Call for Papers: IFTR 2025 Performance and Migration WG

CONVENERS: Yana Meerzon (University of Ottawa), Sheetala Bhat (York University), and Steve Wilmer (Trinity College, Dublin)

This newly established IFTR working group aims to bring together specialists in theatre and performance studies, as well as in philosophy, history, politics, religious, and literary and language studies, to study the impact of global migration on social, cultural and theatre performance.

This group has been holding meetings online since 2023 and is also a formally recognized working group of the CATR. In Cologne, we will focus on the main theme of the group - performance and migration, and ways in which it relates to the general conference theme of carnival.

Carnival implies a temporary transformation in society, the subversion of normal hierarchies, the suspension of normal social conventions, and the assertion of different social possibilities. Migration equally involves social transformation, especially for those migrating from one country to another. In the modern nation state, citizens are expected to maintain permanent places of residence, national identity papers and to communicate through a national language. However, when the state fails to provide safety and security for its citizens, the social order breaks down. With war, poverty, and climate change, citizens flee, defying the normative conventions of social stability in ways analogous to carnivalesque behaviour. Today, with over one hundred million displaced people in the world, more migrants than ever are looking for a new home. Simultaneously, nation states are constantly finding new ways of interrupting or curtailing their mobility and resettlement.

For this in-person conference in Cologne we are seeking papers to address the general theme of performance and migration that may also involve the performance of precarious itineraries, subversive theatre practices, transgressive responses to governmental restrictions, and other forms of carnivalesque behaviour, etc.

Members of the working group are invited to submit book proposals for single authored manuscripts and edited collections to be considered for publication in  the book series Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration 

Please send any inquiries about the working group to Yana Meerzon, Sheetala Bhat, and Steve Wilmer at iftr.performance.migration@gmail.com