Our article explores the impact of the global health pandemic on our five-year, multi-sited, collaborative ethnographic study titled "Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists" and "their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice" (2019-2024). We illustrate how our arts-led, youth-driven ethnographic…

This essay considers what viewing performance as an affective encounter--an embodied experience of sensations and intensities--might mean for applied theatre. Using auto-theory, which joins personal narrative with theories of affect, new materialism and post-humanism, we write an affective encounter that catches up people and objects in relations…

Many youth struggle to determine their role and cope with overwhelming emotions and imaginative dystopias around combatting climate catastrophe and capitalist greed. In this time when many marginalised youth feel assured of immediate and distant threat, it is vital for applied theatre practitioners and educators to nurture critical hope as a means…

This article explores how whiteness is enacted and negotiated from the perspective of a conductor in a Playback Theatre performance (PT). The article addresses how PT provides a stage for exercising opportunities for "doing white differently" in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that "Doing white differently" takes place…

Performance ethnography is a form of performed research that creates a theatrical representation of ethnographic inquiry. Walford (2009) proposes that frequently performance ethnographers neglect traditional ethnographic practices such as participant observation and substantial time in the field. This paper draws on research which investigated the…

This article is an autoethnodrama, which originally began as a workshop piece coming to fruition as an enacted staged reading at the University of Illinois during Fall 2011. As an ethnodrama, the article explores the author's educational journey, pivoting around one of his fondest childhood memories reciting a Langston Hughes poem. Interwoven…

In the twenty-first century the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country. While the numbers of incarcerated males far outnumber incarcerated women, there are still great concerns about the growing female prison population. This fixation with incarceration and building prisons has trickled down to America's children as…

This performance autoethnography shows the author's struggle in finding his place, scholarship, voice, and body, into the academic setting. Mixing together memories of his lived experience with sugar cane workers, notes, and leftovers of different fieldworks, plus 6 years of life as grad student at the University of Illinois, the author looks for…

Using a critical race theory (CRT) framework, this article compares the playwriting methods of the Chicano--Latino theater trio, Culture Clash, to a counterstorytelling methodology. The author uncovers the tenets of a critical race theater in the trio's site-specific ethnographic play, "Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami". He…

Discusses ethnographic performance texts (sometimes called ethnotheatre or ethnodrama), which employ traditional techniques to mount a performance event as an alternative mode of research representation, with actors portraying actual research participants. Discusses ethnodrama's rationale, content and structure, participants and characters,…

"Confessions" begins with an auto-ethnographic account of my learning-through-movement in a relationship that was intimate, therapeutic, embodied and instructive--with a teacher called Annie. It seems sensible to start with a choreographic teacher of Feldenkrais therapies and theatre-movement to think about the meanings I import from my roles as…

This project began when the Philadelphia Folklore Project (PFP) initiated a residency partnership with the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in traditional Cambodian arts. The PFP anticipated raising issues that might help in the understanding of the cultural dynamics and elements that were likely to shape and effect the residency. The PFP imagined…

Explores the successes and failures of the author's "Searching for Osun," a performance ethnography which charted a subjective and selective meditation on Nigeria. Explains important concepts of performance ethnography, such as: an idea of question which constitutes the context; the accountability of the ethnographer; subjectivity;…

Describes how the author used "democratic" directing methods in her after-school play rehearsals of Shakespeare to help high school students navigate the shifting space between their own creative freedom and the conventional confines of a public high school. Details her use of unorthodox rehearsal strategies involving student…

The article takes as its starting point my recent ethnography of the Welsh National Opera Company, and the forthcoming monograph "Everyday Arias: making opera work". In the course of that work I revisited the theme of performance: the ethnography of performance and the performance of ethnography. I discuss briefly the everyday work of…