer, , 2007. ...
We provide an analysis of dance as a practice and an ‘Other’ space; a counter-hegemonic ‘space’, which is affected by the existing social ordering, while simultaneously resisting it. We employ Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ to analyse dance’s potential to disrupt and deconstruct hegemonic discourses of the past in a conflict-ridden environment such as Cyprus. We analyse three dance works by choreographers who are living and working in Cyprus, and while we focus on the interrelated dimensions of time, space and the (choreographic) subject, we demonstrate how dance may (1) provide a space to problematize the past and recraft the present, (2) enable the re-signification of places of conflict into places of communication and peace and (3) invite artists to reflect on their subjectivities and transform into agents of peace.
... Metodológicamente, abogo por un ejercicio reflexivo y crítico a la visión de que la cultura y la realidad social es armoniosa, en tanto considerar la relación dialéctica entre la realidad social y la ideología, y así entender el trabajo etnográfico también como performance, como propone Turner (1986: 73). Aplico la comprensión de la etnografía como "práctica encarnada" (Conquergood, 2002) donde el cuerpo tiene capacidad de entender otros cuerpos. Aquí incide además la perspectiva y mi reflexión autoetnográfica, lo que planteaba Malinowski (1986) en relación al "ser eslavo", pensando en su propio cuerpo y temperamento, lo que tiene que ver con subjetividades y percepciones. ...
Analizaremos la relación entre Brasil y Europa del Este mediante la performance dancística de la compañía Brasiliana, y se plantea la pregunta por el especial interés en el grupo por parte de la República Democrática Alemana. Se examina el uso de folklore en la construcción de identidades en ambos espacios: en los años de la década de 1950 en Brasil y en la misma época en la RDA, tratándose de los primeros años de una nueva república socialista. Las fuentes utilizadas del Archivo de la Danza (Leipzig) son originales, tanto sobre Brasiliana como aquellos sobre la articulación dancística en Europa del Este. Ayudan a comprender cuestiones de corporalidad y movimiento que consideramos como expresión viva de los seres humanos, y además reflejan de manera no verbal la situación de los pueblos. Lo relevante del caso elegido es porque se tratan de sociedades y contextos diferentes; lo que da lugar a la idea de que las circunstancias en Europa del Este en el siglo XX hicieron posible la mutua comprensión a través del contacto y la performatividad corporal-cultural que formaba parte de la vida sociopolítica, por el enfoque educativo y el reconocimiento de la corporalidad como fuente de conocimiento.
... Vain muutama vuosi sitten saatoin väittää, että taiteellinen ja käytäntöön perustuva tutkimus on luovien ja esittävien taiteiden kohdalla vahvasti kehittyvä tutkimusala, joka voidaan ymmärtää myös metodologisena lähestymistapana (Arlander 2008, 30). Korostin, että teoria-käytäntö-jakoa sekä tekstuaalisen tiedon asettamista ruumiillisen tiedon edelle on jo pitkään arvosteltu, esimerkiksi niin sanotun esityksellisen käänteen (performative turn) myötä (Conquergood 2002/2004, Taylor 2003, Davis 2008. Periaatteessa kulttuurintutkimuksessa pyritään saamaan mahdollisimman monien tiedontuottajien ääni kuuluviin. ...
... The broad point is that, in writing, in authoring, text is not an innocent medium (Conquergood, 2002;Geertz, 1989). In writing of people and culture, scholarly work is very often narratological work. ...
The article focuses upon arts-based research in a dialogical unfolding of why art should be and can be integrated in academic work at present, and furthermore situates this development in broad context. The notion of scholartistry, hydrid scholarship-arts practice, is introduced by situating it in the academic literature on research methodology and through exemplification/demonstration - an imaginary exhibition of scholartistic artefacts. Several samples of arts-based research methods are discussed in terms of knowledge production and creative competencies. Connections are drawn with post-disciplinary agendas in the academy and beyond. The argument is made that a distinctive field of scholartistry offers an expansion of project and problem based learning in manifold cultural and organizational fields that are looking for open-ended creative modes of design and production.
... proto, že překračuje rozměr racionálního úsudku nejenom do emotivních, ale zejména symbolických rozměrů lidské existence. Narušení dříve privilegovaného postavení textu kodifikovaného tiskem tak nově zvýznamňuje nejenom hodnotu obrazu, ale obrací se rovněž k dalším nonverbálním a extralingvistickým modům komunikace (Conquergood, 2002). Symbolika obrazu se tak přibližuje k významům mýtopoetické přirozené zkušenosti, která je obtížně interpretovatelná, neboť i přes logické rozpory "odkrývá cosi hlubokého, že ukazuje souvislosti" (Kratochvíl & Bouzek, 1994, s. 59). ...
A deeper understanding of the kindergarten teacher’s profession allows
for the use of visual methodology and symbol analysis of visual representations in pedagogical research. The study seeks to gain a deeper understanding of verbally difficult to convey meanings through quantification of thematic motifs of drawings by student kindergarten teachers (n = 76) and a detailed qualitative analysis of selected images of 5 of them, based on a team-based free association method and subsequent symbolic interpretation of the images. In the results of the quantitative analysis, the kindergarten teacher’s profession is based on the visualization of the relationships and interaction between adults (usually women) and children, most often in free play or learning, with the support of a set agenda and against the background of a positively attuned situation. However, the interpretation of the expressive symbolism of the 5 drawings also offers previously unnoticed contradictions that disrupt this schema. In them, other aspects of the profession emerge, such as overload, elements of unreasonable attachment, dependence or the sad transience of all their efforts and activities, resonating also the weakening of the profession’s importance at the expense of external pressures.
... This study leverages collaborative autoethnography design (Chang et al., 2016) to understand our experiences as undocumented women in U.S. higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. This design builds upon earlier autoethnography methods (Conquergood, 2004;Denzin, 2003;Ellis, 1997;Holman Jones, 2016) by introducing a collaborative component to the method. This creates additional mechanisms for accountability in both "the process and product" of our shared inquiry (Chang, 2013, p. 112) and in the connections we draw between our own stories and the broader sociocultural and political landscape, which is a core function of ethnographic work (Bochner & Ellis, 2002). ...
This presents a collaborative autoethnography to examine the impact of COVID-19 and concurrent shifting immigration policy on Latinx undocumented women in higher education. The authors leverage an intersectional lens to analyze the matrix of stressors that impact undocumented students during the pandemic. Findings show that: (1) the impacts of the pandemic were exacerbated by concurrent, rapidly-shifting immigration policy; (2) undocumented students take an increasing role in helping their families navigate and respond to their family’s needs during COVID-19; and (3) both the pandemic and policy shifts created additional instability during key transitions for both DACA and fully undocumented individuals in higher education. This collaborative method of research also creates a space for intersectional praxis through which undocumented students and scholars can build community, mobilize action, and co-produce knowledge. This study builds on the knowledge of the experiences of undocumented students in the pandemic, which can serve as a starting point to create institutional and policy solutions to support undocumented students in recovery from COVID-19.
... Diversity was a priority discussed in the group in the early development of the project. We focused on intersectional inclusion of our group members using ideologies set forth by ethnography expert Conquergood (2002), who stated, "This propositional knowledge is shadowed by another way of knowing that is grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection: 'knowing how,' and 'knowing who.' This is a view from ground level, in the thick of things" (p. ...
Much computer-mediated communication (CMC) literature has focused on how technology can influence interpersonal relationships and, in turn, lived experiences in social networking sites (SNSs) and offline. Throughout this article we aim to provide a foundation for readers engaging in research on SNSs, specifically Facebook—though our findings here are movable to other text-based platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit. We used a private/hidden Facebook group to facilitate and store the contributions of a mother–professor research collaborative. We focused on autoethnographic and ethnographic narratives and artifacts to collaborate with other academic mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This group created a data set for all of the mother–professors interacting in the group on Facebook. This article details some of the methodological strengths and limitations associated with engaging in online platforms and categorizing or coding data. We aim to provide readers with suggestions and best practices geared toward moving any publication using a text-based online platform toward rigorous initial setup, data collection, and data analysis.
... Miller et al., 2011). It is also an effective means of redistributing power within knowledge relationships (Conquergood, 2002;Doonan, 2015). Michel de Certeau's assertion, "what the map cuts up, the story cuts across" (1984, p. 129), implicates the boundary-blurring nature of oral narrative and its capacity to link concepts, places, and times that have been otherwise divided by political forces. ...
The pluralistic nature of food culture and food systems produces complex and blended realities for research, often prompting approaches that embrace mixed methods and cross-sector partnerships. In parallel, calls for the decolonization of research methods have brought attention to the importance of relationality when working with local communities and traditional knowledge holders. This article presents the process and outcomes of the Timor-Leste Food Innovators Exchange (TLFIX), a multifaceted initiative centered on the contemporary and historic foodways of Timor-Leste, including current challenges to individual health, cultural identity, and economic-ecological sustainability brought about by centuries of colonial and transnational influence. Conceived within an international development context, TLFIX aimed at building local empowerment, economic development, and social change. Methods included quantitative, qualitative, and material-based approaches, including surveys, storytelling, and culinary innovation. As a “consulting academic” on the project, I contributed to the research design, coached team members on storytelling-as-method, and participated in a portion of the work. For the current text, I use the notions of recombinance, responsiveness, and relationality to interpret our collective experience and to frame an example of carrying out mixed-method and mixed-participant work in complex food contexts. As a whole, this example illustrates ways in which to leave space for improvisation and emergence within food practice and scholarship.
K-pop cover dance is one of the key activities within Hayllu culture in Latin America. This paper examines the video performances of the ten finalist groups of the ‘Cover Dance bts ’ contest, a K-pop dance competition performing the choreographies of exclusively bts songs, which was organized in 2021 by the Korean Cultural Center (Buenos Aires) for participants from Latin American countries. The research focuses on the corporal expressions in the videos that go beyond a mere reproduction of movements behind a camera, including aesthetic-creative qualities, and considers dance performances as a multisensory articulation, which are also socio-cultural narratives, and I interpret as urban corpographies. To achieve a broader understanding, I apply a specific methodology as I engage the videos based on a multi-sensory and embodied analysis, arguing that the meaning of dance goes beyond mere visual aspects.
This essay employs personal biography to illustrate larger questions regarding global transformations in the creative arts and tertiary education sector. With a focus on how neo-liberalism has impacted professional screen practices in Australia and those in the contemporary Academy, this paper also provides two screen-arts case studies to illustrate what poietic research forms can uniquely bring to scholarship.
This essay examines theater's role in recording public history, positing a performance-sensitive approach to historiography against the singularity of both monuments and canons. The recent removal of monuments has drawn renewed attention to the problem of singular public histories. I argue for a polyvocal, repertory model of public history as theorized through the collectively written 2016 play The Fall , which records the events of the 2015–16 student protests in South Africa. The essay begins by contextualizing the play in the longer history of workshop theater and educational inequality in South Africa before specifically examining its approach to public history. Such performance-sensitive historiography enacts anticolonial epistemologies by replacing the singular representation of monumentalism with copresence amid contested histories.
This performative and collaborative autoethnography plays with the homophonic or maybe homiletics of “inter” and “enter” as the invitational aspect of collaborative autoethnography. The contribution of diverse collaborators from differing racial, ethnic, geo-spatial locations, and generational standpoints speak to/between experiences with the dialogic aspects of autoethnography; the speaking of self with and for others that is always a part of autoethnographic practice, now made salient in the intentional collaborative, thus exploring the interpersonal, interracial, international, intersectional, interstitial, and the symbolic interactional aspects of autoethnography.
In this paper, we reflect on the challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in tourism research. Specifically, we discuss the intense, messy and complex dynamics of doing (tourism) ethnographic fieldwork, highlighting how key challenges have affected us as researchers, our practises, relationships and experiences in the field. Our reflections are illustrated considering respectively our research experiences of mountaineering in the Himalayas, walking tourism in China, horse-riding tourism in the UK and volunteer tourism in Peru. Although these fields have very different social and geopolitical contexts, we experienced similar issues. Our most commonly experienced challenges include time limitations, having ‘enough data’, accessibility to the informants and rapport building. Through the discussion of these challenges, we unpack the often conflicting emotional contours of fieldwork which are commonly experienced but rarely spoken of. With this paper, we seek to open critical debates on the emotional aspects of tourism research which may be particularly useful for novice ethnographers and scholars constrained by the institutionalized pressures of academia.
Once ethnography travelled beyond the boundaries of its home discipline of social and cultural anthropology, total immersion became less intensive and definitions of ethnography became ever more expansive so that it now covers at-a-distance fieldwork, an ethnographic sensibility, and stories that must meet aesthetic criteria of evaluation. We describe eight varieties of ethnography: hit-and-run, historical, focus groups, autoethnography, visual, applied, performance, and digital. We argue that, although each variety may not involve immersive observation, all are still ethnography because they share an ethnographic sensibility, which is about recovering the meaning of everyday life – about sitting where the other person is sitting. Every version of ethnography we discuss is ‘real’ ethnography because it deploys this ethnographic sensibility.
The following is autoethnographic performative writing that invites the reader into one woman’s experiences of simultaneously becoming a new mother and professor. The writing weaves the autobiographic tale of her new job as an assistant professor with a dramatic performance text based on a graduate student’s ethnographic interview about the birth of her first daughter. Experimental in nature, this script seeks to problematize the relationship of academic selves and others through creative writing.
Resumo Este texto procura oferecer uma viagem pelas diferentes condições de movimento a que estamos expostos e expostas enquanto representantes de um domínio de estudo que (ainda) designamos por etnomusicologia. O texto baseia-se nos conceitos de movência (teorizado por Paul Zumthor) e de movimento (associado à proposta de desclassificação do conhecimento de António García Gutiérrez) para pensar a itinerância, o trânsito e a mobilidade enquanto instâncias constituintes: 1) de todos os fenómenos de interesse etnomusicológico; 2) do posicionamento teórico da disciplina; 3) das suas opções metodológicas; e 4) do modo como etnomusicólogos e etnomusicólogas têm vindo a adotar práticas de investigação partilhada no sentido de uma etnomusicologia progressista. Advogo que esta condição de movimento da etnomusicologia se entrelaça com o seu universo de estudo (música e som) e inscreve uma portabilidade intrínseca, importantes ações de agencialidade e uma condição de permeabilidade capazes de transformar o conhecimento numa força heurística de reedificação disciplinar.
As venues shuttered across Australia, a fervent queer nightlife dreamed up new relations with virtuality, traversing the unstable terrains of memory and trauma. From reflections of sweaty dance floors to the 2020 Zoom-wave of internet performance, the mutual consideration of presence and lack both complexifies and reifies the stakes in reviving queer nightlife cultures.
In times of uncertainty, one would seek the light at the end of the tunnel for clarity. By using Bayo Akomolafe’s metaphor of finding darkness as a literary placeholder, I weave my personal narratives with scholars who refuse colonial assemblages and challenge what has been brought to light. I write-through a time of being lost in the light and explain what it means to find, stay, and be in the darkness. This piece explains finding darkness as resistance to the colonial gaze and troubles the notion of self and visual representations of identity. It also means to embrace and stay hidden with displaced stories and inspire wonder as an incomplete and ongoing practice of wayfinding in the academy.
This paper contributes to the literature on collaborative scholarship by bringing together data from two different critical qualitative dissertation projects in order to better understand the way power complexly flows through communities in both academic and non-academic contexts. The metaphor of dance is used throughout this piece in order to capture the embodied and messy process of being in collaboration with one another as researchers, as scholars, and as people that experience the material consequences of structures of power. We offer insight into our process and provide various examples of how our data danced with one another. We conclude with a discussion that adds to the conversation of collaborative, critical qualitative scholarship and the politics which shape our research commitments.
Writing is an exercise in research—a search for a way of writing. It is not just about finding a new approach to research writing, but about a new way of thinking about and conducting research. The authors aim to show that performance writing creates a dance between different elements, producing a message. After an introduction to performance writing, its origins and intentions, they outline the ethical and political issues involved before considering what we can learn from adopting a communication approach to performance texts. Throughout the article, the authors adopt the styles and methods of two authors, Alphonso Lingis and Jacques Rancière, whose catalytic performance writing produces works that are much more than mere performance.
With the emergence of cyber-culture and new digital media, the present-day global society has turned into a ‘networked society’ powered by micro-electronics-based information and communication technology. Communities around the world are now interacting with each other virtually over the internet, corporations are now moving into opening their stores online with cloud databases to mobilize together with their customer base, governments are stepping to launch their e-government initiatives, educational institutions are now in learning and teaching by zoom, while financial institutions are increasingly presenting themselves in tablets, mobile phones, and social media. With the pandemic of Covid-19, increasing discussions are now going on in various academic and research platforms about the use of images in various forms of communication. In recent times, we can see an increasing interest in visual imagery in anthropology and a significant shift from ‘text’ to ‘visual imagery’ in various types of ethnographic production. Images are now carrying larger values for thinking and doing anthropology and anthropologists are now increasingly using their theories and ethnographic methods to develop various forms of visual imagery including photographs, art-works, paintings, drawings, and others.
This paper primarily focuses on a close examination of the use of various forms of visual practices in contemporary global society and intends to suggest a priority of creating a new space for visual anthropology as ‘anthropology beyond the text’. It also intends to examine the processes and pathways of recent shifts in anthropology from ‘textocentrism’ to ‘visual imagery’. With the above queries, the paper wants to examine the future challenges in the development of visual anthropology in Bangladesh and elsewhere and further intends to address a number of thematic questions associated with the meaning, understanding, critical looking, and practices of visual imagery’ in different visual and virtual platforms and to discuss the major challenges that the visual anthropology is facing from ‘within’ and ‘beyond’ in Bangladesh.
This dissertation offers ecological disorientation as an analytic for making sense of affective experiences of the climate crisis and the epistemological shifts that attend it. It focuses this analytic on a range of thinkers and makers whose reckonings with the climate crisis appeal to sonic creativity. It contributes to the difficult labor of reorienting music studies, the humanities, and higher education institutions to better contend with the climate crisis, for which there is no panacea. Chapter one analyzes the discourse of theorists, critics, scientists, and public officials who deploy sonic figures to make sense of ecological disorientation. The chapter opens this project’s overriding concern—namely, that sonic figures and practices of embodied sense-making can spur action and mobilize affects. Chapter two constellates and analyzes music studies practitioners’ reckonings with ecological disorientation to argue that such reckonings may perpetuate anthropocentric, identitarian epistemologies. Chapter three theorizes parahuman sonic creativity and compiles an archive of practitioners whose creative work in sound contends with, figures, or otherwise relates with the climate crisis and its disorienting effects; it argues that such works aestheticize the climatic, ecological conditions of possibility for their own existence. Chapter four offers a suite of the author’s creative and pedagogical models for reorientation: a breath-controlled instrument linking users’ breath to the real-time air quality of three user-defined cities around the world; a short film demonstrating the instrument; a film about the afterlives of industrial asbestos waste and environmental racism in Ambler, Pennsylvania; a video experiment in “pneumatography”; and two syllabi, available as supplementary files.
Plans and policies rely on knowledge about communities that is often made by actors outside of the community. Exclusion from the creation of knowledge is a function of exclusion from power. Marxists, feminist, decolonial and postmodernist theorists have documented how the knowledge of some subjects is disqualified based on their gender, race, socio-economic position or a range of other constructed differences. Often, several of these constructions intersect in one person’s life, compounding their exclusion in ways that are both relational and structural ( Crenshaw, 2017 ). Participatory planning approaches bring members of the community into contact with planning authorities in an effort to include their voices and interests in official plans. Essential to meaningful engagement in such a process is the participant’s ability to turn their ideas into change through the exercise of their agency. When that potential for transformation is missing, participation is tokenistic at best and dangerous at worst ( Cooke and Kothari, 2001 , Hickey and Mohan, 2004 ; Forester, 2020 ). When planners ask people whose agency is restricted by institutional and cultural forms of subjugation to talk about issues that adversely impact them, but over which they have little control, we can create exposures to internal and external risks that we are ill-equipped to mitigate. How can planners work towards social transformation without shifting the burden of speaking truth to power onto community members? One of the ways in which power and knowledge are related is through the complicated process of communication. Reflecting on power and communication in planning practice, this paper contemplates the question: when working with communities that have been historically excluded from the creation of knowledge about themselves, should planners strive for undistorted communication or should the distortion in communication be analysed for what it can tell us about agency and power, and opportunities for resistance and transformation?
This essay looks at ongoing efforts to revitalize arts and culture among the Yezidi and broader Iraqi Kurdish communities. The Yezidi are survivors of the 2014 genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State (ISIS, also known by its Arabic acronym Da’esh) which resulted in mass killing, captivity and expulsion from their ancestral homeland of Mt. Sinjar in northern Iraq. They are part of the Kurdish people, who have engaged in centuries of struggle to protect their cultural and political identity, establish autonomy and ensure their security in the broader Middle East. After a brief overview of the Yezidi genocide and its aftermath, we trace some theatrical efforts in the 20–21st century and look at two embryonic theater initiatives in Iraqi Kurdistan. The description of cultural projects at Springs of Hope Foundation (Shariya Camp) is followed by personal reflection and analysis of the aims, uses and challenges of Applied Theater. This ‘umbrella term’ refers to a process that uses a theatrical tool-kit in non-theater contexts. The aesthetic, ethical and political challenges inherent in this work are considered: the essay explores questions of ethical care and the implications and pitfalls of working with vulnerable and displaced populations, issues of representation, and creating spaces for healing and expression through participatory theater. Finally, we discuss a new initiative in Iraqi Kurdistan that seeks to address ethnic and political fissures through theater. The essay culminates with a consideration of belonging and re-imagining home.
The project choreographs revolt as performed in Butoh willful stillness. Stillness is a political intervention, which in its slow and sustained study reveals the functioning of in/visible economies of violence. Indeed, Butoh aesthetic of stillness, demands self-reflexivity that troubles voyeuristic passivity to create space for ethically facing the other in moments of violent cultural annihilations and suffering. Beyond underscoring the role of performance art in confronting the apathy of observing and consuming violence, the essay exemplifies Butoh as a choreographic method that performs the discomfort of seeing, thus, cuts across academic and aesthetic critiques of witnessing.
Public performances have been studied as acts of social protest that contest social or gender norms or collective memories of state violence. When public protests were prohibited after the 2010 violent crackdown in Thailand, Thai protesters staged other forms of public performances. What unfolded were adaptive street performances by innovative assemblages that forged new ways to resist when interacting with existing limitations and state suppression. This essay engages Deleuze and Guattari’s approach in examining public performances as assemblages. I argue that the multiplicities of public performances challenged the official narrative of the 2010 Crackdown and served as a demand for accountability and justice.
Augusto Boal, perhaps best known for his Theatre of the Oppressed (1985 [1979]), critiqued Aristotelian aesthetics that left spectators in passive states. He turned to Brechtian proposals that would move spectators to revolutionary action, but also became critical of any straightforward didactic approach to revolutionary theatre. The whole world was indeed a stage and all spectators were also potential actors or “spect-actors.” Boal’s work was shaped by the politics of his time and place: Brazil, Latin America, the Cold War politics of the 20th Century, the experiences of exile during Brazil’s military government, his return from exile, and the economic tyranny of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In memory of Boal’s recent passing (1931-2009), this issue of InTensions features articles that examine theatre and performance as critical social practices and forms of analysis. Leaving to future scholarship the assessment of his life’s work, here we pay homage to Boal with articles and works that take as a starting point Boal’s central life practice: the braiding of performance and politics.
This article intervenes in the persistent hierarchy of epistemological worth that produces scientific knowledge as meaningful, and knowledge from arts or humanities as marginal, or illustrative. The specific trans-disciplinary project we discuss brings together environmental social sciences with performance-based Forum Theatre methods to explore ‘value’ as understood in communities in Tabasco and Chiapas, Mexico in relation to Payment for Ecosystem Services. We argue for engaging, community-based participatory methods that are forged with an understanding of research participants as holistic beings whose lifeworlds are embodied, experiential as well as culturally informed. Trans-disciplinary collaborations that seek to incorporate ‘novel’ methods to engage participants differently might better reflect the dynamic, emergent, and often shifting nature of beliefs, attitudes and values.
As collaborative theatre-makers, university teachers, and researchers in South Africa, our symbiotic, interactive relationship has shaped the construction of our academic identities. The displacement caused by social distancing regulations and repeated government-mandated lockdowns, as well as our own shifting circumstances, have forced us to re-examine these academic identities as we negotiate the challenges of working together while not being able to inhabit the same physical space. In this study, we work dialogically, collaboratively and reciprocally, to interrogate our identities as educators in a creative discipline. Using poetic inquiry and reciprocal found poetry, we examined our teaching experiences in the moment of rupture created by the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore how we are (re)learning and (re)imagining who we are as teachers and what we do with, and for, our students, through interrogating our lived experiences in poetic form. In so doing, we recognize how, by accepting fluidity and contingency, having an ethic of care for ourselves and for our students, accepting our vulnerability, and trusting our resilience, we begin to find the positives, and to embrace, rather than resist, the challenges we are facing. Our process of creating our reciprocal found poems and the use of dialogue as a mode of analysis and meaning-making offer a methodological approach that others may find useful in developing their poetic self-study research.
When utilizing digital methods to research social phenomena, such as slavery, how do we prevent re‐objectifying marginalized humans while reducing them, as a matter of course, to digital units and computational attributes? This essay proposes the meshing of an autoethnographic sensibility with digital humanities. I narrate a portion of my methodological and interpretative processes as extracted from a larger project, “Mapping Modernity’s Slavery,” which utilizes digital mapping methods to visualize and analyze the constitutive spatiality of modern tourism, representations of luxury, and the (en)slave(d) body in antebellum New Orleans. The project plots more than 100 points of sale of enslaved people, the addresses of the city’s major nineteenth‐century hotels, and their relative density and proximity. I also deep map descriptions of these sites as rendered within Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Francis and Theresa Pulszky’s White, Red, Black, both published in 1853. As a way to avoid the reproduction of the slavocracy’s dehumanizing techniques (i.e., the reduction of humans to tabulations in account books, catalogues, bills of sale, etc.), the paper foregrounds how being attuned to the embodied practice, phenomenology, and affect of manipulating archival materials within software platforms critically reshapes the questions asked of the research project. I propose a critical autoethnographic deep mapping to ameliorate the racial limitations and distortions at the intersection of the archive, the map, and the digital.
The disciplines of Sociology and Theater and Performance Studies have a long and intertwined history. The common interest in the behavior of social beings in the artistic, representational realm as well as in everyday life has prompted both disciplines to use participant observation as a research method. This article is co-authored by a performance scholar and a sociologist and combines insights from both disciplines to make the possibilities of ethnographic research on social groups critical and nuanced. This article will introduce sociologists to various performance studies concepts and methodologies useful for the ethnographic inquiry, and provide models of ethnography and performance that demonstrate the intersection between the two in art and research practice.KeywordsEthnographyPerformanceDramaBodyEmbodiment
What you are about to read is a subversive, genre busting, manifesto. I seek ethnographic texts turned into performance events, into ethnodramas, into ethnotheatre, into narrative poems, scripts, short stories, texts with narrators, action, shifting points of view; dramaturgical productions co-performed with audiences; life, narrative and melodrama under the auspices of late neo-liberal capitalism. I seek a new genealogy. It is clear that there is no separation in performance autoethnography between the writer, the ethnographer, the performer and the world. Performance autoethnography makes the writer’s self-visible through performance, through performance writing, through the writer’s presence in the world. Performance autoethnographers are committed to changing the world one word, one performance at a time. The community is global.Keywords(Auto) EthnographyPerformanceTheatrePoliticsResistance
White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest “white-expat-fans” to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with K-pop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.
This chapter presents the second of four case studies exploring contemporary practices of community performance. Big hART’s practical methodology engages a multilayered approach holding in tension individual experiences of exclusion, assets-based community development, the creation of ‘exquisite’ art and national policy change. These dimensions animate Big hART’s dynamic and iterative practice. The chapter examines the final creative development process for Hipbone Sticking Out before the performance premiered at a mainstage theatre in Canberra, the capital city of Australia, in July 2013. Hipbone was produced as part of the Yijala Yala project based in Roebourne, a town of approximately 1000, mostly Indigenous inhabitants in north-western Western Australia. The chapter focuses on the articulation of big hART’s cultural rights-based approach within what anthropologist, Mary Edmunds, refers to as “the hard demands of an overwhelming Pilbara development trajectory [in which] both government and resource companies are essential players in determining what the extent, and the limits, of [Indigenous] self-determination might be” (2012, p. 51). The case study provides detailed examples of a way of working that enables individuals and communities that have experienced social exclusion to stake a claim in mainstream spaces, to call for a response to systematic injustice and to create vital cultural livelihoods.
Intersectionality is core to contemporary feminist rhetorical criticism. It is also a complex concept with great potential for promoting social change by shifting discourses about identity in the public sphere. Therefore, communication scholars have a vested interest in teaching the basics of intersectional criticism to undergraduate and graduate students across the humanities, especially in upper-division undergraduate communication courses that deal with rhetorical criticism, feminist rhetorical theory, women and or gender studies, social movements, critical cultural studies, media studies, or other related topics. I recommend teaching intersectionality as an analytic framework for rhetorical criticism with second-wave feminist music. The unit begins by briefly overviewing the key goals and rhetorical tactics of second-wave feminists. Students then read intersectional criticism of second-wave rhetoric and criticism of rhetorical theory that fails to consider the intersectional experience of identity. The unit culminates with students working in groups to conduct an abbreviated rhetorical criticism of popular music associated with the United States’s second wave of feminist movements. The abbreviated rhetorical criticism asks students to analyze the embodied and situated components of musical argumentation. They present their findings to the class in a multimedia presentation that engages many sensorial and rhetorical possibilities, much like music does.
Courses
Rhetorical Criticism, Feminist Rhetorical Theory, Women/Gender Studies, The Rhetoric of Social Movements, Critical Cultural Studies, Media Studies.
Objectives
In this unit, students will learn how to analyze second-wave feminist rhetoric through an intersectional lens using musical case studies. First, students will study the history of second-wave feminist movements. They will then read about the core tenants of intersectional thinking before exploring how rhetorical critics use intersectionality as an analytic framework. Next, students will engage popular music with feminist messages that emerged during the second wave in an abbreviated rhetorical criticism textured with historical context and focused on embodied experiences of musical appeals. They will present their findings in a multimedia format for their classmates. By the completion of this unit, students should learn to apply intersectional theory to an analysis of a musical rhetorical tactic and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of that tactic.
This book examines the enactment of gendered in/equalities across diverse Cultural forms, turning to the insights produced through the specific modes of onto-epistemological enquiry of embodied performance. It builds on work from the GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project and offers both theoretical and methodological analyses of an array of activities and artworks. The performative manifestations discussed include theatre, installations, social movements, mega-events, documentaries, and literary texts from multiple geopolitical locales. Engaging with the key concepts of re-enactment and relationality, the contributions explore the ways in which in/equalities are relationally re-produced in and through individual and collective bodies. This multi- and trans-disciplinary collection of essays creates fruitful dialogues within and beyond Performance Studies, sitting at the crossroads of ethnography, event studies, social movements, visual studies, critical discourse analysis, and contemporary approaches to textualities emerging from post-colonial and feminist studies.
The end of the crack-cocaine crisis and collapse of open-air urban drug markets over the last two decades have reshaped the contours of gang life and gang violence in the twenty-first century, exacerbating dislocation and disaffection among working-class black youth in the postindustrial urban landscape. Drawing on qualitative research with black gang members in Chicago and East St. Louis, Illinois, this article analyzes how, within this sociohistorical context, political-economic forces shape community conditions, objective life chances, and personal experiences and worldviews, and how gangs and violence emerge in response to these realities. As with recent scholarship on rising rates of self-inflicted deaths among dispossessed working-class whites, this article argues that lives lost to contemporary gang violence should be similarly understood as deaths of despair, produced by a social order in which the possibility of a dignified and meaningful existence has been effectively foreclosed.
This article examines the ways in which Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members of the Ballroom community create black queer space to contend with their spatial exclusion from and marginalization within public and private space in urban Detroit, Michigan. Existing in most urban centers throughout North America, Ballroom culture is a community and network of Black and Latina/o LGBT people. In this ethnography, I delineate the multiple functions of two mutually constitutive domains of Ballroom culture, kinship (the houses) and ritualized performance (the ball events). I use queer theories of geography and draw from Sonjah Stanley Niaah's notion of performance geography to examine the generative socio-spatial practices that Ballroom members deploy to forge alternative possibilities for Black LGBT life in Detroit. In many ways, members of the Ballroom community work to challenge and undo the alienating and oppressive realities of built environments in urban centers by undertaking the necessary social and performance labor that allow its members to revise and reconfigure exclusionary and oppressive spatial forms.
If Arabic drama and Greek theatre shared the same beginnings (both emerging from ceremonies of fertility), then why have the Greek traditions of theatre, tragedy and comedy been read as political but the Arabic traditions dismissed as ‘folkloric’? Consider three texts: an eighth century theatrical script called Muākkamat al-hulafā' (‘Trial of the Caliphs’), a thirteenth century shadow-play titled al-‘Ajīb wa al-harīb (‘The Bemusing and The Strange’) and an oral tale told among the women of Tetoun in Morocco (who trace their ancestry to al-’Andulus in Spain) titled ‘Ali wa Yahzil? (‘Ali, and a Spinner Too?’). All three texts illustrate Arabic dramatic traditions from different times and places and each constitutes a genre of ikāya (Arabic for tale, pl. akāya or ikāyāt). Can these akāya articulate a way of being political that has remained non-articulable within western political thought? To begin to answer such a question, the article first offers an account of a subject that has been recognised as political that of the public spheres. Through the telling of three akāya, the article aims to put into tension this recognisable political subject of public spheres with a subject that positions itself differently in relation to justice and rights. Do the political subjectivities uncovered through this tension operate within existing understandings of the political or do they uncover the limits of such understandings and make possible new interpretations?
This article considers the relation between news images—images captured, selected, written about, printed, and distributed in the course of the news process—and cultural performances—those everyday embodied modes of expressive enactment by which individuals meaningfully and collectively create their worlds. While scholarship on media from a ritual perspective has contributed a great deal to understandings of the cultural dimensions of the production of news images, it remains focused on the sites and practices of encoding. This article calls upon the concept of performance to explore those sites, relations, and practices in which the decoding of news images obtain. After a review and critique of the literature on news as ritual and a definitional overview of the performance concept, it considers two cases which explore the ways news images of September 11, 2001 became lived images through specific cultural performances.
This paper explores the concerns which prompted the introduction of an innovative Masters level module designed for practising teachers at a university in the UK. The module was intended to offer an alternative to positivistic modes of reflectivity and to introduce reflective writing practices that acknowledge the constitutive force of writing. Experimentation with writing styles is not usually associated with continuing professional development offered to teachers. We explain why we view writing as a legitimate and valuable reflective research method for practitioners and why we support efforts to challenge the sedimented assumptions that inform teacher training and professional development activity directed at practising teachers. Our adopted pedagogic strategy was to introduce teachers to reflective writing that simultaneously promotes self‐reflexivity and highlights the creative and constitutive power of writing. We sought to challenge pervasive dualisms or binaries (e.g. teacher: student, creative‐analytical, cognition: affect) and featured the work of Laurel Richardson in support of this agenda. It is argued that practitioners may be better served by reflective writing practices that foster ethical sensibility through recognizing the intuitive or affective dimensions of the writing process. Previous contributors to this journal have called for an expansion of the modes of reflectivity that qualify as reflective practice in higher education. The introduction of the module can be read as a response to that call.
This essay is about anthropology as theater and theater as anthropology. The authors suggest that playwriting can provide a vehicle for ethnographic description, interpretation, and analysis; and that dramatic performance can be used to communicate ethnographic insights to both actors and audience. The writing and producing of their recent play, Condor Qatay, provides an illustration of this process.
Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalization. Tying ethnography to structural analysis, Flexible Citizenship explores how political upheavals and global markets have induced Asian elite families, in particular, to blend strategies of migration, capital and cultural accumulation. She details how their transnational practices of flexibility manipulate different immigration regimes as well as schemes of multiculturalism in advanced liberal societies. Refuting claims about the clash of civilizations, Ong presents a clear account of the cultural logics of globalization as Asian peoples disperse and shape forms of Asia-Pacific modernity.
Prologue: In Medias Res TRAVELS Traveling Cultures A Ghost among Melanesians Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology CONTACTS Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections Paradise Museums as Contact Zones Palenque Log FUTURES Year of the Ram: Honolulu, February 2, 1991 Diasporas Immigrant Fort Ross Meditation Notes References Sources Acknowledgments Index
Performance science is a new way of presenting the results offieldwork research. The performance mode creates problems of syntax and interpretation, but has corresponding advantages, including narrativity and multivocality. We illustrate these problems and advantages with examples from our study of the social organization of professional theatre in the United States, and we urge fieldworkers studying other subject matters to experiment with the performance mode.
This essay examines African American women's participation in Civil War reenactment as performances of idealized femininity. African American Civil War reenactments enable black men and women to construct narratives of historical subjectivity through performances of masculine and feminine agency. In enacting the role of the “demure southern belle” supporting black Union soldiers, black women reenactors occupy an image associated with idealized femininity. This appropriation of southern belle iconicity destabilizes past and contemporary representations, rooted in southern mythology, relegating black women to the categories of the mammy and Jezebel, the black whore. In this endeavor, they use these performances as resistance, thereby suggesting the presence of power and subversion within traditionalism. Moreover, as the black male reenactor's occupation of the conservative image of the idealized citizen-soldier is perceived as anathema to contemporary black masculinist discourse, the ironies inherent in black women's performance of traditional femininity as feminist discourse underscore the problematics embedded within mainstream feminism, revealing the situated nature of its core assumptions.
Grounded in a topics course designed to examine the limits of “racial talk,” the paper examines how critical pedagogy faces a complex web of obstacles in the interrogation of racial discourses and systems. Next, the paper moves to assert and apply the concept of the critical-norm, marking the performativity of critical dialogues and critical analysis that have come to inhibit critical work through the normalization of critical patterns of engagement. The paper turns to performance theory as a space to resist the limitations of the critical-norm, specifically in the context of racial dialogue, marking aesthetic performance dialogue as a space where the trappings of the critical-norm can be expanded, troubled, and potentially reworked.
This article develops the ideal type of charismatic performance. In a charismatic performance, a series of interactions between a leader and his followers takes on a specific pattern and tone: the leader’s startling successes in the world and, in particular, his or her public acts and displays, build upon each other to create, in followers, a perception of the inevitability of his or her rise, a deeply affective connection to the leader, and a tendency for the interpretive frameworks of these followers to center upon the leader’s individual person. Simultaneously, the leader draws emotional energy and political possibility from his (growing) community of followers. Charismatic performances, I argue, provide one route to sovereignty, and thus to political domination and the legitimation of the use of physical violence. I illustrate these arguments and sketch a model of charismatic performance via a historical case study of Bacon’s rebellion (1676) in the English Colony of Virginia. The shift to a performative perspective on charismatic domination and, in particular, the model of a charismatic performance as a recursive, self-legitimating ‘spiral of success’ provides additional analytical leverage for the examination of charismatic domination and the ‘extraordinary’ times that make it more likely to emerge.
This article considers how the arts can be used in research with service users as a critical praxis that fits with the ethos of social work research. It discusses a research project that took place at a Sure Start programme in North West England, UK. Sure Start is a government initiative working with families with pre-school-age children in the most socially and economically disadvantaged areas of the country. The project recruited local, working-class mothers to carry out research into the effectiveness of the programme and into their contemporaries’ experiences of parenting, often in poverty. It employed drama as a means of communicating the research findings, involving local mothers in constructing and performing two plays. One play took the form of an ‘ethnodrama’, whilst the other was influenced by pantomime. The paper looks at the context for applying this methodology and discusses the process of doing so. It then moves on to consider the success of the project, looking at various means of assessing the quality of arts-based research, which include the pleasure and enjoyment it brings. It concludes with the voices of some of the participants and their reflections on the process.
In this article, I examine black queer nightlife in Soweto and its relationship with the making of black queer space in South Africa. Through an in-depth examination of the microgeographies of a Soweto stokvel party, I reveal the complexities of post-apartheid formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Employing the idea of usable space, I highlight quotidian practices of leisure as an important site for understanding cultural creativity within the marginalized spaces occupied by black South African queers. Performance and performativity are central to organizing nightlife spaces and reveal both the possibilities and limits encountered by black queers as they try to construct livable lives.
Argument for understanding organizational performance, cultural performance, and techno-performance as all informing one another. "Performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth: an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge" (176)
Healthy women who are at hereditary risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer are surgically enacting the disease in material registers on their flesh in order to survive cancer in advance. In this practice of "previval," the disease becomes itself, or gains biomedical substance, through its own theatrical gesture.
For this special edition of Critical Stages, Chambers-Letson and Son meditate on the following questions: What are the exigencies that animate your entry into the field of theatre and performance studies? How does a shared project in Asian American performance offer a range of possibilities for thinking through pressing political questions and crises that seem otherwise insurmountable?
Memory and its representations can reveal as much about a culture's sense of itself as they do about its past. Israeli critics have traced the ways in which representations of the Holocaust in their country's films reflect, among many other issues, Israeli culture's preoccupation with the construction of Israeli identity. According to one critic, the Holocaust survivor in films of the 1940s and 1950s embodied weakness and passivity: "all the traits that Israeli identity [was] meant to contrast." In the 1970s, another critic suggests, films "read" the Holocaust from a "nationalist perspective highlighting heroic resistance." Thus, within a few decades, Israeli cinema seems to have represented in radically different ways-through the lens of the Holocaust-The intricacies of Israeli identity formation: first, by shaping memory in terms of the putative weaknesses of diaspora Jews, contrasting them with the strengths of the "new" Israeli Jew; and later, by emphasizing characteristics that linked heroic resisters with heroic Israelis.
While current crisis management literature focuses on the necessity of consistent data and shared interpretation to coordinate effectively, contrastingly, this paper highlights the predominating influence of crisis responders' performances on information transmission. Based on an exploratory interpretive analysis of the 2003 French heat wave crisis response, our findings reveal that performances can support immediate reaction and involvement, but can also generate conflicts or misunderstandings that may burden coordination. This work's contribution to the crisis management literature is in threefold. First, we enrich the crisis management literature by proposing performativity as a potential analytical lens for collective action during crisis response. Second, we propose some practical recommendations to improve crisis management training through the application of the concept of performativity. Finally, we propose a critical perspective on tacitly held assumptions in crisis management.
Chicago, San Francisco, and Minneapolis/St. Paul are major regional centers of theatrical activity in the United States. Like other viable theatre communities, they contain the resources theatres need to produce plays, including community traditions and theatrical cultures, work opportunities, and theatre spaces. We have presented our analysis of these communities and their resources in a dramatic format, which solves some problems of scientific communication but makes additional demands on the reader.
“What's Diana to me, that I should weep for her?” How and why does Princess Di's ghost haunt our memories as well as the latest political crisis?
Cô Định and cô Xuân, two women veterans in Ho Chi Minh City, recount their memories of torture during the Vietnamese-American war. Their remembering requires a performance-centered exploration of the Vietnamese women's tradition of "pain-taking," as well as their haunting return to the Con Dao prisons as veteran-tourists.
This article continues a call for the development of a critical folklore studies as a mode of activist research to redress human suffering and domination. It examines folk criticism as a vibrant, everyday practice and encourages folklorists to embrace critical perspectives as a continuation of this essential human activity. It draws upon Kenneth Burke, Michael Walzer, Thomas McLaughlin, and Antonio Gramsci to illustrate the intimate relationship between folk and professional criticism. Finally, it offers four forms of critical rhetoric intended to complement traditional folklore scholarship and to pursue social change: formal criticism and critique, performance ethnographies, unmaskings, and genealogies.
Critical rhetoricians are increasingly adopting in situ rhetorical methods such as participant observation at protests, consumer sites, and memorials. Despite their value, the ad hoc development of central methodological and analytic commitments of such approaches is cause for concern. In this essay, we synthesize these efforts to name a methodological approach—rhetorical field methods—for analyzing everyday rhetorical experience and articulate the commitments and concerns that motivate this approach, thus creating a focus for debate about in situ rhetorical study. We elaborate on three commitments, articulate some critical problematics, and identify heuristic questions and possibilities of this approach. We conclude by discussing rhetorical field methods' contributions to intradisciplinary communication research.
This essay documents an experiment in the performance of ethnography based on research collected on the audition process. I used a variety of scripting and performance techniques combined with insights from cultural theory to evoke, dramatize, and critique a practice within the institution of theatre. Additionally, I describe the entry of other actors into the process, our rehearsal, the experience of performance, and the evaluation and reflection of post‐performance “aftermath.” Along the way, critiques of “objectivist” ethnography resonate with critiques of the brand of objectivism reified in the audition process. Finally, this essay argues in a more general way for performance as an alternative mode of scholarly representation.
This essay reexamines the eighteenth and nineteenth century elocutionary movement from the perspective of those “others” against whom it erected its protocols of taste, civility, gentility. Elocution, “the just and graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture,” is redefined as the performativity of whiteness naturalized. Moving from a history of ideas approach in which the major theorists and exemplary practitioners are overwhelmingly white and privileged, elocution is relocated within a wider socio‐historical context of racial tension and class struggle. Approaching elocution from below, from the angle of working‐class and enslaved people who were excluded from this bourgeois tradition, brings into sharp focus the complex performative cultural politics of this speech tradition.
The 20th century was dominated by a phalologocentric worldview. Academia was steeped in traditional dichotomies. However, as the world has been evolving due to globalisation, international cultural exchange and social networking, so too are we as theatre makers subject to continuous processes of evolution. The arts evolve at a dramatic rate and it is up to us as artists to sustain our development in cognisance of this. Botha (2006:1) suggests that the result has been "the evolution of a range of alternative forms, sporting revolutionary theories of the dramatic and new approaches to performance". Tuffnell and Crickmay (1990: xi) suggest that one way of shifting the boundaries within which we experience the world is through improvisation and that "[i]n being receptive to the immediate moment and in tuning in to our own sensations, feelings, dreams, we begin our own narrative of discovery that differs from the received narratives of our culture".
This article outlines a theory of re-collection as a means of enhancing and enriching the study of collective memory. Re-collection seeks to generate insights into two underdeveloped threads of collective memory research: (a) its processual and dynamic nature and (b) its largely emplaced character. In particular, this article argues that places of memory are not finished texts, but sites of re-collection in which individuals and groups selectively cull and organize re-collected versions of the past. Grounded in Michael McGee's concept of rhetorical fragments, the theory of re-collection involves attending to discursive fragments of memory that circulate within and around the memory site—as well as the fragments brought to the site by individuals and collectives. Re-collection thus requires analytical tools beyond those traditionally used in rhetorical criticism—as is illustrated in a case study proposal for exploring the process of re-collection surrounding the Space Window in Washington National Cathedral.
Debates about representational forms in qualitative research have tended either to celebrate or to condemn particular forms.
Such an approach reifies the differences between various means of expression and diverts attention from the interpretive,
political and pedagogic issues which, in my view, lend importance to representational choices. Here, I offer an experiential
account of performing ethnography, based on my own field work. I discuss performance both as process and product, and find
points of convergence between my goals as an ethnographer and the resources of performance. As process, performance encourages
participants — performers and audience members alike — to articulate and reflect critically on cultural contexts and meanings;
as product, performance models (in ways more difficult through writing) episodes of social life which, often, are the object
of naturalistic inquiry.
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