ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins with the suggestion that a consideration of performance as research can be founded on the premise of Research as theatre (RaT): that scholarly research not only is performative but also operates theatrically. She argues that the theatrical underpinnings of scholarship can be unearthed by appealing to previous anti-theatrical characterizations of theatre's intentionality and artifice, as it is enlivened or undone through the contingency and excess of their material enactment. The author considers research to include a range of scholarly activities, including surveying the literature, collecting data, writing, teaching and communicating with disciplinary communities. Further, inverting the usual understanding of theatre as one instance of performance and considering performance as research (PAR) as one instance of (RaT) allows for generative and necessary discourse between theatre, materialist STS and feminist theory, to name only a few possible intersections.
