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American Society for Theatre Research
Dallas, TX 7-10 November 2013
Conveners: Kati Sweaney,
Northwestern University ( sweaneyk@gmail.com) and Aileen Robinson,
Northwestern University ( aileenrobinson2014@u.northwestern.edu)
Scientists have a long history of adopting
performance practices as a means of manufacturing professional authority. The
public dissection theatres of early modern Europe, the 18th-century parlor-room
demonstrations of everything from air-pumps to phrenology, the spectacular
electricity shows of Tesla and Edison, the performing hysterics in the Tuesday
lectures of Freud’s teacher Charcot, and the contemporary phenomenon of the TED
conference—all these are not simply entertainments with a scientific theme.
Each event adjudicates between critical performance practices, scientific
ideas, and cultural authorities, enacting embodied relationships between
scientists and objects. Because the interdisciplinary field of science studies
seeks a broad cultural understanding of how scientific knowledge is made, it
has vigorously taken up performance as a new critical lens (as the 2010 special
issue of the science history journal Isis demonstrates).
However, we have observed that little of this valuable contemporary work on
scientific performance has been written by scholars of performance, and that
most of such scholarship tends to use performance as a metaphor,
rather than as a methodology. In this working session, we will open
up a space for performance scholars to critically assess and contribute to
scholarship in this field. We invite papers that interrogate the relationship
between the truth-making claims of science and performance, broadly understood.
Possible topics for inquiry include:
- Historical scientific demonstrations
- Contemporary bioart
- Medical performance art and body art
- Plays that concern science and scientists
- "Performance" as a scientific virtue, a la Jon McKenzie
- Methodological inquiries into the forms of science as performance
- Science performance within specific spaces—museums, archives, universities
- Pedagogical performance of science within schools and universities
Format:
We invite 500-word proposals
that include an abstract for your ASTR paper submission as well as a brief
description of your current work. Please include full contact information and
organizational affiliation (if any) on both your proposal and your email and
send your proposal to both conveners by June 3, 2013.
Participants will submit a 10-12 (2,500-3,000
words) page draft of their paper by October 1 to the conveners. A bibliography
will be circulated in the summer for the benefit of the participants; two small
readings will be highly encouraged to establish common discussion points.
Between October 1 and the ASTR conference, participants will be divided into
small groups in which they will read each other papers and a forum will be set
up for discussing major and minor themes within the works. Major edits and
commentary will be discussed during the conference itself.
