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CFP: ATHE Performance Studies Focus Group Emerging Scholars Panel

The Performance Studies Focus Group at the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference invites submissions of papers for its Emerging Scholars' Panel. The theme of the conference is 'Performance Remains, Global Presence: Memory, Legacy, and Imagined Futures' and it takes place at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago, Illinois from August 11-14, 2011.

The PSFG Emerging Scholars' Panel represents an opportunity for researchers to present their work at a major international conference for the first time. Selected Emerging Scholars will be paired with a mentor from the field of Performance Studies who will offer critical feedback on submitted papers in order to help prepare them for presentation at the conference. ATHE PSFG will also provide successful applicants with complimentary registration to the ATHE PSFG Pre-Conference.

Performance Studies locates itself at the boundaries and intersections of scholarly and artistic practice. It embraces aesthetic and academic interdisciplinarity, as well as the challenges, risks, and innovations that are part of such inclusionary practices. Performance also acts as a critical model for theorizing cultural and social action, providing a lens and practice through which technological and cultural innovations can be processed. How do performance conditions, practices, and innovations facilitate processes of memory, history, historiography, and imagination? How can performance studies deploy these conditions, practices, and innovations in an effort to trouble received understandings of temporality, of the present, and of the 'global present' specifically? Of presence, and of 'global presence' specifically? What tactics can performance deploy in the efforts to resist or subvert increasingly globalized networks of power, domination, and capital? In what ways do processes of globalization threaten, complicate, or facilitate performance's ability to conceive of itself in terms of remainder (or disappearance), presence (or absence)? How do performance artists, practitioners, and scholars imagine their own futures? What, and how, does the pastness of performance legate to the future of performance? What can a focus on remainder, and on temporal categories more generally, reveal about disciplinary and aesthetic habits? What does such a focus risk obscuring or leaving out?

Submissions to the PSFG Emerging Scholars' panel might engage these disciplinary questions, or a range of others around the conference theme. Papers across performance modes and historical periods are welcomed. Topics might include:

- contested boundaries between performance, theatre and other artforms
- emergent technologies in performance
- performance as a modality of (historical) knowledge
- historiographical approaches to performance
- negotiating/ building identity in performance
- remainder and the so-called death of the avant-garde
- performances that disrupt the presence of the physical body
- conflict and confrontation in the performance encounter
- performativity and theatricality
- the relationships between performance and philosophy
- performance, emotion and affect
- complexity, ambiguity and paradox in performance
- performance as debate, negotiation, breakdown

Papers for the PSFG Emerging Scholars' panel should be 8-10 pages in length (double-spaced). The deadline for submission is Saturday 1 February 2011. Please send completed papers (as attachments in Microsoft Word), with institutional affiliation and contact information, to Joseph Cermatori at jpc2143@columbia.edu. Successful applicants will be notified by the end of March 2011.

Please contact Joseph with any other questions regarding the PSFG Emerging Scholars'
panel at the email address above.