ADSA 2021: Performers, Makers, Methodologies – Crafting conditions for Decentring Scholarship and Pedagogy in Drama, Theatre, Performance Studies and Dance
Tue, 30 Nov 2021 to Fri, 3 Dec 2021
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Type of event: Annual Conference Venue: Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria Description: Performers, Makers, Methodologies – Crafting conditions for decolonising scholarship
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.
Questions that the conference seeks to interrogate include:
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?
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 decolonise our scholarship, ways of knowing, and modes of inquiry.
Indicative references
Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, Durham.
Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge (2016) Intersectionality. Polity Press, Cambridge.
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 11 June 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
