Revised Call for Papers
Performers, Makers, Methodologies – Crafting conditions for Decentring Scholarship and Pedagogy in Drama, Theatre, Performance Studies and Dance
Extended deadline: 21 July
Thanks to all who have already sent in proposals for ADSA2021.
We are re-circulating the CfP with some revisions, thanks to guidance and feedback from ADSA colleagues. In the revised call, we seek to better differentiate between decolonising practices and decentring practices. We re-share the call in this amended form and acknowledge the way in which members of ADSA have engaged with us to help us to better understand this distinction. The revised call also seeks to better scaffold how you might go about what you can propose and to integrate insightful feedback we have received.
The field itself is under pressure, and that pressure itself brings to the fore these concerns.
As convenors of the 2021 conference we invite you to engage with the precarity of the times in which we are researching and teaching. Across Australasia there are university programs under pressure of review, while others are being cancelled altogether. It is a good time to examine our assumptions and past practices in scholarship and pedagogy.
Our intention in convening the conference on this theme is to engage us all in examining assumptions, behaviours, and processes that claim authority. In amending the CfP, the subject of decolonisation is not being pushed off the agenda, rather we invite you to investigate a range of practices within the broader remit of decentring and to engage in self-examination within a spirit of solidarity.
We urge you to locate your proposals in the region, to cast an eye over your own local context/s, within the Australasian region. How do these concerns relate more specifically to Aotearoa NZ and Australia?
Rea, Kate and Miles, ADSA 2021 conference organising committee
***
Call for Papers (with revisions)
We invite submissions for the 2021 ADSA conference.
ADSA 2021 invites you to go beyond the instrumental objectives within your research reporting toward an intersectional discussion of the processes, forms, and materials of making and performing.
As an analytical tool, intersectionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age – among others – as interrelated and mutually shaping one another (Patricia Hill Collins 2).
Aligning with Collins’ theory of intersectionality as a way of explaining complexity in the world, the conference seeks to tell stories that embody the many specificities of the Australasian experience.
ADSA2021 asks us to frame our methods, habits, and practices through this intersectional lens and to analyse key aspects of the Australasian performing arts ecology. The conference leverages science philosopher Isabelle Stenger’s take on ecology as a question of habitat, that is, the context in which we undertake our labour, and the habits that inform our methodologies. Stenger (2005) argues that through practice, by its very nature, we must feel out its edges, acknowledge its limits, and also push against these limits to (re) establish them over and over again.
Conference discussions will sit within the intersection of these propositions by Collins and Stengers.
- We are interested in experience and testimony. For example, tell us what you are doing – in pedagogy, in research teams and methodology, in community engagement and professional development.
- We are interested in case study and critique. For example, focus on what does happen and can happen rather than the enormity of what isn’t happening.
- Share details of practice – for example, foreground how and where decentring or decolonisation is happening in the practice context, the practice community, and in the art itself. Find a way of speaking in partnership with the artists.
- Draw attention to practice approaches that are based on intentions to build better relationship with artists and communities – going forward,
- Share your experiences of applying a practice of decentring or decolonisation in pedagogy. How are your institutions are doing it?
In this way, the function of a conference in 2021 is to undertake some critical interrogation and strengthen the bonds of solidarity in a viability and sustainable way going forward.
While we retain these broad questions:
How is our research critiquing singular ideas and understandings and tipping perspectives on their head?
How is our research testing conserved ways of thinking and knowing?
How might we reveal stories and disrupt conventions through practice?
What are the methodological nuances that are forged, and that are contingent on our unique research cultures/ecologies?
We invite you to craft the questions so that we add specificity and detail to this list. What questions serve your self-examination/reflection?
When proposing your paper or panel we ask that you resist binaries and consider how the inquiry is of this place and time. Conference keywords – Intersectionality, Queering, and Ecology – denote our deliberate purpose to begin to decentre our scholarship and pedagogy, ways of knowing, and modes of inquiry.
Decentring is about intersectionality. We add additional indicative references recommended by colleagues:
Indicative references
Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, Durham.
Arora, Swati (2021) A Manifesto to Decentre Theatre and Performance Studies, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 41:1, 12-20, DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1881730
Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge (2016) Intersectionality. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Bianca Elkington et. al. (2020) Imagining Decolonisation. BWB Texts: Wellington, NZ.
Stengers, Isabelle (2005) Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices, Cultural Studies Review, 1 (11) 183-196.
We invite presentations (20 minutes), panels (90 minutes), performative proposals (30-90 minutes, live) and/or performative audio (5-20 minutes, recorded) for the 2021 ADSA conference, convened by Drama and Dance in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Geelong Australia, 30 Nov – 3 December 2021.
Please send proposal abstracts of approximately 250 words to Dr Rea Dennis (rea.dennis@deakin.edu.au) by extended due date 21 July 2021.
Please feel free to contact the conference organisers with any questions.
Rea Dennis rea.dennis@deakin.edu.au
Kate Hunter k.hunter@deakin.edu.au
Miles O’Neil mileso@deakin.edu.au