Platform Vol. 6, No. 2 - Representing the Human

Platform is a refereed electronic journal devoted to postgraduates, postdoctoral researchers, and entry-level academics in the fields of theatre and performing arts. Platform, as the name suggests, works to provide a space for postgraduate researchers and entry-level academics to have their work disseminated through online publication. Platform is run by postgraduates for postgraduates, and operates a peer and academic review system which ensures that contributors not only have the opportunity to publicise their research, but also receive valuable feedback.

Platform is published twice yearly. Each edition of the journal covers a broad range of topics, making it possible for diverse research interests to be accommodated in each volume. 

This issue: Vol. 6, No. 2 takes as its theme representations of the human, a topic that developed out of a symposium hosted by Royal Holloway’s Department of Drama and Theatre in 2011 entitled ‘Who Do We Think We Are: Representing the Human’. The question underpinning that symposium, the question of who ‘we’ are as humans, affects many areas of human (and nonhuman) concern: politics, ethics, history, religion, economics, the environment, science, technology and, of course, literature, drama, theatre, performance and dance, to name only a few. Who or what humans are thought to be and the stories that locate them shape how people behave, treat others, construct laws, inflict punishments, educate and so on. Representations of humans in the arts thereby offer rich and, potentially, influential repositories of ways in which humans have been, and are, conceived and reconceived. Catherine Belsey explains that although ‘[f]ictional texts do not necessarily mirror the practices prevalent in a social body’, they do articulate ‘the meanings its members understand and contest’ about ‘the human’ (5). This being so, Belsey takes the view, as do we, the editors, that fictional representations of humans in literature, theatre and performance constitute possible places ‘from which to begin an analysis of what it means to be a person […] at a specific historical moment’ (ibid).