Critical Performance Studies Research

Critical Performance Studies (CPS) Research views performance as a subject of study, a methodology, as well as a mode for presenting and translating research that is specifically focused on creating change and transforming communities including:

  • Creating resilient, strong and sustainable communities through place awareness and intercultural exchange
  • Preparing learning communities for the future by designing performative, innovative and work-integrated teaching and learning environments
  • Tracing histories and transforming futures of cultural storytelling through performance
  • Developing understandings of lived experiences of gender and sexualities and improving health and wellbeing through creative explorations of performance

Critical performance studies research is an integral part of preparing new generations of storytellers to question not only the assumptions of identity and cultural expression but also taken-for-granted knowledge systems and artistic practices.

CPS staff have specific research and practice-based expertise in the areas of:

  • Gender and sexualities and performance
  • Adaptation, composition and writing for performance
  • Celebrity and popular representation and performance
  • Critical autoethnography and performative writing
  • Performance pedagogy and work-integrated learning

The projects below provide a snapshot of our diverse work in this area:

Staging Australian Women's Lives: Theatre, Feminism, and Socially Engaged Art (ARC DP200102876, 2020-2022) (Professor Stacy Holman Jones) https://stagingwomenslives.com.au

Diversifying Music in Australia: Gender Equity in Jazz and Improvisation (Associate Professor Robert Burke, Professor Margaret Barrett, Professor Cat Hope, Dr Louise Devenish, Dr Nicole Canham)

A Workplace for Learning (Dr Felix Nobis) Felix Nobis is leading research projects investigating ways the university itself can become a workplace (‘a workplace for learning’) and an arena for developing and practicing workplace capabilities. In these projects students develop skills in pitching and prototyping as well as practicing job crafting strategies and design thinking processes. In ATS2184 Intercultural Skills for an Internationalised workplace, students work in intercultural teams, drawing on their diversity to respond to challenges from across the university. In ATS2211 Understanding Workplace Innovation, students engage innovatively with their own learning and collaborate on projects aimed at enhancing the international student experience. Such projects have at their heart an ability to empathise, to listen, to communicate, and to understand another’s experience.