CFP: Beyond the Turn: Performance Philosophy Now

Performance Philosophy Working Session within the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). 

"Beyond the Turn: Performance Philosophy Now" (2 Hour Session)

Conveners: Will Daddario, University of Minnesota ( [email protected]) & Gabriella Calchi-Novati, Trinity College Dublin ([email protected])

The international, interdisciplinary research network known as Performance Philosophy seeks to draw upon and develop the philosophical activity alive within ASTR’s membership to determine the benefits, challenges, theoretical obstacles, and performative potential Performance Philosophy offers to scholars and practitioners in the present moment.

Understood not as a “turn” in the fields of theatre or performance studies but, rather, as a new field in its own right involving researchers based in a wide range of disciplines, Performance Philosophy presents the possibility of thinking theatre and performance anew, against the backdrop of current philosophical debates. Performance philosophers understand those debates to have the ability to thrust theatre and performance events into a new light, while, simultaneously, recognizing that the specific material conditions of theatre and performance events have the ability to invest philosophical concepts with new life. Building on the momentum of recent works such as Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas and Laura Cull’s Theatres of Immanence, this working session requests paper proposals from scholars and practitioners involved in the interplay between performance and philosophy. Specifically, papers might pursue the following avenues:

• the application of philosophy to the analysis of performance;
• the philosophy of performance and/or the performance of philosophy;
• the study of how philosophers and philosophical ideas have been staged in performance or how ideas and images of performance have figured in philosophy;
• the theoretical or practical exploration of philosophy as performance and/or as performative; and likewise, experiments emerging from the idea that performance is a kind of philosophy or thinking or theorizing in itself.

Please compose 500-word proposals that present an abstract of your paper and a brief description of how the paper relates to your primary area of research. Proposals should include complete contact information and organizational affiliation (if any). 

Send your proposal (as MS Word attachments) to both conveners by June 3, 2013. 

After selecting participants who engage with such themes, we will group the papers together by theme and create sub-groups. We will ask members of each sub-group to attend to the interconnection of themes evident in the initial abstracts so as to build connections between the papers. Individuals accepted to the working session will be expected to submit full 10- to 12-page papers no later than October 1, 2013, in order to facilitate pre-conference conversations.

URL (from which you'll be able to find the other Working Sessions):