Call For Papers IFTR 2026

What Performance Economies Do?

The 2026 IFTR World Congress asks us to consider “What Theatre Does”. In a time of major global change, this conference asks whether our tools for studying performance are fit for purpose. Our working group takes this up by looking at what theatre does through two linked lenses: economics and ideology. We start from a simple premise: ideology is not just a set of ideas forced on people, but something that grows out of everyday economic life, ‘a lived belief’ (Eagleton: 1991). A wage looks like a fair payment for work, yet that exchange can hide the fact that workers produce more value than they receive. This is a lived reality built into how economies and cultures operate. From this view, culture doesn’t just contain ideology – it is ideology (Blackwell-Pal et.al.: 2025) So, if theatre is part of this system, what ideological work is it actually doing? How do the practicalities of making theatre – its labour practices, its funding models, and its institutions – both express and conceal the way economic life works?

To answer this question, we welcome comparative and historical analyses, including studies of how economic logics such as Baumol and Bowen’s “cost disease” shape production choices and institutional survival in different contexts (1965).  We are also interested in research that links value‑theoretical approaches, which locate ideology in the logic of the commodity, from Theodor Adorno to recent interventions by Beverly Best (1962; 2015). We encourage research that connects production-side questions (pay, contracts, labour, funding, governance) with reception-side questions (audiences, publics, circulation), and that asks when performance reveals, contests, or transforms the economic relations it lives within. Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation, which allows for an analysis of culture within shifting economic systems, offers another avenue of investigation – especially in the context of late capitalism’s increased intertwinement with ‘late fascism'(Hall: 1978; 1981; Toscano: 2024). Finally, however ideology is theorized, our group is also keen to discuss works of theatre and performance that can offer strong avenues towards what Alisa Zhulina has framed as an “immanent critique” of capitalist modernity (2024).

Here are some questions that might help guide proposals:

• How can linking ideology directly to economic value help us understand what theatre has done historically? Or what it does in society today?
• How do working conditions in the arts, from precarious contracts to the pressure to “love your work”, reinforce or question the seemingly ‘fair’ idea of the wage? 
• When an audience comes together, does this create a real community, or does it perform an ideal of connection that masks alienation within late capitalism? 
• How do different performance styles use the “raw material” of our everyday economic experiences to either support or challenge the status quo? 
• What ideological role  do institutions like national theatres or arts councils play, and how do they connect with state power either historically or now?
• How can we analyse the entire system of theatre – from training to production – as a functioning part of capitalist society?
• How are revived racialised, religious, sexual and gendered vilifications and their cultural circulation enabled by the structures of platform capitalism and emboldened by the authoritarian state?  ·  
• Conversely, how can performance draw attention to ideological formations, and offer ways of disrupting these, for example in the many actions taken across the world by cultural workers in solidarity with Palestine (White Kite, ongoing; Thawra, 2024; ACOD-VRT, 2025).
• Can theatre effectively criticise a system that it is also a part of? How can performance reveal the economic illusions that it also helps to create?
• In our present moment, how do opportunities for a performative disruption of ideology arise?

We also welcome papers that might touch more generally themes of the Performance Economies working group including questions of social reproduction, cultural materialist approaches to institutions and modes of funding and as well as how performance studies might conversely shed light on everyday economies and modes of economic circulation.

Abstract Submission

Note the submission timeline

1 November: Abstract submissions open. Abstracts must be submitted to the IFTR conference platform via the IFTR webpage.

8 December: Abstract submissions close.

30 December: Notification of Acceptance

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 from 1 October 2025.  

For information about the general conference, please check the IFTR website. Please also check for updates on the Performance Economies Working Group page at https://iftr.org/working-groups/performance-economies.

If you have questions about the group or about attending please contact the working group email performance_economies@outlook.com or the convenors: Doug Eacho (douglas.eacho@utoronto.ca), Caoimhe Mader McGuinness (c.madermcguinness@kingston.ac.uk) and Clio Unger (Clio.Unger@cssd.ac.uk).

Working Group Practice

This is a semi-open group – papers are distributed and read by all the participants ahead of the meeting. At the Working Group sessions presenters give shorter 10 minute overviews of their paper, followed by a longer discussion period with all participants. This method allows ideas to be discussed, debated, and evaluated, with participants suggesting directions for the presenters’ work-in-progress. If you are interested in joining the sessions without presenting you are welcome to but please contact us and we will make the papers available in advance of the conference. 

Works cited:

Adorno, T. W. (2018). Theodor W. Adorno on ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory’: From a Seminar Transcript in the Summer Semester of 1962. Historical Materialism, 26(1), 154-164.

Baumol, W. J., & Bowen, W. G. (1965). On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems. The American Economic Review, 55(1/2), 495–502.

Best, B. (2015). Distilling a Value Theory of Ideology from Volume Three of Capital. Historical Materialism, 23(3), 101-141.

Blackwell-Pal et. al. ‘Ideology’ CCLWeb. Special issue keywords for value and culture. Publication due 2025. 

Eagleton, T. (1991). Ideology : an introduction. London: Verso.

Hall, S. (1978). Policing the crisis : mugging, the state and law and order. (Second edition 2013.). London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, S. (1981). ‘The Whites of their eyes’ in (2021). Selected Writings on Race and Difference (P. Gilroy & R. W. Gilmore, Eds.). Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 97-120.

Toscano, A. Late Fascism. London: Verso, 2024.

Zhulina, A. Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024.