One of the world's most distinguished authorities on qualitative research establishes the connection of performance narratives with performance ethnography and autoethnography, the linkage of these formations to critical pedagogy and critical race theory, and the histories of these formations.

The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries.Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies. The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.

This book is a manifesto. It is about rethinking performance autoethnography, about the formation of a critical performative cultural politics, about what happens when everything is already performative, when the dividing line between performativity and performance disappears. This is a book about the writing called autoethnography. It is also about what this form of writing means for writers who want to perform work that leads to social justice. Denzin’s goal is to take the reader through the history, major terms, forms, criticisms and issues confronting performance autoethnography and critical interpretive. To that end many of the chapters are written as performance texts, as ethnodramas. A single thesis organizes this book: the performance turn has been taken in the human disciplines and it must be taken seriously. Multiple informative performance models are discussed: Goffman’s dramaturgy; Turner’s performance anthropology; performance ethnographies by A. D. Smith, Conquergood, and Madison; Saldana’s ethnodramas; Schechter’s social theatre; Norris’s playacting; Boal’s theatre of the oppressed; and Freire’s pedagogies of the oppressed. They represent different ways of staging and hence performing ethnography, resistance and critical pedagogy. They represent different ways of "imagining, and inventing and hence performing alternative imaginaries, alternative counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire" (Schechner 2015). This book provides a systematic treatment of the origins, goals, concepts, genres, methods, aesthetics, ethics and truth conditions of critical performance autoethnography. Denzin uses the performance text as a vehicle for taking up the hard questions about reading, writing, performing and doing critical work that makes a difference.

Whilst exploring the ethics of ethnography, this book illustrates the relevance of performance ethnography across disciplinary boundaries, exploring links between theory & method, various theoretical concepts & a number of methodological techniques.

Performed Ethnography and Communication explores the relationships between these three key terms, addressing the impact of ethnography and communication on the cutting edge of performance studies. Ranging from digital performance, improvisation and the body, to fieldwork and staged collaboration, this volume is divided into two main sections: "Embodied technique and practice," which addresses improvisation, devised theatre-making, and body work to consider what makes bodies move, sound, behave, mean, or appear differently, and the effects of these differences on performance; "Oral history and personal narrative performance," which is concerned with the ways personal stories and histories might be transformed into public events, looking at questions of perspective, ownership, and reception. Including specific historical and theoretical case studies, exercises and activities, and practical applications for improvisation, ethnography, and devised and digital performance, Performed Ethnography and Communication represents an invaluable resource for today’s student of performance studies, communication studies or cultural studies.

Performance and Ethnography: Dance, Drama, Music revisits the territory of the performance orientation, touching on anthropology, dance, folklore, music and theatre to look for present trends in both the ethnography of performance and performance ethnography. One of the main concerns of this volume is with an embodied, affective and sensory ethnography that privileges encounters between ethnographer, participants and practices as key to understanding and knowledge. Another is the extent to which individuals are shaped by their engagement with ethnographic practice in the midst of migration, diffusion, revival, appropriation and commodification of performance. A third is the interface of academic disciplines with the idea of performance, and the way in which academics and practitioners are drawn to ethnography to better understand, negotiate, perform and profess their diverse fields. Individual chapters include a refreshed interface for performance studies and anthropology through new approaches to ritual; a consideration of performance studies through an ethnography of PSi; the emplaced body as a tool for ethnographic research; somatic practice in dance as a mode of ethnography; artisanal musical instrument making as performance; the commodification of traditional performance; and an introductory overview that reflects shifting ethnographic perspectives on traditional performances.

This engaging text introduces the burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of cultural performance, offering ethnographic approaches to performance as well as looking at the aesthetics of experience and performance theory. Examining cultural performance from anthropological, geographical and corporeal standpoints, this book offers many examples of the ways in which performance art and entertainment utilize cultural methods to deepen and enrich the practice. Featuring case studies from a rich cross-section of academics, chapters explore performances from regions as far flung as Bhutan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand and the USA. With cultural performances as varied as Catholic rituals, Maori ceremonies, Monster Truck rallies, musicals, theatre and singing performances, this fascinating text compares performance as art and performance as cultural expression. Core reading for introductory and interdisciplinary modules on performance, this is also an ideal text for upper undergraduate and postgraduate students of performance, visual arts, cultural studies or ethnography.

Publisher description

Anthropologist Fabian mentioned a proverb he had heard to a company of actors in Zaire, and it triggered an ethnographic brainstorming session which resulted in a play, Le pouvoir se mange entier. (Power is eaten whole). This study, an experiment in ethnographic works, examines traditional proverbs about power as it illustrates how the play was created, rehearsed, and performed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.