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- Convenors:
-
Meghan Rose Donnelly
(University of Manchester)
Alexandra D'Onofrio (University of Manchester)
Valentina Zagaria (University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Valentina Zagaria
(University of Manchester)
Meghan Rose Donnelly (University of Manchester)
Alexandra D'Onofrio (University of Manchester)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 2 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract
Anthropologists using research methods inspired by the performing arts are invited to reflect on being together and the co-creation of knowledge. We welcome work on any topic, in any style. We want to know what your methods are and what opportunities they pose for anthropological theory.
Long Abstract
This panel invites anthropologists working with research methods inspired by the performing arts to reflect on ways of being together and the co-creation of knowledge. Theatrical methods are increasingly recognised as valuable additions to the ethnographic toolkit, but we still require spaces for knowledge exchange of specific practices. Our panel is one such space. We aim to draw together scholars currently working with performance-based methods on any topic, in any style. We want to know what your methods are and what opportunities they pose for anthropological knowledge.
We particularly invite scholars to reflect on the relationship between sociality and process in their methodological experiments. As an art form built on live presence, performance allows participants to conjure past experiences while acting in the subjunctive mode, ‘as if’ the future is already present. How does this relationship to time, experience and potentiality help us access and understand people’s worlds? What is the relationship between our methodological process and the ‘final performance’? Is it the way performance pulls us together into a novel ethnographic space? How do we create ways of being together through performance? What might our performative methods teach us about diverse modes of sociality?
We invite anthropologists working with performance-based methods to share insights from the particular forms of performance creation with which they experiment. We encourage PhD students, early career researchers, and anyone thinking through new approaches to performance as ethnographic method to submit their work. Traditional academic papers will be considered, as will multi-modal and interactive presentations.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Wednesday 2 July, 2025, -Paper short abstract
This paper explores Butoh, a Japanese somatic art form, as a tool to deepen researchers’ understanding of embodied experiences in gender-based violence (GBV) contexts. It bridges discourse and experience, fostering creativity and addressing ethical considerations in GBV research and education.
Paper long abstract
This paper highlights the significance of tools that enhance researchers’ understanding of the embodied experiences of gender-based violence (GBV). It examines Butoh, a Japanese somatic practice that emerged in the 1950s, as a medium for addressing the limits of discourse in representing GBV.
Drawing on Foucault, Linda Alcoff, and Laura Gray’s work on violence, experience, and discourse, the paper critically address taken-for-granted ideas about the limits of discourse in the production and experience of violence. These perspectives reveal the challenges of accessing and representing violence within linguistic frameworks. Dewey’s concept of learning as struggle and English’s notion of “in-between” moments further inform the understanding of GBV research as a learning process, wherein Butoh enables safe navigation of the liminal spaces beyond immediate knowledge.
The paper outlines the distinguishing elements of Butoh, providing structured examples of its integration into teaching and research on GBV. By fostering a creative and embodied approach, Butoh bridges the gap between discourse and experience, offering researchers and participants a deeper engagement with the complexities of GBV.
Finally, the paper reflects on the ethical considerations inherent in using Butoh in sensitive research contexts. It proposes strategies to mitigate risks and establish a secure, inclusive environment where creativity supports learning and understanding. This work contributes to evolving pedagogical practices in GBV research and education, underscoring the transformative potential of embodied methodologies.
Paper short abstract
Sucúa Haven, is a collaborative project that lives at the border of Anthropology & Art, Ecuador & the US, fiction & nonfiction. Through staged photographs participants re-create memories, desires and alternative lives. It explores the Ecuadorian diaspora’s senses of belonging in Greater New Haven.
Paper long abstract
Sucúa Haven is a research-creation project that explores notions of belonging among Ecuadorians in New Haven, Connecticut (US). The name comes from Sucúa, a city in the Amazon where most collaborators originate.
Inspired by Jean Rouch’s ethnofictions and Augusto Boal’s concept of the Aesthetic Space, the project employs staged photography and storytelling to represent, reinhabit, and reimagine the memories, dreams, and alternative lives of its participants. These elements form a portrait of a unique territory: Sucúa Haven, a place that exists in the US but is also Ecuador—an Ecuador that both is and looks like an American suburb.
Through staged photographs, collaborators enter Boal’s aesthetic space—where fiction and reality blur—and engage with its properties of dichotomy, plasticity, and telemicroscopicity. This allows participants to dissociate from and reinterpret their own stories, crafting new narratives and characters that resemble but are not always themselves. It also brings “the distant” and “the absent” into presence, exploring how this community navigates belonging and isolation through translocal and transtemporal experiences and imaginaries.
This presentation will reflect on the methodological process, drawing on case examples to examine the aesthetic space’s properties. It will then explore the complementarity of performative, visual, and traditional methods in pursuing a shared anthropology. Finally, it will discuss the importance of memory and imagination as key dimensions for migrant studies, moving beyond material realities to consider less-explored aspects such as affects, longings, and desires.
Sucúa Haven was made possible through the support of Yale RITM’s Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellowship.
https://www.vanessa-teran.com/main-labs-1
Paper short abstract
How could performance practice “decompose” and regenerate ethnographic knowledge? Theatre of Decomposition suggests a poetic exploration of co-dwelling with fungal bodies by reimagining the collaboration of citizen scientists and lichens at the brink of clearcutting old forests in Mi’kma'ki.
Paper long abstract
This interactive presentation will introduce Theatre of Decomposition (ToD)—a creative inquiry and performance method that navigates mycelial interconnectedness. It is based on ethnographic research in Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia, Canada) with citizens studying lichens to protect the old forests. Adapting the citizen scientists' way of knowing and the land-based knowledge, it explores the bodies of fungi and lichens to join the active process of decomposition through mourning and celebrating. In this practice-based research, the performing body of the researcher serves as a key research tool for archiving sensory knowledge and corporeal experiences.
From March to September 2024, citizen scientists set up a camp in the middle of the logging road to stop the imminent logging in the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area. While enduring the grief of deforestation, they continued searching for at-risk lichens to prove the conservation value of the old-growth. Lichen surveys involve all the bodily senses. Nina, one of the citizen scientists, emphasises an integrated perspective as “a body in the forest,” acknowledging our physical participation in the world. As a theatremaker and researcher, I composed the framework of ToD with three key concepts resonating with this experience: 1) shui-gee, 2) di-di-gee, and 3) deo-deum-gee. Each holds multiple approaches that facilitate performers to attune to fungal bodies in and outside their human bodies and generate new movements. I expect that ToD will help extend embodied, sensory learning from ethnographic fieldwork beyond the immediate context, nurturing broader insights that contribute to building resilience in the face of ecological crises.
Paper short abstract
In July 2023 I collaborated with a South African film crew to animate a 1930s South African queer photographic archive. Archival, film, and imagined worlds collided as we lent our bodies to the archive, performing the archive's visual aspirations through our own movements and cohabitation.
Paper long abstract
The living core of my PhD is Seasons of Longing, a short film and collaborative archival intervention. It imagines the moments before and after photographs made by Irene ‘Freddie’ Heseltine in 1930s South Africa of her life partnership with Petronella ‘Nell’ Van Heerden, and their queer inscriptions of freedom and futurity on the racialised South African landscape.
The colliding elements of ‘real,’ archival, imagined and film worlds amplified one another as our mostly queer and person of colour crew lived, worked, narrated and reimagined the colonial era South African home and farm that was the site of this layered storytelling—and that of my own family history. Our embodiment of the archive’s visual aspirations of queer freedom and futurity marked the landscape alongside the actor’s performances. Behind the scenes videos and photographs created the sensation of an ever moving stage, capturing each of us as hushed audience and emotive character alike in shared exploration of queer belonging.
The lending of our bodies to the performance of our encounters with the photographic archive and its visual aspirations acted as a kind of theatre, “trick[ing] the senses into believing that another destiny is possible” (Lalu, Undoing Apartheid, p. 20). Discussions with both film screening audiences and crew kept returning to not just the film as its own object of creative transformation but the filmmaking as a series of intricate, interpersonal technical devices collapsing temporal and spatial divisions as it generated historical enquiry, potential queer futures, and recast relation to landscape and ‘home.’
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines a storytelling project with an elderly, disabled Romani performer in Poland, exploring performance ethnography as a form of quiet activism that envisions alternative lives and futures while fostering an ethics of care.
Paper long abstract
This presentation draws from my new monograph, Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025), which blends autofiction, ethnography, and theatrical improvisation to unravel the politics of aging in Poland. Throughout Poland, thousands of elders live with disabilities in four-storey walk-up apartments. In many cases their children have emigrated; they live with loneliness, silence, and the absence of care. At the centre of the book is Randia – a talented Romani fortune-teller, storyteller, and performer confined to her fourth-floor apartment in old age.
The book discuses my performance ethnography project, which studied how Romani elders face prejudice and discrimination after the widespread emigration of young and middle-aged Roma following Poland’s 2004 EU accession. I argue that, in the interviews, Randia’s identity was fixed: she told of the hardships she faced as a Romani girl and as a wife, mother, and grandmother whose relationship with her family had been shaped by separation, sickness, and death. But in storytelling sessions staged in her home, Randia stepped into characters and was freed: her tales moved between the past, the present, and the future, across life and death; her characters looked after one another and changed history. I argue that Randia’s storytelling sessions constituted a quiet activism through which she envisaged alternative lives and articulated an ethics of care among individuals, communities, and spirits. Ultimately, I ask how performance ethnography can cultivate more equitable ethnographer-participant relationships, new ways of being together, listening, and caring for one another.
Paper short abstract
Grounded in transgender and anarchist theory, this paper discusses video performance as a method to make “queer ways penetrate the ethnographic imagination” (Angela Jones) and foster hermeneutical justice in the field.
Paper long abstract
Over the past few years, many studies have been published on queer and transgender identities, which critiques of dominant paradigms have led the social sciences towards the need for an epistemological shift that calls into question “the orienting assumptions and conceptual frameworks” (Stacey & Thorne 1985, p. 302) underlying the theoretical models and research methods commonly used by ethnographers (Schilt and Lagos, 2017). My paper explores some propositions about what a queer shift could look like using video performance. First, I discuss how any attempt to further consider a queer approach in ethnography calls for non-conventional, experimental data collection and interdisciplinary distribution strategies, leading performance arts to serve as a critical resource. Second, I argue that defining “queer ethnography” and how it can be done in practice requires to address how ethnographic theories inherently produce forms of epistemic violence – especially through the concepts of “destruction” and “failure”, both used by queer and anarchist theorists. Third, I present how I explore such a queer, destruction-informed practice, through a series of performances using analog film, experimental imagery, and video installations where the physical destruction of lens-based technologies dialogue with the deconstruction of epistemic violence. Ultimately, I suggest that video performance can help ethnographers critically address dominant canons in their research, revisit the core concept of embodiment through a queer lens, and help foster hermeneutical justice in the discipline.
Paper short abstract
Presenting video excerpts from a virtual exploratory rehearsal process alongside individuals with the genetic condition Turner Syndrome, this discussion considers how performance ethnography elucidates the ethical contours of imagination.
Paper long abstract
What kind of ethical work does imagination play in performance ethnography? How does situating performance help bring to the fore the ethical contours of imagination in everyday life? This presentation considers a virtual exploratory rehearsal process alongside six interlocutors with Turner Syndrome (45,X). The collaboration was designed to elucidate their complex lived experiences with the genetic condition, which results in infertility and is contested as an intersex category. Individuals with Turner Syndrome consistently situated their identities in relationship to imagined "ideal" models of diagnosis, and similarly in relationship to imagined "others" with minority sex, gender, and disability identities. During a ten-week rehearsal process that culminated in the original play "The Butterfly Effect," the group participated in role-playing exercises and other imaginative practices that directly engaged, and made embodied, these relationships. This presentation therefore considers how performance ethnography can help to clarify how we imagine our identities in relationship to cultural expectations, especially those that queer and disabled bodies bring into relief. Furthermore, it ponders the ethical dimensions, for researcher and interlocutor, of engaging imagination as a means to identity oneself in contrast to others. Prioritizing a series of video recordings from rehearsals, this presentation seeks to capture moments of imagination, and its complicated ethical ramifications, in action.
Paper short abstract
This work reflects on the political implications, aesthetic possibilities, and ethical challenges of using performance-based ethnographic methods in academic research with children.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I reflect on the potential of performance-based ethnographic methods to address the ethical and methodological challenges faced in my interdisciplinary postdoctoral research project titled "Childhoods and Dissident Theatricalities: Symbolic Practices of Resistance by Children in Downtown São Paulo" (Faculty of Education, University of São Paulo, Brazil). The research focuses on the "Tricycles in the Park Project," an initiative created by a preschool institution in Downtown São Paulo with the goal of ensuring children’s right to the city within a context considered hostile and violent, where many of the children involved are immigrants or migrants living in temporary housing and urban occupations.
This research aims to explore how children's agency manifests through symbolic practices of visibility and resistance within this project. We argue that children not only form bonds with the city, but that the city, in turn, learns to see and relate to the children. The paper examines how performance-based ethnographic methods, combined with co-creating video content with children, can foster affective, non-adult-centered approaches to qualitative research.
Additionally, this paper addresses the political implications and aesthetic possibilities inherent in the methodological choices of the research, framed by the central question: What must adults relinquish in order to conduct research with children?