Call for Papers

The Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working Group co-convenors are delighted to issue a call for papers for the forthcoming conference at the University of Salford in September on any topic exploring the relation of theatre, dance or performance to philosophy. The working group’s mission is to encourage interdisciplinary debates addressing any aspect of philosophical research into the area of theatre and performance – deriving either from a continental perspective, or coming from within the analytical tradition.

This year, we welcome in particular papers or panels around notions such as populism and mobilisation. For example, contributions could be conceived as updates and responses to Badiou, Bourdieu, Butler, Didi-Huberman, Khiari, and Rancière’s book What is a People? (2016, first published 2013) from the perspective of theatre and performance: Who are the people? How can this notion (if it is a notion) be represented? Shall we go beyond clichés or sarcasms (here one might think of Gob Squad’s Revolution Now)? Can we imagine the people anew? How do we understand questions of mobility, movement and mobilisation in the wake of a new surge of popular protests in the US and around the world, following uprisings and repression in the contexts, among others, of Occupy and the Arab Spring? Do questions of theatricality, resistance and the performance of protest take on new dramaturgies or choreographies today, as we enter full throttle into an era of governmental discourse hinging on denunciations and exploitations of the false, the fabricated and the ‘fake’? How might we understand questions of travel and translation, hospitality, humanity and even ‘universality’ when borders between Europe and the UK, Mexico and the USA, among so many others, are ever more subject to controls, and individuals ever more fearful of detention and deportation? What cultures of generosity and care, complicity and sorority might we imagine in the face of this systematization of violence, waged in the name of the ‘people’? Ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the student protests of May ’68, we further ask, what legacy do these protests represent, and what role do universities play in the new cultures of resistance today?

Contributions might be in the form of ten-minute provocations, twenty-minute papers or twenty-minute performance-papers.

Please email all abstracts (no more than 300 words in length), an additional few sentences of biographical information and precise details of the audio-visual technology you will need to make your presentation to to Kélina Gotman - kelina.gotman@kcl.ac.uk and Fred Dalmasso – f.t.j.dalmasso@lboro.ac.uk. The deadline for the submission of proposals is Thursday 13 April 2017.

Please note: only one proposal may be submitted for the TaPRA 2017 Conference. It is not permitted to submit multiple proposals or submit the same proposal to several Calls for Papers. All presenters must be TaPRA members, i.e. registered for the conference; this includes presentations given by Skype or other media broadcast even where the presenter may not physically attend the conference venue. 

http://www.tapra.org/