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Ang Lee’s 2019 film Gemini Man features the most realistic digital human to grace the cinematic screen, specifically a computer-generated version of young Will Smith who battles his more aged self throughout the film. And for the first time in film history, this photorealistic digital human is Black. This essay explores why this groundbreaking achievement has not been acknowledged or celebrated by the film's production or publicity teams. I argue that Will Smith’s particular “post-racial” identity mediates contemporary concerns related to the racialized implications of facial recognition and other digital imaging technologies, as well as to the future of the film industry in the digital age. In the second half of the essay, I examine how the appearance of Will Smith in deepfake parody videos illustrates how race circulates on screens of various media formats. I conclude with a call to use digital visual effects, deepfake tools, and other advanced technologies to further racial justice instead of repeating the problematic usage of the past.

On July 14, 2019, a 3-minute 36-second video titled “Keanu Reeves Stops A ROBBERY!” was released on YouTube visual effects (VFX) channel, Corridor. The video’s click-bait title ensured it was quickly shared by users across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Comments on the video suggest that the vast majority of viewers categorised it as fiction. What seemed less universally recognised, though, was that the performer in the clip was not Keanu Reeves himself. It was voice actor and stuntman Reuben Langdon, and his face was digitally replaced with that of Reeves, through the use of an AI generated deepfake, an open access application, Faceswap, and compositing in Adobe After Effects. This article uses Corridor’s deepfake Keanu video (hereafter shorted to CDFK) as a case study which allows the fleshing out of an, as yet, under-researched area of deepfakes: the role of framing contexts in shaping how viewers evaluate, categorise, make sense of and discuss these images. This research draws on visual effects scholarship, celebrity studies, cognitive film studies, social media theory, digital rhetoric, and discourse analysis. It is intended to serve as a starting point of a larger study that will eventually map types of online manipulated media creation on a continuum from the professional to the vernacular, across different platforms, and attending to their aesthetic, ethical, cultural and reception dimensions. The focus on context (platform, creator channel, and comments) also reveals the emergence of an industrial and aesthetic category of visual effects, which I call here “platform VFX,” a key term that provides us with more nuanced frames for illuminating and analysing a range of manipulated media practices as VFX software becomes ever more accessible and lends itself to more vernacular uses, such as we see with various face swap apps.

Focusing on a series of YouTube creators, this essay interrogates the persistence of the hegemonic power of the white male hardbody, arguing that digital facial replacements – in particular those of 1980s action stars – produce a mode of white, masculine identity that is essentially exchangeable and transactional. These bodies are capitalist commodities, fundamentally interchangable and asserting the same bundle of ideological traits. The technology of digital facial replacement allows creators to visualize this exchange value. As opposed to the pornographic, invasive, and misogynistic face swap videos originally posted on reddit.com by user ‘deepfakes’ in 2017, the facial replacement videos found on YouTube are more playful in nature, imagining alternate histories and using face swapping as a mode of comedy. This case study of 1980s action stars opens up to a broader examination of issues of identity in digital facial replacement. In the videos under analysis, gender swaps are relatively common, but ethnic swaps are scarce. The reluctance of the YouTubers to ‘blindcast’ their revisionist videos reveals a subtle critique of the fantasy of a post-racial world. Racial difference – and, perhaps, cultural specificity – remains intact, and the creators take a seemingly apolitical, comical, ‘safe’ approach to identity rather than an explicitly critical stance. By denuding the more threatening and destructive aspects of deepfakes, these YouTube videos produce a more palatable version of facial replacement. This version, however, is no less ideologically complex than its more explicitly political and misogynistic counterparts. These contemporary facial substitutions not only continue to ‘reboot’ white male hegemony, but they also function as an ideological reclamation of masculine power in the present through modified images of the (revisionist) past.

Chief Caupolican is Emile Barrangon, an early 20th-century performer in the US who was born in Chile to an indigenous Mapuche father and a French mother. Despite his fame, he has not yet been included in studies on indigenous agency in Native American representations, likely because of his immigrant origins. We situate his indigenous self-identification and media success within the broader context of ongoing pan-indigenous activism in the country and Native Americans’ efforts to engage indigenous representations in the media. The pan-indigenous movement that sought to unify indigenous political claims, regardless of tribal affiliation, enabled and encouraged foreign-born aborigines and persons of mixed ancestry to identify with indigeneity in ways that transcend nation-state borders. By presenting and examining his multi-faceted life, performance, and political views, this article contributes to better understanding the complex dynamics of the indigenous performance landscape in the early 20th century.

Cet article propose une réévaluation critique de la notion de corps sans organes dans l’oeuvre d’Antonin Artaud à la lumière des cahiers d’Ivry publiés fin 2011 et dans lesquels Artaud mentionne un nouveau « corps de gloire ». L’auteur commence par préciser la relation entre « le corps sans organes » et la tradition catholique de façon à montrer comment Artaud détourne cette dernière de façon hérétique. Le corps sans organes d’Artaud est ensuite distingué de sa conceptualisation par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari en prenant appui sur des commentaires de Paule Thévenin, qui a édité les Œuvres complètes d’Artaud, ainsi que sur des textes d’Artaud contemporains à l’émission radiophonique qui contredisent la lecture deleuzo-guattarienne. En effet, le corps sans organes d’Artaud est défini de façon explicite en réaction à la psychanalyse freudienne et sa définition hérétique en tant que « corps de gloire » est destinée à s’opposer dans un même geste à la religion ainsi qu’à la psychanalyse.

This article aims to deepen the understanding of the distribution and reconfiguration of agency and power in relationships between artists from the South and curators from the North. Focusing on the Zürcher Theater Spektakel, an annual performing arts festival in Zürich, Switzerland, it scrutinises the artist-curator relationship through the perspective of the gift rationales. Gift-giving theory can contribute to understanding motifs and logics behind dealings between curator and artist. In order to qualify these interactions, the article fuses gift-giving with relational care ethics. In doing so, it foregrounds the values and ethics that inhabit curator-artist relationships and shows to what degree gift-givers and gift-recipients may influence each other’s work. From this perspective, the article suggests that contemporary curating not only implies that the curator and the artist coproduce artistic performances, rather contemporary curating entails that the curator and the artist coproduce curatorial formats, hence the festival.

It is generally assumed that visible actors in the performing arts industry maintain overall wellness despite the knowledge that an actor’s life is often characterized by instability. While an actor’s performance is often critiqued subjectively and critically, the variety of occupational risks associated with an actor’s well-being is less closely examined. Prior research suggests those working within the acting profession experience significant levels of distress. As a result, this article, first, aims to address the issues confronting the actor, in particular, anxiety associated with erratic employment, vulnerability to adverse working conditions, and conflict in identity owing to the impact of acting coupled with the effect of economic insecurity. Second, the paper follows with a consideration of key counselling theories to help strengthen this diverse group’s personal well-being and career prospects. By examining counselling interventions, the application of these theories can allow actors to develop optimally in acting industries worldwide.

This article shares the playscript of an ethnodrama by and about people from religious backgrounds who identify as LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual/Aromantic; “+” refers to the multitude of other identities included within Queerness and/or Transness) that was devised and performed at Utah State University. The applied theater project sought to understand, value, and share these peoples’ experiences, including the myriad roles religion played in their lives. Applied theater works to inspire social change through the performance of live productions. This project strove to help amplify the participants’ voices as they explored topics and issues that they uniquely face. The central research question for this project was “How do people from religious backgrounds who identify as LGBTQIA+ understand, process, and interact with individuals and institutions they encounter on a regular basis?” Specific themes and topics included familial responses to participants’ queer and religious identities, how participants sought to find and create community, how they experienced acceptance and rejection, and ways religious belief intersected with their queer identities.

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related.

This article considers ways in which solidarity across social locations might play a role in fostering resistance to vulnerability. My case study consists of the interplay between writer George Ryga’s 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and Okanagan Syilx writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 novel Slash. While these important and compelling texts have received considerable critical attention, the relationship between them is less known. I am interested in the ways in which these works both hail and offer critique to one another. In the contemporary moment, in which questions of appropriation of voice have gained renewed urgency within Indigenous literary circles in Canada and beyond, the relationship between these texts speaks to a historical instance of appropriation, but also of complicated processes of alliance-building. These texts demonstrate how agency resides across multiple locations. I read Ryga’s Ecstasy in the context of Jeannette Armstrong’s engagement with the play within her novel Slash in order to witness the ways in which Ryga’s text, in the first instance, appropriates Indigenous voices into an anti-capitalist critique. In the second instance, I read these works in order to witness how they might simultaneously provide a compelling analysis of the vulnerability of the people who are the subject of both works. I compare the interplay between Armstrong and Ryga’s texts to contemporary debates around appropriation in order to argue for the historical and ongoing importance of these two works as precursors to the crucial interventions made by contemporary Indigenous critics and writers.

This article introduces five principles of Deleuzian ontology and the conceptual framework of techniques and forces into emerging CCO scholarship addressing (dis)organization and power. By introducing Deleuzian concepts of (1) the virtual, (2) mutual (in)stability of meaning and materiality, (3) forces (and techniques), (4) communication, and (5) power, this essay builds a relational ontology that centers communication, speaks across existing theories of CCO, and offers a more detailed emphasis on power. In doing so, it enhances the explanatory power of CCO in general, as a set of theories useful for describing how organizational constitution and power play out in an increasingly (dis)organized world where the prevalence of bounded stable organizations can no longer be taken for granted.

In this research, we brought together various theories and speculative conceptual connections of otherness associated with liminality especially as seen through one methodological experiment and art-based intervention, namely flash mobs. From our perspective, liminality and liminal spaces are incomplete and always becoming since often they cannot be documented or described through existing language and normative concepts. Moving away from normativity and speaking back from liminal spaces carry risks since complex and intersubjective liminal spaces challenge the authority of the researcher, knowing, and doing in Academia. In this work, we use examples from our flash mob events to bridge theorizing and public performances, actual limit experiences, and twisted forms of (normative) scholarship. We ask what is being produced through art-based interventions, resistance, liminality, and twisted scholarship in the context of inquiry.

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.

This essay examines parallels between the resolidification of German identity and reconfigurations of German national space and nation-state time. From recurring events (refugee-guided tours) to temporary installations (a private home’s garden memorial), these performances by and about those excluded or conditionally tolerated define an emerging refugee subjectivity. Each performance stages the dichotomy between transience and permanent residence and engages the public in perpetual enactments of democratic deliberation. We argue that these performances force audiences to recognize how they implicitly define their nations and fellow citizens by both their domestic democratic practices and the exceptions at the border: who is deported and kept out, who are permitted to enter and remain. With growing critical interest in performance and performativity in international relations, we consider the impact of individual and collective pro-migrant protest performances on national identity and electoral politics in Germany and their effects on organizing, resistance, and performance “artivism” globally.

Drawing on refugee studies, “Picturing Katrina: The Queer Child and Black Death-Birthing Narratives” explores the transient performance of antiblack and refugee policies and procedures and how this transmutation manifested around Hurricane Katrina. The article focuses on Beasts of the Southern Wild, which is an allegory of Hurricane Katrina, and its black death-birthing narrative— Beasts calls upon a black girl to produce an imagined future grounded in the reproduction of a structure hostile to black life. By positing her as harbinger of a more sustainable ecological future, Beasts’ black death-birthing narrative queers Hushpuppy, a 6-year old living in intense poverty. This article focuses on Beasts to explore the relationship among the watery deaths and depths of Hurricane Katrina, refugee policies, and transatlantic slavery. The article closes with a brief turn to a “real-life” black death-birthing narrative featured in People magazine in order to not only to suggest the breadth of media forms that utilize black death-birthing narratives centering on childhood and disaster, but also to begin to interrogate the material conditions that enable the proliferation of these narratives as well as the narratives’ material effects.

This paper examines the influence of intense scrutiny from Ofsted on school leadership and policy enactment. Data was collected in a coastal area of deprivation, providing the setting for a detailed case study of school leadership in a state secondary school and a state primary school, both with recent or ongoing experience of intense scrutiny from Ofsted. Seventeen interviews were undertaken with staff involved in leadership roles. The analyses of data and discussion form an understanding of how policy is enacted in relation to the dual responsibility that school leaders negotiate between the local context at Seatown and Ofsted. This paper suggests that Ofsted forces a privileging of a compliant and consistent enactment of policy; a hyper-enactment of policy, that reduces the capacity of school leaders to address the significant social context of the school. Foucault’s work on self-disciplinary technologies provides insight into the micropolitical spaces which open up for some school leaders. The discussion on the micropolitics of compliance and resistance offers insight into the tensions pertinent to school leadership teams and explores issues relevant to those interested in policy and inspection activity, particularly those within areas of deprivation.

Based upon more than 25 years as a director of ensembles of performative research, I provide example of improvisational approaches that I have taken to explore a range of social interactions including the teacher/student relationship, subtle differences among need/want/desire, practicum politics, trust, reading power in gender, judging strangers, locus of control, homelessness, and aging parents. Techniques have included image theater, hot-seating, manipulation of objects, trust falls, music, and metaphorical roles. Theoretical discussions include an unpacking of truth claims in imaginative endeavors that explore the plausible, the false separation of truth and fiction, re-examining what makes research empirical, ways of generating information other than the traditional questionnaire, and/or interview and dialogic audience participation. In addition to justifying this approach for performative research practitioners, it provides a variety of possibilities for those who seek other means to critically and imaginatively examine the human condition.

The subject of Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman performance, Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey, is Ellen Craft, an ex-slave whose escape from the slave-owning state of Georgia to England in the late 1840s is recounted in the escape narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Rather than using her performance to present her biographical subject with an interiority the original slave narrative scarcely offers her, Adebayo reconstitutes Ellen and relocates her in an auto/biographical work that self-consciously blurs the boundaries between autobiography, biography, and biofiction, thus exposing the overlap and interdependency of these textual forms. Through a detailed analysis of both texts and their contexts, this essay argues that Adebayo constructs a figurative, first person auto/biography of Ellen Craft, a “call and response” production, originating in an “intimate, somatic engagement with the body of another”, whose “touch” sets up a fluid process of identification. Her work performs a textual revision of the slave narrative genre and its rich, socio-cultural contexts. As a performed, auto/biographical reimagining of Ellen Craft’s flight from slavery Moj of the Antarctic, like Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, transgresses multiple borders and, in the process, subverts expectations of what constitutes an authentic self. It deconstructs conventionally defined categories of race, gender, and sexuality and radically extends the Crafts’ own examination of the meaning of freedom.

This article mines the history of rape jurisprudence to illuminate how the legal treatment of wartime rape informs long-standing gendered tropes that dominate its understanding on the ground as well as its representation in literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes by reading Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog as a model for a dialogic literary imagination capable of revealing the fatal consequences of toxic masculinity as it informs not only the perpetration of rape in wartime, but also the possibility for either perpetrator or victim to achieve subjectivity free from the burdens of brutally constraining gender norms.

This article presents an archaeological inquiry into the early histories of Quality of Life (QoL) measures, and takes this as an occasion to rethink the concept of the ‘medical model of disability’. Focusing on three instruments that set the ground for the emergence of QoL measures, namely, the Karnofsky Performance Scale (KPS, 1948), and the classification of functional capacity as a diagnostic criterion for heart diseases (Bainton, 1928) and as a supplementary aid to therapeutic criteria in rheumatoid arthritis ( Steinbrocker, Traeger, and Batterman, 1949 ) – I discuss how medicine, throughout the emergence of QoL, began to expand its gaze beyond the confines of the body to what that body does in daily life. Building upon Armstrong et al.’s notion of ‘distal symptoms’ (2007) and Wahlberg’s idea of ‘knowledge of living’ (2018), I propose the notion of disabilitization to encapsulate this expansion of the clinical gaze, through which medicine has come to articulate diseases and their treatments in new ways, and in so doing, has inadvertently created disability as a new kind of knowledge category in itself – a category that is defined not through its reduction to mere pathology, but through its dispersal into everyday life. I present this concept not as a periodization, but as a provocative discontinuity with the totalizing history assumed within the medical model of disability, and in so doing, ask what, in fact, holds ‘the medical model’ together, and whether there might be other ways of understanding medicine’s complex relationship to disability than what the concept of the medical model allows us to envisage.

This essay—based on fieldwork with off-grid homebuilders in the Mid-Ohio River Valley—recognizes ethnography as a more-than-human ecology of habit, rhythm, and affect. I begin by describing some of the materials, species, and affects I encountered during this fieldwork to show how Appalachian history, geography, and habit influenced my performance of sensory ethnography. From these anecdotes, field notes, and vignettes, I theorize ethnographic fieldwork as, first and foremost, a rhythmic attunement to place and bodies, especially nonhuman ones. In turn, I argue for a practice of fieldwork that roots human experience within a vibrant material ecology of more-than-human forces.

The pastrycook Aron Forss was a well-known person in his hometown Uppsala in the 1840’s and 1850’s, famous both for his popular café and for his femininity. This article analyses the rumors that surrounded his person, using paintings, newspaper clippings, and memoirs written by his former customers. Through his business, Forss could lay claim on normative masculinity through the rousing bourgeois ideals of financial success and craftsmanship. Being a successful businessman was a way of securing social acceptance and respectability. However, it was apparently not enough. In order to sustain his business, Forss was forced to put up with harassments. Some of his costumers treated him much like other women in public places were treated—as objects of sexual advance. Several of Forss’s contemporaries describe him with particular fascination. By describing Forss as a spectacle, he is made an exception to the rules of social appropriateness.

Employing dysfunctional or arrested development, extreme sports tricksters cultivate diverse strategies of sporting identity. Through parody, satire, and mockery, adolescent performances and representations resist hegemonic ideologies of mainstream sports masculinity. This work interrogates the representational and performative texts, events, and bodies of extreme sports using queer theories and psychoanalytic approaches. To assess failure as a potentially strategic and radical mode of counter-hegemonic resistance, I trace the origins of extreme sports cultures through icons such as Evel Knievel and the Dangerous Sports Club. I also look at a modern heir apparent—action sporting collective Nitro Circus. In failing at mainstream sporting masculinities, these athletes create different ways of being and doing sport through commoditization, adolescence, gender, Whiteness, corporeality, and death.

This paper reflects on a recent participatory installation by the artists’ collective @.ac, entitled Messy Democracy, as a case study to raise questions concerning the ‘distribution of the sensible’ within the neoliberal art school. The project set up a quasi-autonomous artists’ space within Hanover Project gallery 9 April–3 May, 2018 at University of Central Lancashire, Preston. This exhibition functioned as a space of collective pedagogy, co-labour and ‘dissensus’ situated in relation to the wider operation of the department of Fine Art. It also sought to operate as a critical alternative to contemporary models of the art school, rooted in notions of usefulness and romantic self-realisation, but re-structured in the service of ‘commodification’ and ‘financialisation’ in wake of the Browne Report (2010). Most importantly, Messy Democracy represented a ‘theatocractic’ ‘undercommons’ for alternate and counter-hegemonic subjectivities to emerge. However, hierarchical logics, resulting from the hegemonic ‘distribution of the sensible’ stubbornly persisted even within this nascent pedagogic democracy.

Western philosophical traditions have been haunted by an intellectualist thesis supported by two foundational assumptions: first, that humans can be defined in virtue of their minds, and second, that having a mind separates humans from non-human animals. Many phenomenologists have complicated this thesis, but there is nevertheless a tendency in phenomenology to remain fully within a human-centric research paradigm. This article will explore the possibilities of a posthuman phenomenology for unsettling this human-centeredness and suggest that certain forms of performance philosophy are the most effective methods for investigating this new terrain.

The aim of the article is to observe the contemporary media system in the light of Luhmann’s media system, namely a specific function system of society which has witnessed ever greater internal complexity vis-a-vis an environment marked by the spread of the web and social network sites. From the viewpoint of sociocybernetics, the question of increased complexity can be addressed through an ecological approach in order to analyse the distinction between the mass media and the web – in its specific 2.0 evolution, characterized by user-generated content and algorithms. This approach allows to observe the reciprocal relations by preserving the autonomy of the two spheres without resorting to explanations that have to do with hybridization or the blur of the boundaries. In this sense the article analyses Facebook – as an example of web 2.0 operational logic – as a social system distinct from that of the mass media, where the first substantial difference depends on the role played by individuals in reproducing communication and on the role of the algorithm. In this sense mass media and the web are treated on the basis of their relationship of structural coupling by observing how they irritate, or disturb, each other and at the same time maintain their autonomy.

Social media’s shift from storing media permanently by default, to supporting increasingly diverse temporalities of display and interaction has important implications for understanding the political economy of the digital. In this article, I use queer theory to complicate the normative dimensions of the privacy discourses that popularly frame digital ephemerality, suggesting instead that we understand the ephemeral as redistributing the pleasures and dangers of risk. To demonstrate, I do a close reading of the functions, design choices, and aesthetics of popular digital communication platforms, which increasingly provide the affective texture and context for everyday life. Using Snapchat and Apple’s Find My Friends and iMessage as case studies, I highlight a profitable dynamic between promiscuous exposure and monogamous retrenchment.

Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ( 4, 3, 2 for short) is a classic of the new wave in Romanian cinema. Centred on the paternalistic and patriarchal relationship between political power and women, this analysis reveals the psychological effects of traumatic situations and how unconscious (hidden, often irrational) drives determine human behaviour in subjects living under totalitarianism. This article provides a reading of the film through such concepts as the (male) gaze, the law in relation to the figure of the father and the Lacanian orders of the symbolic and the real, the split personality of the abused woman as both subject and object, and life/death instincts in the face of totalitarian intrusion into the reproductive rights of women. This kind of analysis sheds new light on the nuances of the film and the significance of the silence in it by exposing the symbolic reality of communist totalitarianism as opposed to a seemingly authentic Lacanian real that is hidden in the silence and in the materiality of the female body.

Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological–human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human–technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or software, output and agency. As feminist scholars have long argued, emphasising and fetishising code or software, and celebrating output and agency are normatively masculine, white and Western conceptions of technology that feed into the growing valorisation of accelerationist logic whilst also negating embodied, not to mention other (non-white, Western, masculine) bodies, expertise or histories per se. In this article, we want to redress this by drawing on our empirical material on live coding to focus on human–technology kinship and, in so doing, think about failure, slowness and embodiment and about human–technology relations that are more akin to what Alison Kafer (drawing on the work of Donna Haraway) has termed ‘becoming with’ or ‘making kin’. This, we argue, has the potential to shift the focus from the potentialities of technologies on or through the body, towards the generative capacities of mediation (including failure), which are caught up in lived experiences. The question is not only about how the relations of bodies and technologies are played out in certain circumstances but about what might be played out if we reconceptualise these relations in these terms.

This article examines the grassroots artistic initiative al-Fann Midan (Art is a City Square) in Cairo and a contrasting approach to street art organizing in Alexandria to demonstrate how each enacted a different relationship to ‘the political’ in a revolutionary moment. Extending sociologist Asef Bayat’s concept ‘quiet encroachment’, it analyzes these contrasting approaches through the sonic metaphor of ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’ politics. As a spectrum, this framework highlights how the everyday, the gestural, and the affective on the one hand can exist simultaneously, and at times in tension with, larger, more representational political expressions on the other. It thus avoids fetishizing creative ‘resistance’ or ‘dissent’, while nonetheless analyzing art in a revolutionary moment, by grounding creative expression more historically and with analytical attention to how it reanimates long-standing debates among Arab intellectuals regarding the role of the ‘artist’.

This article examines the available literature on engaging young audiences to visit libraries, museums and performing arts shows, and their strategies for developing permanent audiences. The recommendations drawn from the review serve as an input for the Latin American Library for Children and Youth that is currently in a planning stage. Ideas regarding program, partnerships, communication and promotion of libraries in the context of the 21st century are explained in accordance with an audience approach that emphasises the presentness of children and youth, the demands and motivation of cultural participants, and the need to enable cultural rights.

The timeline of the Anthropocene – a geological epoch that Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer say began in the late 18th century with the invention of the steam engine – seems like a brief and inconsequential blip, against the time scales embodied by the microbial communities. Wolbachia bacteria predate Anthropos by some 150 million years, and will likely outlast us. Wolbachia bacteria are worthy of their own geological epoch because they offer a fresh vantage point on one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time: ‘How should we love in a time of extinction?’ Narratives about the Wolbachiacene have the potential to disrupt the overwhelming stories of tragedy orbiting around Anthropos, with disquieting and generative accounts of interspecies romance. Wolbachia often perform queer tricks inside their invertebrate hosts. In some host species these bacteria induce parthenogenesis – completely eliminating males from the population. Wolbachia can also transform genetic males into reproductively viable females.

As one of the most influential feminist theorists in Western academic circles, Hélène Cixous is often associated with écriture feminine (feminine writing), a term she coined in 1977, and with a fluid, poetic style both in her essays and in her fiction. This article investigates how Hélène Cixous uses the concept of the ‘feminine’ in her plays as a container for heterogeneity, liminality and difference, mobilizing it to animate feminist strategies that interrupt male, white and/or hegemonic forms of subjectivity. If for Cixous the practice of feminine writing is fundamentally characterized by the desire to create a mode of expression in which (gendered, embodied, racial) difference and otherness would retain their alterity, in dramatic writing she found an especially conducive medium for the realization of that desire. This article examines Cixous’s anti-realist postdramatic works, from her first produced play Portrait of Dora (1976) to her works for Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, in the context of a feminist aesthetics of estrangement, and considers how her plays enact feminist theory’s own movement away from the psychoanalytical discourses of the 1970s and 1980s to postcolonial and materialist critiques. The article employs a range of intersectional critical methodologies for situating Cixous’s dramatic writing within a broader feminist praxis, using the work of feminist performance scholars like Elin Diamond, Rebecca Schneider and Jill Dolan to consider the liminal Other as a precarious feminine figure that Cixous re-inscribes into discourse. Feminine writing, the progressive movement away from realism towards postdramatic theatre, and Cixous’s artistic collaboration with Mnouchkine are each considered as feminist strategies towards a rendition of the subject that can reiterate its otherness on stage. The central argument is that it is the enactment of these strategies in live performance that makes Hélène Cixous’s concept of femininity as liminal difference so relevant for feminist politics today.

Notions discriminatory to persons with disabilities commonly underpin political theories of rights. While persons without disabilities are considered “normal” and independent, persons with disabilities are commonly seen as “deviant” and dependent. Persons with intellectual disabilities are also seen as lacking the autonomy required to have human rights. Acknowledging the equal human rights of all human beings, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) refutes such notions. Drawing upon relational theory, this Article provides a theoretical basis to some of the novel features of the CRPD. In contrast to many dominant theories of rights, the author argues that 1) disability constitutes a natural part of human diversity, 2) human beings are interdependent, 3) rights are achieved through supportive relations, and 4) human rights are ideals that inform how we should treat each other. The Article shows that a human rights theory fully inclusive of persons with intellectual disabilities also strengthens the human rights of others. © 2018 SAGE Publications

This paper argues that narrative knowledge (or ‘storyknowing’) is marginalized within the English school system, because it is misunderstood and often not recognized as knowledge. We track the changing status of storytelling through some key moments in recent educational history, particularly focusing on its gradual erosion during the progressive era, the onset of the National Curriculum (despite the impact of the National Oracy Project), and the post-2000 period with its conflicting drives towards compliance and creativity. \ud \ud To understand the consequences of this marginalization, we build up a picture of the value of nature of narrative knowledge, drawing firstly on the body of theorists who have investigated narrative. We then look to our long-term practice research with three groups of ‘low-ability’ 11-14-year-old pupils, in particular their own observations on storytelling made during a focus group. Both sources lead us to challenge the currently dominant perception that pupils listening to a whole narrative are in a passive role. Indeed, we provide evidence that reasserting the value of storyknowing may restore aspects of agency, autonomy and knowledge creation to both teachers and pupils which may not be afforded by overtly ‘active’ learning strategies. We conclude by considering the conditions in which storyknowing, as characterized by the pupils and theorists, might flourish within schools.

For the past seven years, I've worked on completing an illustrated novel based on my experiences as a child growing up in a sometimes violent and unpredictable home. At first, I planned only to use the details of my life as a way of grounding the story, but the more I wrote and drew, the more I remembered new events and sensations of my childhood. This paper explores the process of writing and drawing as a way of revisiting, reexamining, and making new meanings of childhood experiences. Through fiction writing, I rearrange and reinterpret the past, constructing knowledge through causality and reasoning. Through drawing, I externalize and render visible sensations of childhood that had been previously inaccessible. Ultimately, I consider the ways writing and drawing function as a form of active remembering that reconstructs and reclaims the past.

Libraries remain crucial for the preservation and dissemination of cultural products in the English-speaking Caribbean. Cultural products span the realm from traditional to contemporary artforms in diverse formats. Technology has facilitated the process allowing cultural intermediaries such as libraries, archives and museums to extend their reach and expand markets. Globalization has also impacted the process, weakening national boundaries to facilitate a polemically viewed transformation. The treatment of cultural products with libraries is an uncommon theme in the literature on Caribbean libraries. This article therefore explores the practices of the Caribbean library in the acquisition, preservation and promotion of the region’s cultural product.

Living history performances attempt to create “authentic reproductions,” presentations that aim to present the past in the present as accurately as possible. Such performances have a tendency to present a single interpretation of history as the only interpretation possible. This article analyzes the performance Masada Live by the Asphalt Theatre company as an alternative living history performance. Masada Live uses theatricality to call attention to the constructed nature of the performance, creating a space for a more nuanced and critical understandings of a history.

Therapeutic theater projects with Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon work at the intersection of the public and the private, facilitating individual healings while also promoting new group identities. The playing space becomes an open discursive field in which varied understandings of the self become platforms for new understandings of the nation. In the process, these artists/refugees trouble the boundaries between the private and the public, potentially creating a new public sphere that is not only revolutionary in its critique of entrenched political power but in its reformulation of the idea of the public itself. This article examines one such project, The Syria Trojan Woman, directed by Omar Abu Saada. The article places this work in the context of Abu Saada’s work in applied theater in Syria prior to the uprising and within the larger context of Syrian political theater. Applied theater, an umbrella term designating performance valued as efficacious as well as aesthetic, has had a brief and difficult history in Syria because of its capacity to undermine the regulation of speech. In the case of The Syria Trojan Woman, this speech has traveled beyond the countries hosting refugees through the efforts of non-governmental organizations that bring additional fundraising and consciousness-raising objectives to the endeavor. Through international tours and the use of new media, local performances become international phenomenon, further complicating the idea of a revolutionary public sphere.

The Parsi theatre that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century was India's principal commercial theatre and an answer to the bourgeois aspirations of a new middle class. Although its importance has been acknowledged due to its role as the predecessor of the South and Southeast Asian ‘modern’ theatre, there exists to this date no published critical history of the politics of its professionalisation and transregional expansion. This article will serve as a corrective measure, filling in the gap in existing research through a comparative analysis of the reception of the Parsi theatre marked by the Victoria Nāṭak Maṇḍali's (Victoria Theatrical Company's) decision to tour Burma in 1881 and subsequently to participate in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in London. As a vehicle of increasingly globalised mass consumption practices, the Parsi theatre was a resounding success in Southeast Asia, inspiring the creation of ‘imitation Parsi theatre’ in present-day Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. In stark comparison, the Parsi theatre's portrayal of a cosmopolitan, urban, industrially advanced orient was ‘doomed to disappointment’ in London and was an unequivocal financial failure. By demonstrating the reasons for the Parsi theatre's eastward success and westward failure this article demonstrates not merely the unevenness of cultural globalisation but also the need for a reconsideration of the place of material, socio-political and racial imbalances and relatedly of immobilities, embargoes, disjunctures and exclusions in our understandings of global or transnational theatre history.

The recent annihilation of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud by ISIS represents a disturbing trend in how some terrorist groups are trying to erase historical sites for the cultures they communicate. This study explores how one of these devastated spaces is still expressed in the media years after its destruction by examining another act of iconoclasm that occurred in 2001 when the Taliban annihilated the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan statues. The research explores the conception of negative spaces in communication and the means by which they are created through warfare and terrorism. A frame and critical analysis of popular magazines then assesses how the Bamiyan Buddhas’ identity has been transformed over time, and some of the journalistic practices that have enabled these renderings. The results reveal how the Buddhas have gradually become journalism’s touchstone for modern cultural terrorism, while in 70 percent of the coverage the site’s actual history has been replaced by the narrative of its destruction.

This article seeks to stimulate a fresh and inter-disciplinary debate which revolves around the need to move from a ‘senseless democracy’ that is insufficiently attuned to the dilemmas and challenges of fostering meaningful political engagement to a more ‘sensory democracy’. It achieves this by first exploring and dissecting recent works within democratic theory that emphasise the role of ‘watching’ and ‘listening’ within sociopolitical relationships. It then goes on to develop a set of constructive criticisms by applying insights drawn from the fields of practical aesthetics and applied theatre. Not only does this exercise allow us to take the analytical lens far beyond the focus on voice-based forms of expression that have hitherto dominated political analysis, it demonstrates the value of inter-disciplinary scholarship in exposing sensory-subtleties that raise distinctive questions for both politics ‘as theory’ and politics ‘as practice’.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted at the United Nations by world leaders in 2015, promotes just, peaceful and inclusive societies (Goal 16) as an important component of sustainab...

Mass vaccination programmes mean that poliomyelitis is almost a forgotten memory in the Global North. But in reality its effects continue as many people who contracted paralytic polio in childhood may develop functional deterioration (Post-Polio Syndrome or PPS) in later adulthood; mass migration and escape from violence means that it is also re-emerging in contemporary societies. Thus it is crucial for different audiences to have opportunities to engage with, and understand the life histories of polio survivors and their personal experiences of disease and disability across biographical and historical time. This article discusses the process of using recorded delivery verbatim techniques, with disabled and non-disabled actors, to translate ethnographic research about social history of polio into a creative accessible medium for new generation audiences to learn about the hidden, often contested, histories of disability and disease that may collide with professional, medical and public discourse. Our contention is that ethnodrama can give a voice to the voiceless, and enable them to contribute to the production of new knowledge, health interventions and policy instruments that affect their lives.

Drawing on assets-oriented, sociocultural theories of imagination and learning, the authors argue that the improvisational qualities and expanded resources of dramatic approaches to teaching make a positive difference in the quality of and persistence in students’ story writing. The authors describe findings from a controlled quasi-experimental study examining the outcomes of an 8-week story-writing and drama-based program, Literacy to Life, implemented in 29 third-grade classrooms in elementary schools with and without Title I funding located within the same urban school district in Texas. Pre- and post-measures of writing self-efficacy, story building, and generating and revising ideas showed significant positive results, especially for students in schools that receive Title I funding. Research findings and the sociocultural theoretical framework argue for increased resources in support of opportunities for students to practice combinatorial imagination and use cultural knowledge for creative writing, as was made possible through the Literacy to Life program.

Anime is a globally prominent media-form with a multitude of styles, yet it maintains a relative uniformity to sustain a recognizable identity as a particular category of media. The performance of the recognizably ‘anime-esque’ is what distinguishes anime as a type of animation, allowing it to be sold and consumed as ‘anime’. Anime, and its recognizable identity, are performatively constituted by a series of anime-esque acts performed in animation, citing a system/database of conventionalized models in each iteration. What we recognize as ‘anime proper’ are not just ‘animations from Japan’, but animations that perform large quantities of anime-esque acts. However, anime must continuously work through the problematic of maintaining its identity without redundancy, each performance working through the tensions of diversity and uniformity: in straying too far from a conventional model, it loses anime-esque recognizability and cannot be sold/consumed as anime. As such, anime’s identity negotiates the dynamic divisions between uniformity, repetition and the global on the one hand, and diversity, variation and the local, on the other. Working through this problematic entails a different type of creativity as combinations of citations from conventional models in each performance negotiate that particular anime’s identity as an anime production and its distinction from other anime. Anime’s problematic is not only invoked through the engagement of conventionalized models of character design and narrative, but also in the technical processes/materiality of animation, which cite character models and conventionalized acting expressions when animated. Yet it is not just the material limits of the medium of animation. There is another limit in the performance of anime in the act of citation that facilitates the doing (and selling) of anime: in the repeated acts of the anime-esque, in the serialization of anime as a media-form, the contours of anime’s formal system become a factor of convergence.

Walter J Ong argues: ‘The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word’. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of enunciation in which written words refuse repose. This essay argues that although spoken, written and printed words operate within radically different temporal planes, spoken words also have thing-like properties and written and printed words also move through time. Digital writing has given rise to a new regime of signification unforeseen by Ong in which written words refuse repose. Jay David Bolter argues that digital writing ‘challenges the logocentric notion that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language…The writer and reader can create and examine structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech’. N Katherine Hayles argues that, in digital media, the text ‘becomes a process, an event brought into existence when the program runs…The [text] is “eventilized,” made more an event and less a discrete, self-contained object with clear boundaries in space and time’. Jean-Jacques Lecercle argues that language is a constructed system, constantly subject to change…‘We therefore need to conceive of language not as a stable, arrested system, but as a system of variations’. This essay draws upon a diverse corpus of literary, media and performance theory and practice to establish a critical framework for examining the performance of variable texts throughout the entire apparatus of hardware, software, networks, bodies and spaces within and through which they operate and propagate. This framework is applied to a number of examples of digital writing which incorporates variability, instability, transformation and change into the process of composition, resulting in texts which are both physical and digital, confusing and confound boundaries between speaking, writing and reading.

As a first-year doctoral student in my first quarter, I expected to be challenged, not rocked to my core. I entered the program with what I would have described as a strong, salient, and clear understanding of who I am and how I move in the world. At the end of my first year, I can say with conviction that I have more to learn. There were four critical moments that shifted/altered/jolted my learning forward. This article is structured around each of these moments and is an exploration of the themes and questions that emerged.