ABSTRACT
The organization Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, Inc. (PTO) is one of the reasons Augusto Boal’s work has been distributed across the United States, then that “multiplication”—as Boal called it—is partly rooted in the US academy of higher education. The US campus has never been a place for a broad, deep interrogation of systems of oppression as articulated in PTO’s founding documents. The 1997 University of Nebraska at Omaha Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference was more manageable with merely 400 attendees. Regrettably, Paulo Freire passed on May 2, 1997. That the conference formed in time for him to be a guest remains one of the brilliantly shining stars of PTO’s growing constellation. The US campus has never been a place for a broad, deep interrogation of systems of oppression as articulated in PTO’s founding documents. To the contrary, it has been one of the most powerful agents of containment and management of social and economic democracy.
