Practice-as-Research Sessions
Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
Format and Approach
This series integrates autoethnography and practice-as-research through performance, choreography, and theater-based methods. Participants engage in writing, movement, and vocal practices to examine how cultural experience is personal, collective, and evolving.
Autoethnography uses personal experience to examine wider cultural and social conditions, while practice-as-research treats creative activity as a way of generating knowledge. Grounded in embodied inquiry and relational ethics, the sessions offer accessible pathways into performance research—equally suited for artists, educators, and those seeking to live more creatively in their daily lives.
Originally designed for BA, MA, and doctoral students in peace and conflict studies, performance, artistic research, critical theory, design, and education, the sessions can also be adapted for organizations, collectives, and individuals with no formal performance training.
Sessions may be offered independently or serve as the educational foundation for a longer Civic Performance Lab.
Session Units
(Each unit can be facilitated as a stand-alone session or part of a longer series.)
Writing About Self
Explore the materiality of language and the gesture of naming as gateways to layered understandings of identity.
Morning Ritual
Attend to the transition from rest to wakefulness through somatic awareness, discovering how everyday gestures carry communicative and ethical meaning.
Vocalizing Embodied Knowledge
Investigate the relationship between voice, memory, and emotion. Learn to vocalize from embodied awareness—beyond binaries of rationality and feeling.
Performing Cultural Selfhood
Engage in solo and group performance-making to examine how identity is co-created across physical, social, and digital environments.
These units are both reflective and generative, offering frameworks for socially engaged, interdisciplinary, and ethical creative practices. Whether culminating in a performance, a collaborative curriculum, or a dialogic facilitation model, the sessions support embodied inquiry as a foundation for creative and social transformation.
Formats and Delivery
Delivery options include:
One- or two-day workshops
Week-long intensives
Full-semester courses
Sessions are available in-person or online and can be embedded into existing programs or offered independently. Outcomes may include performances, reflective essays, participatory projects, public dialogues, and digital or visual works.
Each session invites participants to critically reflect on power relations, cultural selfhood, and the performance of identity in response to social and institutional norms. In longer formats, participants may develop a practice-as-research portfolio that begins with individual reflection and culminates in a collaborative or socially engaged work.
Download the Program Brochure (PDF)
Includes an overview of the methodology, detailed unit descriptions, learning outcomes, participant testimonials, and guidance on how to host or tailor these sessions for your institution or community.