Skip to main content

Web Content Display Web Content Display

Events calendar

Breadcrumb Breadcrumb

Web Content Display Web Content Display

May 2018

20180528
Previous week
Next week

Cultural Mobility of Performance and Performativity Studies

Date: 28.05.2018 - 30.05.2018
Place: Sala Bobrzyńskiego room, Collegium Maius, ul. Jagiellońska 15
Organiser: JU Chair in Performance Studies
Cultural Mobility of Performance and Performativity Studies

The organisers of the international conference would like to reflect on the processes of cultural mobility of notions, theories and methodologies developed in the study of performativity in diverse cultural contexts.

In recent years there has been a growing academic trend towards decentralising the power of American universities as leading centers of performance studies. As new performance studies departments crop up all around the world and a new field of study known as “performativity studies” emerges, the conference organisers would like to reflect on the processes of cultural mobility of notions, theories and methodologies developed in the study of performativity in diverse cultural contexts, believing that sharing case studies from different countries would enable them to scrutinize specific translations, applications and hybrid connections that occur in performance and performativity studies in particular cultural contexts.

The conference organisers are especially interested in how concepts and theories of performativity perform in local contexts (are they applied selectively and to what ends?) and how they change or modify hitherto accepted academic disciplines (theatre studies, sociology, historiography, social sciences etc.). To what extent are the terms coined and used in specific English-speaking cultural contexts (performance, performativity, counterfactuality, situated knowledges, cultural scenarios, remains, re-enactment and more) operative in other contexts and how they hybridise with the terms already rooted in local languages?

Moreover, the organisers are interested in the process of positioning performativity studies in new contexts. In what knowledge configurations (or university departments) do they emerge and what are the consequences of their position?

Finally, do performativity studies allow for fundamental changes in academic vocabularies, where traditional terms used in local contexts acquire new meanings and new vivid metaphors are imported?

Another question is the undisputed domination of English as the contemporary Latin which has become the main platform for the exchange of thoughts in the present-day academia. To internationalise their research, scholars must model and adjust their propositions, findings and case studies in such a way that they are comprehensible to an English-speaking reader, who – it should be stressed – may not necessarily be a native speaker of English. In this context, what is gained and what is lost by globalising performance and performativity studies?