Events: Kritika Kultura Lecture Series presents Victor Merriman
Kritika Kultura, the international refereed journal of language, literary, and cultural studies of the Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University, will host a lecture by Victor Merriman. The lecture is titled “Drama, Mediation, and Contemporary Social Imaginaries” and will be held on April 30, 2019, 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., at SOM 111 (Ching Tan Room), Ateneo de Manila University. The lecture will conclude with a launch of Professor Merriman's book Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-Common. The event is open to the public. About the lecture This lecture seeks to identify, evaluate, and propose strategies for navigating the mediated, dramatized tropes which inform our contemporary social imaginaries. It draws on Professor Merriman’s recently published book Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-Common (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and develops ideas first considered in "Marking 'Austerity': Critique, Purpose and Performance," his editor’s introduction to Forum Kritika: Performance and Domination. He will argue that Deficit Culture is a moralizing enabler of neoliberal "Austerity" in the Global North, and what is known as the "Anglosphere," and that its rhetorical figurations are essential to the proliferation of a range of post-liberal, illiberal and white supremacist ideologies, none of which are compatible with democratic public life. He will consider the implications of mediations of public life and "life-in-public" for ideas of the common good, and practices of life-in-common. The lecture will conclude with a reflection on how live acts of theater and performance are positioned, challenged, and enabled by on-line mediation. About the resource person Victor Merriman is Professor of Critical Performance Studies and Director of Research in Performing Arts at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England. He established the Performance and Civic Futures Research Group in 2013, following a Colloquium on Performance and Domination. He has edited three Forum Kritika special issues for Kritika Kultura: Radical Theatre and Ireland (2010: 14/15); Performance and Domination (2013: 21/22); and with Dr. Niamh Malone, Radical Cultural Responses to Crises in Urban Democracy (2018: 30/31). He is author of Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s (Carysfort Press, 2011), Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-Common (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and many articles and book chapters on drama, postcolonial criticism, pedagogy, cultural politics, and public policy. He is a member of the International Advisory Boards of Perspectives in Arts and Humanities: Asia and UNITAS, and the British Association of Irish Studies, which he has served as Treasurer and Membership Secretary. He is a founding director of One Hour Theatre Company (2016-ongoing), and his dramaturgical credits include The Press by David Lloyd, staged at Ateneo de Manila University (2009). About Kritika Kultura Kritika Kultura is acknowledged by a host of Asian and Asian American Studies libraries and scholarly networks, and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Clarivate), Scopus, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). For inquiries about submission guidelines and future events, visit http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk or email kk.soh@ateneo.edu. |
