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ABSTRACT
This essay contributes to interdisciplinary conversations about the positioning and future of performance studies within US higher education. Through an atypical research method for the field – content analysis – we provide an alternative angle from which to view our collective work in this contemporary moment. Our research includes coding and analysis of 650 webpages obtained from official websites of four-year US institutions, producing a topographical map of performance studies. Our findings suggest that PS is an interdisciplinary field situated in multiple theoretical, institutional, and geographic locations that features various tensions in focus and scope.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Indeed, this is a “wicked problem” of the sort Langellier outlined in her contribution to the Economies and Ethics Conference (215), and outlined by Gingrich-Philbrook in a recent call for this special issue:
Academic institutions ask practitioners to create work recognizable by their units and the disciplinary histories those units represent, but also to transcend disciplinary boundaries when preparing their scholarship so that its reception and citation might have international and interdisciplinary reach. (n.p.)
2 We studied PS however it appeared in our data (not distinguishing between the NYU and Northwestern schools), but the dual beginnings may explain or moderate some of our findings. Though important, a focus on such a bifurcated origin story has an unintended exclusionary effect, leaving out key institutions external to these “passages,” such as the University of North Texas or Arizona State University, which are included in our study.
3 For more definitions and discussion, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; McKenzie; Schechner (among others).
4 The fact that these shifts were associated with Northwestern University and Southern Illinois University led McKenzie to state that Pelias and VanOosting’s “figure” of PS “marks the site where oral interpretation met anthropology, a site located somewhere in Illinois” (47). Notably, he does not mention communication, though oral interpretation was associated with English and Speech Departments, the precursors to our Communication Departments (Robb).
5 See, for example, Bahn and Bahn; Harding and Rosenthal; Jackson; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; McKenzie; Robb; Schechner, “1960s”; Schechner, “Performance”; Taylor. (Not an exhaustive list.)
6 “Desire lines” is “a term borrowed from the field of architecture and urban design, which refers to the path of least resistance across walked terrain” (Kelly 203).
7 These are similar to the questions asked by Gingrich-Philbrook in the call for a special issue, though our research began well before the call.
8 We would like to thank Editor Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, for how his description of some of these ideas influenced our language.
9 We began with six questions covering these topics; based in our findings we have chosen to highlight these three.
10 This helpfully limited our scope but means that we cannot attest to the presence of PS at two-year institutions or in secondary education. We know PS likely exists in these spaces, but they are beyond our particular focus.
11 Such a task would require alternative data gathering.
12 We question whether such an “unbiased” representation is possible.
13 For this reason, we cannot make claims as to the history or the future of the field.
14 This amounts to over 10% of the courses explicitly naming their introductory level focus.
15 Of the 96 total institutions, 84 (83.33%) are located in these three regions. There are 40 institutions (38.4% of the 96) in the East Coast region, 26 (27.08%) in the Midwest, and 18 (18.75%) on the West Coast. We included California, Oregon, and Washington as West Coast states. We placed Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in the Eastern region. Finally, we included Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin in the Midwest region.
16 They’re also not new concerns. Not only did Madison first mention them in 1999 (see Madison, “Performing”), but Strine referred to disciplinary-wide concerns at least as early as 1998: “Currently, multidisciplinary appropriations of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ as analytical tools or critical tropes abound, giving the unsettling sense that work in performance studies is at the cutting-edge of post- or anti-disciplinary scholarship” (Strine, “Articulating”).
17 We would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers, who suggested that we include reference to this reality.
18 Mary Margaret Robb lists many public and private institutions in her history of oral interpretation of literature, including private universities like Harvard and Yale, but also early public institutions like the University of North Carolina (79).
19 Robb states, of the mid-twentieth century, that “There was a general belief that oral interpretation made a significant contribution toward strengthening the arts and humanities in the educational program of the United States” (232).