Leader: Christine Balt
Location: Room 7-425, 7th Floor – John Molson Building, 1450 Rue Guy – Concordia University
In-Person Session
This workshop asks how drama-based methodologies can advance more justice-oriented modes of inquiry in community-based, ethnographic research. Specifically, the workshop will grapple with the tensions that exist regarding the role of drama-based research in communities: should, for instance, performance be leveraged as a tool of primarily critique and analysis, particularly through critical ethnographic work that seeks to “engage, interpret, and record the social meanings, values, structures, and embodiments within a particular domain, setting, or field of human interaction” (Madison, 2020)? Or, should researchers eschew critique for more generative work that produces, rather than examines, new realities, according to a performative paradigm of research invested in world-making (Denzin, 2001)? This workshop will turn to autotopography (Heddon, 2007) as a justice-oriented methodology that can hold onto both critique and performativity in community-based research. Specifically, ‘autotopography’ emerges as a practice that attends to both the ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ (Heddon, 2007) of communities: their histories and socio-political (raced, gendered) inheritances via a critical ethnographic approach, and also, the ‘elsewheres’ of their imaginations as per a performative research methodology. Participants will engage in a series of writing and performance prompts to produce their own autotopographies – these will function as research artifacts that will mobilize criticality and performativity in ‘frictional’ ways (Puar, 2012). The autotopographies will also be examined as examples of ‘wondrous’ data (MacLure, 2013) that exert what I call ‘critical fascination’ through their “capacity to animate further thought” in data analysis (p. 228). Participants (26 max.) need no prior performance experience to attend this workshop.