ABSTRACT

Situated Knowing aims to critically examine performance studies’ ideological and socio-political underpinnings while also challenging the Anglo-centrism of the discipline.

This book reworks the concept of situated knowledges put forward over thirty years ago by American biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway in order to challenge the Enlightenment paradigm of objectivity in sciences by emphasising the role of the embodied and partial socio-cultural perspective of the scholar in the production of knowledge.

Through carefully selected case studies of contemporary natural, cultural and technological performances, contributors to this volume show that the proposed approach requires new genealogies of traditional concepts, emerges from encounters with contemporary performative arts or contact zones and may potentially go beyond the human in order to include non-human ways of being in the world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, cultural studies, media studies and theatre studies.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Situated knowing: From performance art to the laboratory of knowledge-making

part 1|54 pages

Knowing and alternative genealogies

chapter 1|29 pages

Slough media

chapter 2|19 pages

The performing arts as ‘cognitive hybrids’

The power of the performatic Spiel-Raum

part 2|56 pages

Knowing with performative arts

chapter 3|19 pages

Dead capital

chapter 4|16 pages

Beyond presence

Performing the limits of knowing

part 3|34 pages

Knowing in contact zones

part 4|36 pages

Knowing beyond the human

chapter 8|14 pages

The shadow of a pine tree

Authorship, agency and performing beyond the human

chapter 9|18 pages

What performativity scholarscan learn from mushrooms

Situated knowing in polyphonic assemblages