On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this second part of a two-part blog post, two of the conference organizersSarah Lucie, and Amir Farjoun, both students in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance—reflect on some of the questions about materiality and knowledge that arise in their field, and the particular challenges theatre and performance studies might offer to object-oriented thought. Click here to read Part 1 reflections and thoughts by conference organizer Eylül FidanAkıncı.
On May 10, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association presents its 2018 conference, Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies, bringing together working groups of visiting scholars, graduate students, and independent artist-scholars to explore the multiple potential meanings of “object” within theatre and performance studies. In this two-part blog post, three of the conference organizers—Eylül FidanAkıncı, Sarah Lucie, and Amir Farjoun, all students in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance—reflect on some of the questions about materiality and knowledge that arise in their field, and the particular challenges theatre and performance studies might offer to object-oriented thought.
This two-part piece was commissioned and co-published by the performance venue JACK, located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as an extension of their Reparations365 project, in collaboration with Digital Humanities Fellow Jaime Shearn Coan, who served as the editor. Benedict Nguyen introduces their piece as follows: I try to write about a lot of things: gentrification and space, the power and capacity to choose where to be (in dance and in the world), reparations and who’s owed what, and how to reorganize institutions and non-profit boards, workers cooperatives, and more. In Part I, I start by throwing myself under the bus to connect the evolving gentrification in the South Bronx and dialogues on equity and changing institutions in dance. In Part II, I try to imagine some specific-ish solutions to these questions to reconsider institutional structures more democratically. There are specific examples and ideas and some pop culture references and more. Thanks for reading this super-maximalist thought experiment.
In this reflection on a recent meeting of the VHS Archives Working Group, Juan Fernández discusses archives and memory and “intellectual feelings," which he describes as "a need to better understand past lived experiences and a desire to gain a deeper understanding of a missing/moving image." Identifying absences in the documentation of queer Latina/o/x social spaces in Los Angeles, including backyard T-parties and nightclubs that have since shut down, he is working to develop alternate routes of gathering minoritarian social histories that are capacious enough to include personal desire, memory and nostalgia.
Lost & Found Managing Editor Stephon Lawrence and poet Layla Benitez-James discuss Benitez-James' new chapbook “God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure” as well as her thoughts around the compulsion to collect, turning over ideas of desire, and the entangled holiness between a portrait of Jimi Hendrix and the Virgen de Guadalupe.
In memoriam of the extraordinary artist James Luna, we are sharing his keynote performative lecture at the "Scales of Visibility in Global Indigenous Art" conference from October 2016.
A selection of readings from the new issue of WSQ in preparation for "Slam Precarious Work" on the current state of precarious labor, imperatives to love your job, the social and racial hierarchies of domestic labor, and how women workers organizing in NYC's Chinatown have connected the conditions of their paid work with their unpaid care work.
Danielle Rouse discusses the event [email protected], which consisted of a series of performances, readings, and discussion that considered how standardized uses of English have been used to oppress while those oppressed have creatively transformed the language.
Archivist Rachel Mattson raises questions about how digitization and online distribution change the stakes of preserving videotape archives of queer histories. Exploring two distinct instances, raised among the VHS Archives working group, Mattson considers the nuances of how context, medium, and identity transform the ethics of using this archival material.
Digital Publics Fellow Kasey Zapatka outlines his project "Housing Literacy" and provides an overview of NYC rent regulation and tenants' rights, along with the history and current context of rent regulation in New York City.
Digital Publics Fellow Diane Yoong describes the process of beginning their project searching for and recovering the histories of queer Asian (American)s, who have generally been excluded from histories and normative representations of queer people. They also discuss a number of other archival initiatives and interventions taking place in and around the Center for the Humanities.
Cory Tamler discusses her experience reading an archival copy of Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, annotated by Solanas herself. In this post, Tamler reads how the act of annotation might be a textual performance of becoming for Solanas—who negotiates the text’s unique publishing history and its consequences for her legacy in both the literal and figurative margins.
Iris Cushing reflects on her experience as part of the Collaborative Research Seminar on Archives and Special Collections, reading The Floating Bear, a bi-monthly, mimeographed newsletter started in 1961 by Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones. Cushing attends to the material, social, and conceptual conditions under which the newsletter circulated—its "field" and "range—considering the Bear's network of influences, the labor required to produce it, and the artistic freedom afforded by it.
GC PhD student Maya Harakawa reflects on her fellowship co-running the online magazine Triple Canopy's Publication Intensive, a two-week summer program devoted to considering forms of publication that bring together networked forms of production and circulation with the rich legacies of print culture and artistic practices rooted in print.
Jean Carlos Soto reports on the Consciousness & Revolution II conference and three panels dealing with legacies of movement-based education from the nationalist right-wing's influence over India's theological schools in the 1980s to the Portuguese grassroots social movement Plataforma Gueto, the Blank Panthers' Oakland Community School and the "We Will Remember" Survival Group.
A selection of readings for "Intimate Measures: Amy Herzog and Nitin Ahuja" on the refraction of the self through the microbiome, the labor of intimacy in ASMR videos, the work of commodities, and intimate self-management.
"[...] perhaps caring labor does not require literally caring, which would only interfere with efficiency. "
--Amy Herzog, "Star vehicle: labor and corporeal traffic in Under the Skin"
Five Lehman College English Honors program students reflect on discussions from the Activism in Academia conference on topics including the use of literature to foster empathy; diversifying curricula; student experiences of race, religion, and representation in the classroom; and activist pedagogies.
Curator Kaegan Sparks shares suggested readings for the exhibition Soft Skillson questions of reproductive and affective labor, care, ASMR, and gendered and racialized forms of work.
GC PhD students Kaitlin Mondello and Elizabeth Weybright reflect on a series of presentations and performances from “The Vibrating World: Soundscapes and Undersongs” conference, which ranged from considerations of sound and affect to theories on the intersection of disability and modernist music to aural performances of a threatened environment.
GC M.A. student Mette Christiansen reflects on a selection of presentations from the "Public and Publics" conference, which considered various conceptions of the public through a range of lenses including governance and the law, counterpublics and social movements, physical and designed space (and related question of access and exclusion), and art in public.
GC PhD student Christina Katopodis reflects on a selection of presentations from The Vibrating World conference including a silent performance of a scene from the opera Aida, a panel on the politics of sound, a performative lecture on making music with nonhuman lifeforms, and an audiovisual performance that drew on the dual histories of synthesizers and radio.
