Congratulations to GRSJ Director Dr. Nora Angeles and GRSJ faculty Dr. John Paul Catungal and their research team on being awarded a 2024 Priority Thematic Public Humanities Research Incubator Grant for the project: Diaspora Theatre as Affective and Performative Archives on Transnational Migration
Abstract: A Public Humanities project about art, theatre, diaspora & migration seems counter-intuitive, problematic & frivolous amidst worsening refugee crises & anti-immigration rhetoric. However, recent literature highlights how artists ethically demonstrate the functional, instrumental, & political power of theatre & performance arts in shaping how varied audiences perceive im/migrants, their communities & cultures & consequently shape policies & service programs. Studying arts, culture & migration linkages have been long explored in Humanities & Cultural Studies, but less so within Migration Studies dominated by the Social Sciences. The performative, representational, & the sociological, e.g. migrant labour, race & precarity, connect the long-intertwined histories of theater & migration, requiring more invigorated, contextual, & critical examination in less studied sites & communities of immigrant-led diaspora theater in Western Canada. In deploying theatrical processes through the re-staging of the play buto-buto:bones are seeds, we cultivate a performance archive generated by Filipino immigrants drawn from their lived experiences, allowing action research participants to re-imagine their migratory narratives & histories, informed by current decolonization challenges in world theatre history textbooks notorious for their Eurocentric ways of knowing, looking, privileging & pedagogy.
Team Members:
Dr. Stephen Heatley, Department of Theatre and Film
Dr. John Paul Catungal, GRSJ and Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM)
Dr. Dennis Gupa, Department of Theatre and Film, University of Winnipeg
