[Candrama] ASTR 2018 working session: T&P vs the Crisis in the Humanities

[Kim Solga]

Friends!

Please consider submitting proposals to the working session I am curating at ASTR 2018 in San Diego, along with colleagues Sylvan Baker, Diana Damian, Rebecca Laughton, and Kat Low from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

It is a continuation of my ongoing project, “Theatre and Performance vs the Crisis in the Humanities”, and we are very excited about expanding our discussions to encompass the US context (thus far we have been focused on the UK and Canada, primarily).

That said, scholars from ALL national/regional contexts are welcome, as are young and emerging scholars, mid-career and senior scholars, and especially scholars with administrative experience/backgrounds.

Please reply to ksolga at uwo.ca<mailto:ksolga at uwo.ca> with queries.

Submissions happen through the ASTR website via https://astr.site-ym.com/page/18_WSSubmissions but I reproduce our CFP below for your convenience.

Very best late April wishes, and apologies if you are receiving this MANY times!

Kim

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Theatre and Performance vs the Crisis in the Humanities: (A)rousing the "Mobile Critical Paradigm"

Kim Solga, Western University, ksolga at uwo.ca<mailto:ksolga at uwo.ca>
Sylvan Baker, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (CSSD)
Diana Damian (CSSD)
Rebecca Hayes Laughton (CSSD)
Katharine Low (CSSD)

This working session, the third in an information- and data-gathering project we have been undertaking since autumn 2017, seeks to share, collect, and generate dialogues about how theatre and performance may best be deployed as a "mobile critical paradigm" (Gallagher and Freeman 2016, 9) in the neoliberal university.

"The discourse of crisis in the humanities persists," as Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman write in their 2016 collection, In Defence of Theatre (5); scholars, artists, and educators in theatre and performance across (and beyond) the Anglosphere feel this pressure especially acutely as a result of what Laura Levin describes as the expendability with which fine arts programs are often regarded as part of the logic of austerity (161). The emergent challenge for educators is then twofold: 1) to face what often seems like the overwhelming pressures of government and administration-mandated measurement and accountability on our own terms, and 2) in the process to redefine those terms – the measures by which university administrators and governments recognize us, and view our continued worth.

Michael McKinnie (2017) and Jen Harvie (2013) have both separately argued that theatre and performance occupy what we might call an enviably precarious position vis-à-vis institutionality: they are both imbricated within institutional paradigms (from grammar school through to university curricula, to national theatre spaces and government-granting agencies), and yet work against those institutional paradigms as essential forms of social critique. Can theatre and performance find ways to be instrumental to the neoliberal university, without fully becoming instrumentalized by it?

If performance is indeed a “mobile critical paradigm” in Freeman and Gallagher’s provocative and useful formulation — deeply relevant to a range of university disciplines, yet not often visible as such — theatre and performance teachers, researchers, and practitioners must (a)rouse ourselves to its potential across our internal institutional borders. Recognizing how and where this awakening has already happened, and how we might further rouse one another to the means of activating performance's mobile critical potential, is this session's aim. It builds on the recent "social turn" in theatre and performance scholarship (Jackson 2011), but it focuses deliberately on its framing within university contexts. Our goal is to share a variety of "best practices" that, taken individually as models, can assist us in making local change at our own institutions, while taken collectively can represent qualitative evidence of our successful, ongoing adaptation to existing institutional realities.

The session will build on workshops and discussions we have already curated in England at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (December 2017), in Canada at the Canadian Association of Theatre Research (May 2018), and at ATHE in Boston (summer 2018). The session is also linked, indirectly, to a special issue of Research in Drama Education that will be published in August 2019. The research questions attached to the session, and to the larger project of which it forms a part, are:

  1.  What initiatives are already underway to ready schools and departments of theatre and performance for survival within the neoliberal university?
  2.  How are these initiatives received by stakeholders (students, teachers, artists, administrators, community partners) both inside and outside of institutional contexts?
  3.  How essential is interdisciplinary collaboration to the survival of theatre and performance labour in the neoliberal university? What models exist for such (successful) collaboration?
  4.  How essential is community collaboration to the survival of theatre and performance labour in the neoliberal university? What models exist for such (successful) collaboration?
  5.  Within the initiatives and collaborations thus detailed, what room exists for creative, performance-driven critique of neoliberal structures? How is that room made? When and how does making such space fall short of goals?

Participants will be selected based on the case studies – whether past or present, ongoing or closed, successful or “failed” – that they have to share: we aim to amass a wide range of examples of ongoing work that respond to the questions above in order to produce a similarly wide-ranging and provocative conversation. Once selected, participants will be asked to craft a brief (1500-word) case study document for group dissemination; based on our collective reading of those documents, and other relevant materials, we will all generate topics and questions for discussion in San Diego together.

Please submit a 250-word description of the case study you would like to share and a 50-word biographical note. If you wish, please note the research question(s) above to which it responds, and/or suggest a question we may not have yet articulated!

Please also note that we hope to include a genuinely diverse range of participants: from those at small colleges and teaching-only institutions to R1 faculty; from students, to contract faculty, to full-time faculty, to those who are also administrators. (Theatre and performance scholars turned administrators are especially welcome to apply.)

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