Dwight Conquergood Award

PSi is pleased to announce the establishment of the Dwight Conquergood Award in honour of Dwight Conquergood, a distinguished performance scholar, educator and community activist who died November 2004 at the age of 55, after a long battle with cancer.

Dwight made an immense contribution to performance scholarship and to Performance Studies international, which he helped establish. He was an instrumental force in shaping and expanding the field of performance studies, defining performance as a living practice that aims to "bring together different voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs so that they can have a conversation with one another."

The Dwight Conquergood Award, which will be given for the first time in 2006, will cover the cost of attending the annual PSi conference, including travel, accommodation and registration fees. It will be awarded every year to an individual whose work around cultural performance in some way carries a connection to Dwight's own practice.

Guided by passionate and relentless insistence on approaching ethnographic research as an ethical act, an act of performative witnessing, Dwight's work continually traversed the boundaries between academic research and community activism. His research - which included pioneering work with the Chicago Latin Kings gang, projects with the impoverished Hmong communities in Chicago, work with refugees in the Gaza Strip and in Thailand - often concerned a community or a subgroup excluded from the dominant agendas or ideology.

Acknowledging this legacy, the Dwight Conquergood Award will be given to an artist, an activist or an emerging academic conducting research or working on projects with disenfranchised communities. The award will be open to graduate students and researchers in performance, cultural studies, ethnography, anthropology as well as to practitioners and community members themselves who might be working outside of educational or institutional structures.

Of particular interest will be projects that might give voice to a particular excluded community or a group, raise awareness of human rights issues, challenge stereotypes, affect perception of a community from the outside, alter problematic media representation, or carry the potential to affect public policy.

To apply for the Dwight Conquergood Award you need to forward a proposal for a presentation / paper to the organisers of the current PSi Conference by their specified deadline. You should additionally include a one page CV and a brief accompanying letter outlining your reasons for application. A small committee consisting of the conference organisers and members of the PSi board will judge the Dwight Conquergood Award.

Applications for an award for 2008 should be sent to the conference organising committee by the submissions deadline once the call for papers has gone out.