The first full episodes of Pedagogy in Process will be published next week! This month’s conversations were initially presented as part of a roundtable titled “Queer Archival Praxis: Histories and Methodologies” as part of the 2023 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference.

How do we queer the archive or the conference, bend the format to fit people in the session rather than fitting ourselves into traditional formats and structures? One response to that was to turn our conference panel into a podcast. Three reasons why: one, it allows us to create an audio-based record, an archive in itself, of the ideas shared. It’s an archival praxis that privileges dialogue, relationality, and collaborative processing. Two, a podcast can make this conversation accessible to a broader audience so that it can more easily continue beyond this one conference room in this one location, in this one ninety-minute session. And three, the podcast format made it possible for the conversation to be accessible to all of the scholars who wanted to be a part of the session in the first place.

So, we proposed this conference roundtable with a roster of ten participants. Only four of us were able to travel to Austin in August to present in person… for the variety of reasons that conferences like this one tend to be inaccessible, particularly to contingent faculty members, graduate students, parents of small children, people with disabilities, early career scholars scrambling to move for new jobs, etc… So, a couple of weeks ahead of the conference, we recorded a virtual “part one” of our discussion. Part of that conversation aired in September on my other series, Gender Euphoria, the Podcast, on HowlRound Theatre Commons.

I was joined by fellow queer artists, educators, historians, scholars, co-conspirators-in-tearing-down-structures-of-fuckery: Kelli Crump, Jordan Ealey, Victoria Lafave, David Silvernail, and Janet Werther. We tackled the following questions:

What role does white supremacy play in the creation of the queer theatre cannon (which informs which queer and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, people of color] stories are told on stage and then therefore preserved in the archive)?

What makes it into our classrooms for students to learn about as they become future historians, directors, producers?

As queer theatre artists, historians, educators, what power do we have, or what responsibility do we have, to change that? 

Check out our conversation on HowlRound Theatre Commons

or listen on Spotify!