Next London Theatre Seminar, 2 May 2019: Theatre / Performance / Dance Studies is Too White (Roberta Mock, Mojisola Adebayo, Lynette Goddard, Cristina Rosa, chaired by Royona Mitra)

Our next London Theatre Seminar will take place on 2 May 2019 at 6:30 PM, at 11 Bedford Square (RHUL Central London), Room 1-01. Please note remainder of our seminars for Term 3 will also take place at 11 Bedford Square, owing to the ongoing boycott of UoL Senate House.

We are pleased to host Roberta Mock (Plymouth), Mojisola Adebayo (QMUL), Lynette Goddard (RHUL), Cristina Rosa (Roehampton) in conversation, chaired by Royona Mitra (Brunel) for a roundtable discussion: Theatre / Performance / Dance Studies is Too White. 

We hope to see you there!

Broderick, Louise, and Bryce

Roundtable: Theatre / Performance / Dance Studies is Too White

Our fields today are undeniably shaped by whiteness, and the power imbalances that white supremacy entails. This manifests both in terms of the scholarship that is generated and consumed in the fields, and in terms of what is delivered in higher education programmes that nurture future scholars and artists. In this roundtable we bring together a group of scholars to address the challenges faced by our disciplines in acknowledging how they have been impacted by the dual impacts of neoliberalism’s project of “diversity” on one hand, and the deeply embedded structural racism that operates on the broader social stage and in higher education, on the other. The panel will consider ethical and anti-racist pathways for the evolution of our fields, placing the decentering of their whiteness at the centre of these discussions. It will be of interest to scholars and artists who are invested in seeking social justice through their work.

The panel will unpack inherent structural racisms that shape our fields, exposing the problematic nature of  ‘diversity’ initiatives that have become central to the academy, both critiquing the embedded languages through which race and racism are perpetuated, and seeking critical discourses and mechanisms through which safe spaces can be created for scholars and students of colour. We will attend to the links between racism and capitalism, examining how this manifests in university hiring and promotion processes and curriculum content. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018), the panel will further consider the politics of hearing and the task of listening, questioning how whiteness listens and what it chooses to be deaf to. Finally, the panel will also consider how to empower future scholars with the tools and means with which to undo historical regimes of oppression.

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