Introduction: Performance and Pedagogy release_wo7pq2od3vfzzgvm2jcxheb54i

Abstract

When the editorial consortium of Performance Matters first conceived this special issue on "Performance and Pedagogy," I had no idea that its preparation would coincide with one of the most transformative teaching experiences of my academic career. This past spring semester I co-taught a graduate seminar with Dara Culhane, my colleague at Simon Fraser University, and the Associate Editor of this journal. Our goal was to combine theories and methods from performance studies and sensory ethnography to investigate various embodied sites of research and ways of knowing as they are increasingly practiced across a range of academic disciplines, including anthropology (Dara's departmental home), literature and the fine and performing arts (between whose units I teach), and gender studies (where Dara and I both have faculty affiliations). In the end, our biggest challenge lay not in soliciting support from our respective program chairs (we did so fairly easily, and with surprising enthusiasm for our initiative), nor in getting the required enrolment (we were oversubscribed), nor even in convincing our students to interrupt their discussions of a given text to engage in some breathing exercises, or a game of Simon Says (they were all eager and willing participants). Rather, the greatest irritant was figuring out how to cross-list the course across three different units, a performative impediment our university's information management system proved singularly ill-equipped to handle.
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