This workshop invites artists, scholars, and activists and all those who work with fugitive practices across borders and performance to collaboratively explore border-thinking and border epistemologies. We will explore materiality, ephemerality and the colonial
logics of categorisations that determine what is understood as licit/ illicit within arts practices.

Border Epistemologies working group of Performance Studies International (PSi) convenors Swati Arora (Queen Mary, University of London), Diana Damian Martin (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama), Aylwyn Walsh (University of Leeds), and artist and researcher Tara Fatehi.

Swati Arora is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Her work engages with the intersections of minoritarian performance, coloniality, geography, and racialisation while experimenting with intimate forms of scholarly writing and dissemination. She is working on a monograph on performance and visual cultures in postcolonial Delhi. For 2025-26, she is a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Diana Damian Martin is writer and researcher working on experimental critical and artistic practices through the lens of border work. She is co-editor of Performance Pedagogies: Objects, Transfers, Formations (2025) and co-editor of the Routledge Series in European Entanglements: Performance Interventions and Cultural Politics, and has worked for over two decades transnationally as a writer, dramaturg and curator at the borderlands of performance and art. Diana is a member of several collaborative research networks, and is co-host of collectives Something Other, Department of Feminist Conversations and Critical Interruptions. Diana is a Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies and Research Lead in the Department of Practice at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

ally walsh is Professor of Performance and Social Change at the University of Leeds, where she is Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. She makes work with communities and is author of Prison Cultures: Performance, Resistance, Desire (2019), and Harm and Repair in Contemporary South African Performance: Resisting Injustice (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2027). She works on abolition, arts activism and convenes a current project on Holding Conflict in arts organisations.