Call for Papers: Performing Citizenship

Sunday October 28, 2007

Call for Papers: Performing Citizenship

A special Issue of Text and Performance Quarterly
Guest Editors: Karen Mitchell, University of Northern Iowa, Harry Brod, University of Northern Iowa and Sonja Kuftnec, University of Minnesota

"To be a citizen is not to live in a society. A citizen is one who transforms society."
-Augusto Boal

Recently, an interest in the intersection of performance and legal/symbolic citizenship has emerged among scholars and artists who explore the performance of citizenship from a number of perspectives: global, national, transnational, historical, local, and personal. Historically, citizenship has been used as a means to exclude and to regulate people as well as to empower them. This is particularly evident in the post-9/11 world where we witness global events which devalue human rights and cause us to question the meaning of the word citizen.

We invite manuscripts that explore such questions as:

• What results when we reclaim citizenship by seeing ourselves as agents of transformation rather than simply as residents of society?

• How can performance be used to overturn podium centered power structures into audience centered dialogue that strives to create space for all participants' voices?

• How does performance work with and against the politics of democracy?

• How can performance practices draw attention to the exclusions of citizenship: for those brought to a country against their will, in residence prior to the foundation of a state, or for legal or illegal immigrants?

• How might performance practices activate global citizens?

• What scripts and roles must an immigrant learn to order to have access to citizenship?

Our hope is that writers will submit manuscripts suitable for each of the traditional sections of the journal: Research Reports, The Performance Space, and Books in Review. Inquiries about possible topics and approaches are welcome and should be directed to Karen Mitchell at the email address listed below.

Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed. (2003). To facilitate the blind, peer review process, no material identifying the author(s) of submitted manuscripts should appear anywhere other than the title page, which should include: (a) the title of the paper, (b) the author's name, position, institutional affiliation, address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address; (c) any acknowledgements, including the history of the manuscript if any part of it has been presented at a conference or is derived from a thesis or dissertation; (d) a close word count. The first page of the manuscript itself should include the title of the paper, an abstract of 100 words, and a list of five suggested key words. Manuscripts must be double-spaced throughout and should be no longer than 9000 words, inclusive of notes and reference matter.

Please submit an electronic copy to Karen.Mitchell@uni.edu by September 1, 2008.