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Special Issue: Performance Praxis in Carceral Spaces
Edited by Kamran Afary, Greg Langner, and Allen Burnett
Teaching and Learning Through Performance Praxis in Carceral-Impacted Spaces
[essay/pdf]
Who/What is Godot?
[video]
Celebrating the Arts and Education in Prison as Practices of Survival, Resistance, Healing, and Transformation [essay/pdf]
Performing Abolition in the Hold: Gender-Responsive Prisons, Black Trans
Subjectivities, and the Possibility of Abolitionist Prison Education
[essay/pdf]
Troublemaker [essay/pdf]
Pedagogical Explorations: Unveiling
Narratives in Iranian Prison Literature and Human Rights Education
[essay/pdf]
<notes on contributors>
» Kamran Afary is associate professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Los Angeles and a registered drama therapist (RDT). In addition to teaching courses on campus and at Lancaster Prison and providing supervision on research and practice, he offers continuing education trauma-informed workshops for mental health professionals on Narradrama.
» Lynn Baker-Nauman, MA, LMFT, RDT, is an Adjunct Professor of Social Work/Human Services and Theatre at Folsom Lake College for the Prison Re-entry Education Program and for Cal State Dominguez Hills MA program for Humanities in CDCR prisons. She has taught and directed Shakespeare to groups in multiple prisons in Northern California. Lynn is a Marriage and Family Therapist and Registered Drama Therapist doing trauma work with individuals and couples. As a social justice advocate, Lynn believes in our ability to re-story and connect with our power to heal through theatre. She has published in Drama Therapy Review and the edited collection Into Abolitionist Theatre: A Guidebook for Liberatory Theatre-making.
» Allen Burnett Is Exectutive Director and Co-founder at The PRISM Way.
» David Carillo is a formerly incarcerated college student and artist.
» Jacob Carlock is an incarcerated college student and artist.
» Meghan Cosgrove is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at Colorado State University and a lecturer in the University of Colorado's Prison Education Program.
» Keean Davis is an incarcerated college student and artist.
» Stephen J. Hartnett is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver and the Director of the University of Colorado's Prison Education Program.
» Jaden Janak (they/he) is an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College and a Senior Fellow with the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. Their research focuses on U.S. prison abolition organizing, LGBTQ+ radical politics, and popular culture. His current book project, Experiments in Freedom: Present Histories of an Abolitionist Future, explores U.S. prison abolitionist organizing from the 1990s to the present. Their scholarship can be found in journals such as GLQ, Behemoth, Social Education, and Communication/Critical Cultural Studies. Outside of their research, Jaden organizes with various abolitionist collectives.
» Kenji Jones is an incarcerated college student and artist.
» Greg Langner is a tenured Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Antelope Valley College, in the northern rural region of Los Angeles County. Building on backgrounds in community organizing, arts management, campaign politics, and public performance, Greg's Ph.D. in Communication and Performance Studies — earned with a graduate minor in Film and Media Arts — focused on critical, creative, and ethnographic research methods. Interrogating plainly uneven worldviews and the destructive behaviors always following them, Greg's practice-based research centers embodied knowledge, individual intuition, scientific inquiry, and collaborative experience, with sharp interest in the potential of creative and digital media to influence individual and social change. An atypical learner, Greg's scholarship and artistic practice also often analyze, and amplify, the expressive values of cartoon animation in contemporary culture.
» Sean Mueller is a formerly incarcerated college student and artist.
» Marcos Santos is a Lecturer at California State University, Los Angeles.
» Manuel Sisneros is a formerly incarcerated college student and artist.
» Jeff Stein Is Director at Project Rebound, California State University, Los Angeles.
» Taveuan Williams is an incarcerated college student and artist.
» Warren Worthington is an incarcerated college student and artist.
» Claudia Yaghoobi is a Roshan Distinguished Professor of Persian Studies and serves as the director of the Center for the Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Yaghoobi is a scholar of Iranian cultural studies and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Transnational Culture in the Iranian Armenian Diaspora (Edinburgh UP 2023), Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Persian Literature and Film (Cambridge UP 2020), and Subjectivity in 'Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (Purdue UP 2017). Currently, Yaghoobi is completing her fourth monograph, titled Lives Translation: Armenian Women's Voices in Iran and the US, under contract with UNC Press.
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (issn: 1557-2935)
editor-in-chief: Michael LeVan (Vancouver, WA)
managing editor: Greg Langner (Antelope Valley College)
aftermaths editors: Mary Elizabeth Anderson & Richard Haley (San Jose State University)
the city editors: Patrick Duggan (University of Southampton) and Stuart Andrews (Brunel Univesity of London)
performance & pedagogy editor: Robert Gutierrez-Perez (California State University, San Marcos)
the performance wunderkammer editor: Christopher J. McRae (University of South Florida)
book review editor: Christopher J. McRae (University of South Florida)
banner/issue image, "Slot" by Michael LeVan