[Candrama] CFP - IFTR 2026 Feminist Research Working Group

[Kim Solga]

IFTR FEMINIST RESEARCH WORKING GROUP
IFTR World Congress 2026
6-10 July 2026, Melbourne, Australia

CALL FOR PAPERS

Dear feminist friends,

The theme for the 2026 IFTR World Congress is “What Theatre Does.” As the conference CFP notes, “Theatre, dance, and other cultural performances all do things. A key tenet of Theatre and Performance Studies (TaPS) is that these practices are, in themselves, ways of doing…. Over time and across cultures, performance has variously been said to beguile, celebrate, empower, entertain, exalt, instruct, oppress, provoke, purify, moralise, remember, subvert, transfigure, and welcome. But are we as TaPS scholars happy to leave it there? Can we afford to?” (The full call is reproduced below.)

In line with this call to reconsider the public efficacy and activist potential of theatre and performance in a burning, increasingly authoritarian world, the Feminist Research Working Group invites papers that consider the conference theme with special attention to these questions:


1.        What does theatre and performance do, today, for women around the world? How does it mobilize; how does it represent; how does it uplift; when and how does it create change?

2.        What do feminist theories do for theatre and performance studies (TaPS) today? How have developments in theoretical perspectives (feminist and other) over the last 40+ years shifted the way TaPS scholars understand the labour of feminist performance praxis?

3.        How might we define feminist theatre today? What has changed over the last four decades? What changes do we see coming?

To submit a paper to the Feminist Research Working Group, please follow the general conference submission timeline:

•      1 November: Abstract submissions open. Abstracts can be submitted to the IFTR conference platform which is accessed via the IFTR webpage<http://www.iftr.org/>

•      8 December: Abstract submissions close

•      Please note that you have to be a member of the IFTR to submit an abstract. To join or renew your membership, visit the IFTR webpage<http://www.iftr.org/> from 1 October.
Questions? Reach the FRWG convenors, Professor Kim Solga and Dr Mallarika Sinha Roy, at ksolga at uwo.ca<mailto:ksolga at uwo.ca>and mallarikasinharoy at yahoo.com<mailto:mallarikasinharoy at yahoo.com>.





IFTR World Congress 2026
What Theatre Does

6-10 July 2026
The University of Melbourne, Australia

Call for Papers

Theatre, dance, and other cultural performances all do things. A key tenet of Theatre and Performance Studies (TaPS) is that these practices are, in themselves, ways of doing.

For Elin Diamond, performance is ‘a doing and a thing done.’ Diana Taylor channels artistic insights from Latin America to add that it is also ‘redoing,’ and ‘a thing done to and with the spectator.’ In recent years, diverse scholars have taken these ideas in fresh directions. Writing about indigeneity in Hawaii, Stephanie Nohelani Teves argues that ‘the performance of aloha…does something to and for Kānaka Maoli.’ This includes a ‘practice of insurgent world-­making that exceeds the limits set by the colonial order of ­things.’ In his ‘Manifesto for Queer of Color Life’, Joshua Chambers-Letson asserts that ‘[p]erformance doesn’t just rehearse a different world, it makes it anew, again and again.’ Meanwhile, the terms gathered in The Routledge Companion to Performance-Related Concepts in Non-European Languages describe myriad ‘doings’ of performance, from Lina Saleh’s interpretation of the Arabic maṯṯal as ‘continuous transformation in representation’, to Zeami’s ‘interval of doing nothing’ (senuhima), as considered by Yamashita Yoshiteru (see references below).



These insights reflect performance knowledge long enacted by practitioners throughout the world. Over time and across cultures, performance has variously been said to beguile, celebrate, empower, entertain, exalt, instruct, oppress, provoke, purify, moralise, remember, subvert, transfigure, and welcome.

But are we as TaPS scholars happy to leave it there? Can we afford to?

Climate change, competition for resources, and the rise of polarising new technologies are leading to complex and sometimes violent realignments of global political power and ideology. This impacts what kinds of performances are being made in the present, and how we should understand them historically.

In Australia, where our conference will be held, artists, audiences and researchers alike are tussling with specific iterations of these issues. These include the significance and future vitality of Indigenous performance cultures and their intersection with the cultural legacies of settler-colonialism; new forms of intercultural belonging in an Asia-Pacific setting; and how commercial, community and cutting-edge performances alike can respond at the human scale to major global challenges.

In response, we invite you to a conference called ‘What Theatre Does’ that is deliberately, open-heartedly, inclusive. Come: come on over and tell everyone else what the theatre, dance and performance you know best did, does, or might yet do.

But a conference called ‘What Theatre Does’ also harbours a demand. Our conference will take place in Melbourne, known as Naarm by the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation on whose unceded land the city stands. Here, wominjeka, the Aboriginal Woi-wurrung welcome that Traditional Owners offer, means ‘come with purpose.’ It is a welcome that all visitors, whether new or of long standing, must earn, especially during National NAIDOC Week<https://www.naidoc.org.au/>, which ‘celebrates and recognises the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’, and will coincide with our conference. What is our purpose?

What Theatre Does will not ask you to frame your existing expertise around a novel theme or topic, but to interrogate the basis on which you make claims about the performance practices you study, and extend their scope. Which orthodoxies no longer hold? How much of our scholarship is wishful thinking? Are our methods and theories fit for purpose?

What Theatre Does will ask these hard questions in service of rigour, not critique; imaginatively, not instrumentally. In answering them, your presentation might touch on one or more of the following broad themes:

Creation and Speculation: how is performance made and what does that make possible?
• How performance-makers use the creative process to achieve effective theatre
• How performances express cultural and geographical location, including relations to sovereign land
• What kinds of world-making theatre and performance are good at and what kinds of futures they help us imagine
• What the limits of theatre and performance are, or how we can imagine these forms other than they currently appear

Experience and Aesthetics: what do participants get out of performance events, and how?
• The relationship between organisational, technical and production practices and how they shape performance aesthetics
• The bases for the claims we make about reception and how audience research is changing our understanding of theatre, dance and performance
• The best ways to describe or analyse performances
• What a contemporary poetics or aesthetics of performance might involve

Methods and Theories: what are they good for, and can we do them better?
• When methods and theories are useful, and where they fall short
• What forms of knowledge theatre and performance embody
• How culturally specific understandings of what theatre does expand the field
• What specific contributions theatre and performance can make to broader interdisciplinary enquiry


Impact and Efficacy: what does performance demonstrably achieve, with what results?
• The distinctive force of performance in everything from ceremony to community to new technological environments, and as a mechanism for renewal, regeneration, and reparation
• Who the stakeholders in theatre and performance are, and what they want
• How theatre and performance really effect social and political change
• What theatre achieves as a creative industry


In addition to IFTR’s standard General Panels, Working Groups and New Scholars Forum, our conference will include a dedicated First Nations Circle. Hosted in Naarm (Melbourne) on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nations, this closed circle recognises First Nations and Indigenous peoples as part of global, sovereign networks of knowledge, practice, and kinship. It brings relational ways of working—across Country, desert, river, and ocean—into dialogue beyond conference tracks and national borders. Aware that these relations are shaped by colonisation, displacement, extractive economies, and imposed borders, the Circle refuses isolation and centres Indigenous-led performance as a site of connection, resurgence, and knowledge-making.

Abstracts of between 200-250 words are invited from scholars, teachers, researchers, artists, and students of theatre arts, theatre studies, performance studies, and related disciplines. If you are applying to present on a General Panel, please include an explanation of how your paper will address the conference theme of what theatre does. You may wish to reference one of the four sub-themes: Creation and Speculation, Experience and Aesthetics, Methods and Theories, or Impact and Efficacy.

Note the submission timeline

•      1 November: Abstract submissions open. Abstracts can be submitted to the IFTR conference platform which is accessed via the IFTR webpage<http://www.iftr.org/>

•      8 December: Abstract submissions close

•      Please note that you have to be a member of the IFTR to submit an abstract. To join or renew your membership, visit the IFTR webpage<http://www.iftr.org/> from 1 October.

Questions? Write to us on IFTR2026-enquiries at unimelb.edu.au<mailto:IFTR2026-enquiries at unimelb.edu.au>

The IFTR World Congress 2026 will take place on the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne. It is convened by Dr Sarah Balkin, Dr Lindsay Goss, Dr Margaret Harvey, and Professor Paul Rae (all from the School of Culture and Communication) and Dr Robert Walton (Victorian College of the Arts).

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the Traditional Owners of the unceded lands on which we work, learn and live. We pay respects to Elders past, present and future, and acknowledge the importance of Indigenous knowledge in the Academy.






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