[Candrama] ATHE Theory and Criticism Focus Group CFP - Tending the Garden

[Kelsey Jacobson]

Hi All,

Please see below calls for roundtable participants, as well as curated
panels, for the Theory and Criticism Focus Group at ATHE 2022.

With apologies for cross-posting -

Kelsey

Kelsey Jacobson, PhD
Theory and Criticism Focus Group Representative
Assistant Professor, Queen's University


Call for Papers: Theory and Criticism Focus Group—ATHE 2022 Conference
Rehearsing
the Possible: Practicing Reparative Creativity

Detroit, MI | July 28–July 31, 2022
Please send questions to Theory and Criticism Conference Planner: Abby
Schroering (abby.schroering at gmail.com)

Submission Deadline: Sunday, 23 October 2021

The Theory and Criticism Focus Group will accept individual 250-word
position paper abstracts for the Tending the Garden Roundtable Series.
Submissions should include:

1) Abstract (250 words or less)
2) Title
3) Contact information (name, institutional affiliation, email address, and
phone number) 4) Bio of 50 words or less

Tending the Garden—An Interactive Roundtable Event

Progress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms.
Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each
living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime
reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion. Within a given
species, too, there are multiple time-making projects, as organisms enlist
each other and coordinate in making landscapes. [...] The curiosity I
advocate follows such multiple temporalities, revitalizing description and
imagination. This is not a simple empiricism, in which the world invents
its own categories. Instead, agnostic about where we are going, we might
look for what has been ignored because it never fit the timeline of
progress.1

In response to the 2022 ATHE conference theme, “Rehearsing the Possible:
Practicing Reparative Creativity,” the Theory and Criticism Focus Group
will focus our annual roundtable series on explorations of “gardening” as
scholarly, creative, and pedagogical practice—both metaphorically and
literally. For the “Tending the Garden” roundtable series, we welcome a
wide range of contributions from practitioners, educators, and scholars.

This roundtable series will explore gardening as a cyclical, seasonal
practice of regeneration and reciprocity. To plant and tend a garden is a
radical act of faith that assumes a future in which interspecies
communities will flourish and actively create that future; it is also a
continual encounter with the past through memories of prior seasons,
intergenerational knowledge, and material encounters with soils, saved
seeds, and compost. If theater and performance— and theory and criticism—is
a garden, what does it mean to tend it? How do we believe in and create a
future of mutual flourishing? (As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, “all
flourishing is mutual” (20).)2 How to compost old ideas, frameworks, and
materials into a generative bed out of which something new might grow? How
to regard the practice not as a means to a fruitful harvest, but as an
ever-evolving process of growth, change, and care? Following Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing’s provocation above, how to resist the timeline of
progress in favor of alternative worlding and time-making projects, human
and non?

1Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the
Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 21. 2 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding
Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of
Plants, 20.

The Theory and Criticism Focus Group seeks position papers from theatre
artists, educators, scholars, activists, philosophers, and critics
interested in examining our 2022 Roundtable Series theme, “Tending the
Garden.”

The roundtables eschew formal paper presentations in favor of short
position papers and provocations designed to encourage interactive critical
conversations among panelists and audience members. Building on our
previous roundtable series, we strive to include a diverse range of
participants from graduate students and emerging scholars to professional
critics, artists, educators, and senior scholars.

Position papers can take the form of a short essay, a manifesto, an
outreach exercise, a critical review, a theoretical musing, a research
report, a creative project, an interview, or an embodied performance
practice. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

   -

   ●  How do actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and teachers
   cultivate a future through engagement with the past? What pasts do we
   consciously or unconsciously reinforce, reify, or ignore? To what ends?
   -

   ●  How does imagining the field of theater and performance as a garden
   to be tended change our usual patterns, modes, and ways of doing work? What
   would flourishing look like?
   -

   ●  What must be weeded, composted, broken down, re-tooled, or
   re-combined to contribute to the flourishing of theater and performance
   theory and criticism?
   -

   ●  What are the daily, seasonal, annual “chores” of the field? What must
   be constantly done and redone in order to maintain the cycle?
   -

   ●  What does it mean to “get your hands dirty” in this field? Where is
   the productive messiness?
   -

   ●  What are the seasons of rest, growth, and harvest in theater and
   performance?
   -

   ●  What is the theoretical equivalent of monocultural, industrial-scale
   agriculture? Of organic/regenerative farming? Of the community garden?
   -

   ●  What is already growing in Detroit, and who is tending it? How might
   we engage, guided by an ethic of genuine reciprocity?
   -

   ●  What does it mean to truly recognize land?
   -

   ●  How does attention to the nonhuman change perceptions of space and
   time?
   -

   ●  What would it look like to value process over product, cyclicality
   over linearity? How would such a shift impact narrative, theory,
   pedagogy?
   -

   ●  How does environmental racism shape worldings both locally in Detroit
   and more

   expansively across other geographies? What is the role of theater and
   performance in that system of oppression?

   T&C will inform participants of their acceptance by Monday, November 1,
   and the Theory and Criticism Focus Group will oversee the submission of the
   Roundtable Series panels through ATHE’s online proposal process. Send your
   roundtable abstracts to the Theory and Criticism Focus Group conference
   planner Abby Schroering, abby.schroering at gmail.com.


Call for Complete Session Proposals, and Curated Panel Proposals

Sponsored by the Theory and Criticism Focus Group

Complete Session Proposals

We seek complete session proposals for the 2021 conference that include a
broad range of theoretical/critical interrogations and applications based
on the theme of “Rehearsing the Possible: Practicing Reparative
Creativity.” We encourage multidisciplinary dialogues across the fields of
performance scholarship and praxis. We also seek participants from a
variety of focus group affiliations.

The Theory and Criticism Focus Group supports broad definitions of
criticism and performance, and therefore encourages a wide range of
examples and topics. Feel free to explore both historical and contemporary
critics and theorists, in popular culture, academic scholarship, and
performance praxis. Panel proposals that engage scholarly conversation in
creative ways are highly encouraged.

Complete session proposals (separate from the Roundtable Series) should be
submitted directly to the ATHE website (www.athe.org). You must have the
names for all participants ready for the proposal. The website includes
submission information and forms. The session proposal deadline is December
1, 2021.

Curated Session Proposals: DEADLINE Monday, November 22

We also seek proposals to present on curated panels. Please direct these
submissions to the organizer of the panel to which you are applying.

1. Cite Better–A Lightning Roundtable Amplification of Theorists You Should
be Citing: As a field we have come to recognize the dire need to expand our
citation pool. Too often, theory and criticism privilege the same voices,
overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white. For this panel we seek
presenters to give short spotlights to BIPOC women theorists and women
theorists of the global majority who we may not have learned about in
graduate school. For this roundtable we invite members to share lightning
fast introductions to scholars they want to make sure the rest of us know
about. Presenters will be asked to speak for no more than 3 minutes about
an individual theorist and to submit a short thumbnail summary of that
theorist prior to the conference for distribution to all in attendance.
Panelists may present on more than one theorist if they wish.

Contact: Abby Schroering, abby.schroering at gmail.com

2. Growing In Detroit: Artistic expression and experimentation thrive in
Detroit. This panel seeks scholarship and criticism dedicated to amplifying
work in Detroit and/or by Detroit-based artists, past and present.

Contact: Abby Schroering, abby.schroering at gmail.com

Please Note:

   -

   ●  Individuals do not need to be a member of the Theory and Criticism
   Focus Group or ATHE to submit single presentations or panels. However,
   if chosen and scheduled, participants must become members of ATHE by the
   time of the conference.
   -

   ●  Single Focus Group Sessions can address questions to the conference
   planner (abby.schroering at gmail.com) before submitting their proposal.
   -

   ●  Multidisciplinary proposals must be authorized by TWO sponsoring ATHE
   focus groups. Email and get authorization from each focus group’s
   conference planner before submitting.
   -

   ●  For more detailed information, see the ATHE website.
   -

   ●  If you have an individually-authored paper that you would like to
   present but does not fit in the roundtables series or the curated
   panels, please email an abstract to Abby Schroering (
   abby.schroering at gmail.com) before the December 1st deadline and she will
   help it find a home.

*THREE TIPS FOR FIRST-TIME PANEL ASSEMBLERS*

   1.

   Consider inviting panelists with a range of theatrical perspectives and
   backgrounds.
   2.

   Conference panels can be helpful networking tools. Instead of assembling
   a panel of only your cohort-mates, consider inviting a senior scholar
   whose work you’ve cited recently. Clearly and briefly explain the core idea
   of the proposal, the reason you’re inviting them, and ask if they’re
   working on anything they’d like to present.
   3.

   Alternatively, it can be helpful to give panelists clear options: “Dear
   senior scholar, I am putting together a panel on [X]. I greatly admire your
   work on [X-related] and would love for you to present in this area. Of
   course, we would be thrilled with whatever you would like to contribute,
   but please consider that you might do A, B, or C.”
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