Performing Social Justice used performance as a way of engaging vital social issues and enacting change. Taught as a sprint course, the lab was organized around the following questions: how have notions of social justice been conceptualized over time? Who counts, or is excluded, from definitions of citizenship? How is social justice performed/embodied and by whom? How can performance reveal fissures in structures of oppression? How do various populations resist normative notions of citizenship, thus blurring lines between borders, nations, and the un/documented?
Taking inspiration from the Living Newspapers of the 1930s, as well as from contemporary practices in devising theatre, students in this lab researched, reflected, and took creative action as they experimented with ways to represent two complex civic problems--racism and climate change. The lab culminated in a short collaborative performance.
