Communication 615 - Survey of Performance Studies

This course is a survey in performance studies. As such, we will overview the history of the field, major tenets, paradigms, theories, methodologies, and directions. As a field of study, performance studies is interdisciplinary, practiced across fields, and specifically as a subfield and tradition in Communication. Beyond the field, we will look to the ways theories are produced as and through performance, how theories analyze as and through performance and how performance as a methodology is practiced as aesthetic communication, ritual, everyday life, ethnography, and more. Students will demonstrate their understanding of performance in all these ways through writing and analysis as well as through different kinds of performance practices. Students should leave the survey with an understanding of the breadth of performance studies and be prepared to use performance theories and methodologies in research, an area focus, or in further seminars.