PSi is very pleased to announce that the annual conferences in 2022 and 2023 are set to happen. At its regular meeting on 27 July 2021, the PSi Board of Directors approved the proposals for a fully online conference in July 2022 and a blended conference in South Africa in July 2023.
The 2022 conference is being organized directly by the PSi Board through a Conference Steering Committee made up of PSi directors and an Advisory Board that includes invited scholars and advocates on the theme as well as some representatives of our PSi communities: institutional members, working groups, and the Future Advisory Board. The conference will be held fully online because of the continuing uncertainty of our world due to the pandemic.
The 2022 theme is ‘Hunger’. We asked ourselves how we can gather in the midst of the pandemic and ethically respond to the dire situation of global hunger affecting millions of people across the world, with the pandemic exacerbating systems and structures of inequalities already present prior to Covid. How can Performance Studies respond to real, corporeal hunger? How can Performance Studies’ methodologies and practices contribute to global activism and discourse-making against hunger?
Read more on the Call for Proposals to be released on 15 September 2021. Reserve the dates: 6-9 July 2022.
In 2023 we are going to Johannesburg, South Africa! Hosting the conference is the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, specifically its Theatre and Performance Department and Drama for Life Department.
Here is an advance peek at the conference call:
“The conference proposes an exploration of and critical thinking around the notion of Uhambo Luyazilawula: Embodied Wandering Practices within the African continent and its implications for global scholarship and performance practice. The call to think deeply about ‘uhambo luyazilawula’ as an embodied wandering practice asks scholars, creatives, and performance artists to engage with what it means to return to journeying and traveling in order to interrogate experiential knowledge systems, and to centralise indigenous knowledges as part of this inquiry. It is to engage and unpack the wandering ways of life that characterise borderless boundaries; the politics of migration; linguistic, cultural and social exchanges; nomadic mobility; diasporic identity formation; and diverse access to various systems and structures of life. This collective exploration of the wandering and dynamic intersections between past and present, local and global, culture and corporation, the margin and the centre are fundamental to the project of positioning traditional African epistemology as essential in the production of contemporary knowledge, both local and global.
This blended conference intends to apply the embodied practice of traveling, of moving, and of journeying as both its theme and structure, encouraging participants and attendees to journey to various cultural and performance venues in Johannesburg, both onsite and online. Positioning the conference as a moving blended conference embraces the practice of ‘ukuhamba,’ mapping the intersections between performance, people, spaces and cultures.”
LINKS:
Reserve the dates: 27-30 July 2023.
Participation in the PSi annual conference requires membership in the association and payment of yearly dues which are set fairly low. If you are not yet a member and wish to be, register now at https://www.psi-web.org/membership/.
From:
Jazmin Llana (De La Salle University)
PSi Vice President