Location: Zoom Room B / Salle Zoom B
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5324702280?pwd=yuo077u9YJNihv59FvXxbosHNeVpvv.1
• Session co-organizers:
Christine Balt and Kathleen Gallagher
| This 90-minute roundtable session invites participants to grapple with the ‘discontents’ of teaching, learning, and creating in our climate emergency. Reckoning with an increasingly more emphatic turn towards authoritarianism in political life, and what Naomi Klein (2019) has termed ‘climate barbarism,’ we consider what it means to “stay on the right side of an increasingly thin line… between wellness and malaise” (Gallagher and Balt 1) and ask what performance can offer as a modality for living well (enough) in the midst of our myriad social, political, and ecological global discontents. Guiding the conversation will be the recently published (October 2024) edited collection, Global Climate Education and its Discontents: Using Drama to Forge a New Way. This book takes ‘discontent’ – restlessness, vexation, unease – as a productive disposition for troubling accepted, simple, and ‘solutions-oriented’ climate narratives. Opting to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016), the book proposes that performance can orient us towards more complex, emergent, and unsettled epistemological approaches as we live and learn together in a crisis. To that end, the roundtable will commence with a brief introduction to the book, and then engage with the following provocations: • What can performance do to augment our capacity for, and experience of, agency in the climate crisis? • How can performance help us “live the contradictions” (Gallagher and Balt 1) between wellness and malaise in these times? • What can ‘liminality,’ proffered by Victor Turner’s (1980) thesis on performance, transformation and the social, offer as a way to avoid the rush to simplified solutions and uncritical utopian ideals in climate performance and pedagogy? Participants interested in the many ‘discontents’ of performance in the climate crisis are welcome to join the roundtable and engage with these and other questions in a lively and collegial setting. |
Biographies
Christine Balt
| Christine Balt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. She is interested in ecological performance and finding ‘collective wellbeing’ in the drama classroom. Winner of CATR’s 2024 Richard Plant Award, she has published articles in Theatre Research in Canada, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance and The International Journal for Qualitative Studies in Education. |