New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research

In what ways can performance be mobilized to resist? This is the question that the present volume explores from within the context of qualitative research. From an arts-based approach, authors suggest methods on how artistic practice resists. The volume addresses how critical performance autoethnography might retain its ethical and democratic potential without falling into dogmatism or hegemony. This vision for democracy can even be accomplished through improvised, process-centered pieces that weave together thoughts from several key scholars, all to give us a critical perspective on how performative autoethnography is paradigmatically situated. The performance texts collected here question and resist, showing how the experience of art-making can move us through political and public spaces with liberatory potential, challenging social and ideological hegemonies and to generate social movements. Imaginative arts-based practices allow us access to emotional and embodied phenomena that remain otherwise foreclosed by traditional forms of inquiry. From poetics to public performances, subversive interventions, and more, these chapters bring a radical performative discourse to the fore. In so doing, the chapters work to create a framework for just performance, showing us how we might live performance as resistance.


Introduction

The Generic Activism of Just Performance

James Salvo


Chapter One

The World’s Resistance in Arts-Based Research

Richard Siegsemund


Chapter Two

Failing Better: The Ethics of Critical Performance Autoethnography

Sophie Tamas


Chapter Three

Performance Autoethnography: Many Surfaces, Many Forms, Many Interpretations

Desiree Yomtoob


Chapter Four

Paradigmatic Situatedness of Performative Autoethnography: A Postcritical Perspective

William M. Sughrua


Chapter Five

Quest for Lunch and Comfort Zones: About Personal-Becoming-Political Encounters

Inge G. E. Blockmans


Chapter Six

Compositions: A Visual Essay

Jasmine B. Ulmer


Chapter Seven

Art-Making in Public—Impacting Positive Transformation

Aravindhan Natarajan


Chapter Eight

Poetics of Rage as Performative Creative Subversion: Autoethnography and Social Drama

César Antonio Cisneros Puebla


Chapter Nine

Saving Our Soul: Imagination as Activism

Nancy Gerber


Chapter Ten

Escaping into Liberatory and De/Colonial Possibilities: Juxtaposing Absurdity and Creativity

Kakali Bhattacharya


About the Authors


Index