Teaching workshop: performance and borders

Through this laboratory, students will: 1) examine how performance operates as a constitutive force in the making, maintenance, and contestation of borders across territorial, social, and symbolic registers; 2) analyze a broad range of border performances, situating each within its political and material conditions; 3) develop nuanced frameworks for understanding the complicities, ambivalences, and limits of performative border-crossing; and 4) engage with interdisciplinary theoretical tools drawn from border studies, performance studies, migration studies, and critical geography to analyze how bodies, movement, and representation intersect with regimes of sovereignty and control.

1) Students will critically analyze how performances participate in both the reproduction and the contestation of borders, demonstrating an understanding of performance as a constitutive rather than merely reflective practice; 2) Students will identify and compare border performances across a range of geopolitical and cultural contexts, articulating how each operates within specific regimes of mobility, sovereignty, and exclusion; 3) Students will evaluate dominant narratives of transgression and resistance in performance scholarship, producing more nuanced accounts of how performance can simultaneously reinforce, negotiate, and challenge borders; 4) Students will design and present a research project that examines a specific border performance, analyzing its political stakes and material effects.