- diaspora
- nationalism and transnationalism
- refugees
Performance and Migration
This 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.
KEYWORDS
EMAIL ADDRESS
iftr.performance.migration@gmail.com
CFP FOR IFTR 2025
Following the gathering at the IFTR conference in Manila in July 2024, the Performance and Migration working group is holding its inaugural meeting as a formally recognized IFTR working group. The working group, which has been in existence as a research group since 2023 and is also a formally recognized working group of the CATR, will focus in Cologne on its main theme of performance and migration and ways in which this 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.
Abstracts can be submitted via the IFTR Cambridge Core portal. Please note that you must renew your membership or become a member in order to submit: https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/iftr/conference
The deadline for abstracts for working group papers is 15 January 2025.
Papers of up to 3,000 words in length are to be distributed by 9 May 2025.
For information about the general conference, please check the IFTR website. Please also check for updates on the Performance and Migration Working Group page at https://iftr.org/working-groups/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
CONVENERS
Yana Meerzon (University of Ottawa)
Sheetala Bhat (York University)
Steve Wilmer (Trinity College, Dublin)
MISSION STATEMENT
Our objective is to propose new philosophical and cultural discourses that can help us understand the role of performance arts in building a more just and democratic community of mobile subjects based on their shared interests and responsibilities, and recognizing the worth of different opinions, values, and positions. The group’s specific goals include: 1) to contribute to the internationally growing field of interdisciplinary studies in migration and performance; 2) to develop new interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical approaches for the study of migration through and in theatre; and 3) to re-evaluate and re-validate the impact humanities and social sciences can have on the public sphere and discourses.
Our research program builds on the work of the Studies in Migration, an interdisciplinary research group which Yana Meerzon ran at the University of Ottawa (2015-2019). In the Fall 2023, Meerzon, Wilmer and Bhat started running an online group Performance, Migration and Nationalism with the aim to create an online repository of primary and secondary sources related to this topic. In the Winter 2024 Canadian Association of Theatre Research (CATR) has accepted this group among its regular working groups with the 3 years mandate (2024-2026); our first meeting was held at the CATR 2024, online. The focus of the CATR group is Performance, Migration, and Nationalism with special attention paid to Canadian histories of colonization, immigration, and decolonization.
The newly formed IFTR working group Performance and Migration (2024-2028) recognizes ‘migration’ as an umbrella term that refers to exile, forced displacement, refugees, and cosmopolitan travel practices, among others. Focusing on questions of representation, dramaturgies of migration, public discourse and the language of laws and legislation, this group aims to develop a collaborative approach not only to forming coherent interdisciplinary research questions in relation to performance and migration but also to developing intersecting research practices. These practices can include working with documents and archival materials, interviewing live respondents and artists, and designing ethical protocols for collecting data through collaborations and auto-ethnography.
The group aims to provide opportunities for collaboration of senior and emerging scholars, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, whose work focuses on the questions of performance and migration. It seeks careful balance of the scholarly works rooted in theatre practice and theory.
The group meets online regularly throughout an academic year: we invite international researchers and students to join its ongoing working sessions without charge. Those who will participate in the meetings of the group during the CATR and / or IFTR conferences are asked to pay CATR or IFTR membership and conference fees.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Book Series: Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration (https://www.springer.com/series/17066?srsltid=AfmBOop-hhX9nArX2Y6_9kYHOukU3krVsVwyEU43wPc6KM6sW6z_zP6f)
Co-editors: Yana Meerzon and Stephen Eliott Wilmer
With the arrival of over a million refugees into Europe in 2015 and millions of displaced Ukrainians in 2022, the topic of migration has become a major source of public concern and discussion. However, migration is not a new or a local issue. From earliest recorded time, individuals and populations all over the world have migrated to achieve a better life or escape subjection and the threat of violence. The theatre has continually addressed this theme both in its dramaturgy and in its performance practices. Theatre artists have always striven to find new audiences, and the stories they have told have regularly dealt with the theme of migration. Through the centuries peripatetic artists have taken their work on the road in a variety of forms and manifestations such as pageant wagons, commedia dell’arte, touring shows, puppetry, opera, circus, dance, legitimate theatre and mixed media; while playwrights worldwide explored the pathos of the homeless, the excluded and the forcibly displaced to question the meaning of life. This series brings together a range of scholarship focusing on many eras of performance, as well as numerous geographical and social conditions to offer an understanding of the complexities of theatre and migration.
Performance and Migration Archive (Yana Meerzon, MITACS program UOttawa): https://archiveoftheatreandmigration.wordpress.com
European Journal of Theatre and Performance (EJTP) Special Issue N. 9; Exile and (Neo)Nationalism. Guest editors: Yana Meerzon and Pieter Verstraete. Expected publication Fall 2025.
“Staging Injustice: Performance and Asylum Hearings” A panel discussion in the Long Room Hub under the auspices of the Trinity College Dublin Drama Department, the “Identities in Transformation” thematic network, the Centre for Forced Migration Studies and the IFTR and CATR Performance and Migration working groups in the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, 21 February 2025 from 4 pm to 7 pm
In the past twenty years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in performance and refugees, such as the work of Emma Cox, Caroline Wake, Alison Jeffers, and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration (edited by Meerzon and Wilmer in 2023). Despite this research, little attention has been paid to the performative aspects of asylum hearings. The aim of this seminar on “Performance and Asylum Hearings” is to examine asylum-hearing procedures as a form of courtroom drama in which the state’s policies are played out against the refugee in secrecy. This is the third seminar on this topic, and it will lead to a new collection of articles edited by Steve Wilmer.
COMPLETED PUBLICATIONS / OUTPUTS
The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration, Eds. Yana Meerzon and Steve Wilmer (Palgrave 2023) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-20196-7