Convenors: Yana Meerzon, Sheetala Bhat and Stephen Elliot
Location: Zoom Room B
Online Session
This working group aims to bring together Canadian and international specialists in theatre and performance studies and other disciplines to examine the complex impact of global migration and to critique the practices of rising nationalisms. Focusing on questions of representation, public discourse and the language of laws and legislation, this group will develop a collaborative approach for coherent interdisciplinary research to assess these practices.
In the CATR 2024 conference, the group will focus its online meeting on the interconnections between migrant justice, nationalism, and decolonization practices in Canada and internationally. In relation to the Canadian context, for example, we aim to discuss what decolonization means to the study of migration when we center Indigenous sovereignty, as well as the ways theatre/performance scholarship addresses the role of settler colonialism in migrant justice. In relation to the global context, we propose to discuss staging justice in relation to “theatrics” of interactions between different practices and discourses of nationalisms and migration, including the interplay between newcomers’ ideas of nationalism and the host country’s existing and emerging forms of nationalism, and the changes in legislative systems of asylum seeking and immigration, border control, and activism. Among the questions we ask is how theatre and performance arts approach the context-specific and multidimensional relations between migrant justice, nationalism, and decolonization.