Interdisciplinary Humanities – Performance Edition

Special Performance edition of Interdisciplinary Humanities, the journal of Humanities Education and Research Association (https://www.utep.edu/liberalarts/hera/).

“Performance in the Humanities”
Deadline: October 31, 2023
Word limit: 6000

This special edition will investigate how performance shapes our experience of the humanities. In the four decades since NYU offered the first degree in “Performance Studies,” the advent of the internet and social media has changed the way we study, create, teach, learn, and identify ourselves.  Performance forms and platforms have multiplied and facilitated one of the most contentious political cycles in American history, public upheavals demanding social justice, and new thresholds of mis and disinformation. How are these performance platforms shaping our experience and understanding of the world? With so much at stake for our students, this is the right time to reflect upon the role performance is playing in meaning-making.

The study of performance and the performative opens new epistemological and political possibilities. How are these possibilities being manifest by internet platforms? How has social media, for example, changed our understanding and construction of the self? How do pace and quantity–inherent characteristics of selfie–make it a language altogether different from the self-portrait? More significantly, does the ubiquity of the personal-image aggravate a subjective mind/body duality? Are the virtual spaces we’ve occupied during the pandemic further distancing humans from their bodies?  Will this further delay education’s understanding of body learning? How so? More constructively, has virtual education disrupted academic hierarchies in a productive way? If so, how? Generally, we invite explorations of ways in which technology is part of our aesthetic and social performance. As one example, what do memes reveal about a generation’s process of performing culture? What new aesthetic forms are emerging online? How are these forms generating ways of knowing that are shaping our politics and our world?

Send submissions to:

Kim Abunuwara
Humanities Program Director
Utah Valley University
Kimberly.abunuwara@uvu.edu