Papers by Shauna M MacDonald
Text and Performance Quarterly, May 5, 2020
ABSTRACT In this response essay for the Performance Space, I argue that Dr Charles Parrott's ... more ABSTRACT In this response essay for the Performance Space, I argue that Dr Charles Parrott's “A Happily Married Man” provides an example of a new-to-us genre for solo performance. Through well-crafted, well-performed stories connected by common themes, Parrott muses about what it means to be an adult in the twenty-first century.
Text and Performance Quarterly, Oct 1, 2020
Routledge eBooks, Mar 1, 2023
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2021
The shifting existential, political, and social paradigms we are experiencing require new modalit... more The shifting existential, political, and social paradigms we are experiencing require new modalities of reflection, which need to occur, in effect, out on a limb, reaching beyond our existing methods and approaches while maintaining relevance to our lives. (Susan Kozel 8)Diffraction #1: Re-Entry"It's over," the voice was saying. The fog receding, the room came into focus. I removed the mask but stayed kneeling, clinging to the vestiges of that other space-time. I had never been in so deep; the exit could only be described as disorienting. This world is louder, brighter-harsh. (Once you've made this kind of journey, it's home that feels foreign). Staring down at the mural, the paint on my (her?) hands, the carpet leaving ridges in my knees, I breathe back into myself and search for the words. Finding them lacking, I just smile as I stand and begin to disinvest myself of the trappings of transport. I rub my eyes and cradle my breasts, willing my body to expand ba...
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2020
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2020
How do performance studies scholars communicate the field to and for students, scholars, and stak... more How do performance studies scholars communicate the field to and for students, scholars, and stakeholders? Through an analysis of online data gathered from institutions of higher education in the United States, we investigated how educators narrate performance studies in curricular descriptions. We detail the stated characteristics of performance studies and its object of study; the theories and sources referenced by scholars; and the methodologies, approaches, and techniques educators use and teach (to which ends). These findings and the collective picture they paint provide a guide for current and future scholars and students interested in performance studies praxis.
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2020
ABSTRACT In this response essay for the Performance Space, I argue that Dr Charles Parrott's ... more ABSTRACT In this response essay for the Performance Space, I argue that Dr Charles Parrott's “A Happily Married Man” provides an example of a new-to-us genre for solo performance. Through well-crafted, well-performed stories connected by common themes, Parrott muses about what it means to be an adult in the twenty-first century.
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2018
In this essay, I examine how people in a preservation community perform and articulate performanc... more In this essay, I examine how people in a preservation community perform and articulate performances of modern lighthouse keeping. I argue that keeping presents an alternative approach to metacultural agent performances and constructions of cultural memory. Keepers perform lighthouse tourism strategically in relation to heritage tourism to keep lighthouses and lighthouse culture alive, and in so doing, provide a window into tourism as performance, a critique of the heritage tourism frame, and a possibility for rethinking theorizations of authenticity, heritage, and tourism in performance studies. Keepers' performances provide a model for theorizing the production of heritage and tourism performance.
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2019
This essay contributes to interdisciplinary conversations about the positioning and future of per... more 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 fieldcontent analysiswe 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.
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2017
ABSTRACT In this performance response, I narrate my experience as a two-time witness of Hauntings... more ABSTRACT In this performance response, I narrate my experience as a two-time witness of Hauntings, a performance by Tessa Carr and Deanna Shoemaker. In form and content, I explicitly highlight an argument I see operating implicitly within the show: haunting is a relational phenomenon.
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2016
In this autoethnographic cartography, I argue for the need for alternative embodied maps for acad... more In this autoethnographic cartography, I argue for the need for alternative embodied maps for academic life. Using my experiences as a budding pharologist (someone who studies lighthouses), I bear witness to my cultural experience of academia through a collaged autoethnography of mapping and composing space. I bring together autoethnography, theories of cartography, as well as my experiences researching lighthouses as sites of public memory performance, to demonstrate that there is a need in the culture of academia for real discussions about anxiety and similar issues—among faculty and students—and that autoethnography, cartography, and pharology provide an entry into such a discussion. In fragmented sections designed to highlight the ways experiences intertwine, I move through four phases of feeling “blue”: the deep blue of confusing academic anxiety and depression; the search for a methodology to lead me to a brighter, more pleasant kind of blue; the research journey that moved me ...
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2015
In this “researcher9s prologue,” I story my experiences performing as and about a lighthouse, sha... more In this “researcher9s prologue,” I story my experiences performing as and about a lighthouse, sharing how this experience served as a catalyst for a new research trajectory. Narrating my writing, rehearsal, and performance as processes of inquiry, I share how this work generated critical questions about lighthouses as technologies, the dynamics of technoscientific care, and performative storytelling as a potential local communicative strategy. I draw upon performance studies’ theorizations of listening, writing, rehearsing, and performing, to present, by way of example, a methodological strategy for attending to the liminal research time between inspiration and systematic research study.
This dissertation is a performative exploration of experience within our technoscientific--that i... more This dissertation is a performative exploration of experience within our technoscientific--that is, technologically and scientifically saturated--world. Drawing upon posthumanism and cyborg studies and working through specific, mutated versions of performative inquiry and phenomenology, I aim to encourage creative public participation in technoscientific discourse. That is, I apply an adapted method (cyborg phenomenology) to my own staged personae performances of nonhuman entities in order to investigate technoscientific experience from a less anthrocentric perspective. My goal is to interrogate my performance experience in order to better understand the dynamics of agency and relationship within our technologically infused world, and to employ performance and performative writing as pedagogical tools for educating others about these dynamics. This document might be best read as an example of performative inquiry as a useful approach to the study of technoscience and its consequences. As a whole, this dissertation is a call for, theorization with, and performative demonstration of artful participation in the multi-layered discourses of technology and science that impact the lives of all beings in our world. It is an experiential experiment, an exploration of possibility, and a beginning
Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of …, 2010
Place, space, and homeplace have taken on increasing conceptual significance for performance stud... more Place, space, and homeplace have taken on increasing conceptual significance for performance studies practitioners. Despite a wealth of research, there are few theoretical models within the discipline to which researchers of homeplace can appeal for scholarly guidance. In this paper, I survey recent essays about home, place, and space within two major disciplinary journals to create such a model. Using my own experience with homeplace and performance as a frame, I outline four major orientations toward homeplace displayed within recent performance studies literature. Though my goal is far from exhaustive, I aim both to describe the variety of research projects being undertaken as well as to present readers with a useful theoretical model of performance and homeplace.
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2016
Canadian Theatre Review, 2012
Women's Studies in Communication, 2007
... Pre-menstrual Syndrome (PMS) has become a demon in our cultural imagination; no one would dar... more ... Pre-menstrual Syndrome (PMS) has become a demon in our cultural imagination; no one would dare to ask women ... A dozen years in martial arts and I' ve never bled this way. ... And it was then that I fell in love with red ("Patriarchal")." And it was then, performing bleeding while ...
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Papers by Shauna M MacDonald