Australasian Drama Studies Journal
Call For Papers
Special Issue (87), October 2025
We invite submissions for a special issue of Australasian Drama Studies, Issue 87, October 2025: Care, Discomfort and Performance.
Submissions may be in the form of a detailed proposal (up to 400 words) or a full draft (including an abstract of 100-150 words). A full draft or substantial example of academic writing is preferred from doctoral candidates, emerging, or previously unpublished researchers.
Proposals should be no more than 400 words, stating the title and author/s (with affiliations), and should give a clear sense of the proposed argument or investigation.
We invite proposals for papers of:
- maximum 6,000 words.
- maximum 4,000 words.
Or:
short provocations or reflections of maximum 1,500 words.
Please also submit a brief biography (50 words max) and set of up to five key words.
Timeline:
- Proposals/first drafts: Monday 20 January 2025.
- Notification of acceptance: Friday 7 February 2025.
- Full drafts: Friday 23 May 2025
- Peer review: June-July 2025
- Final deadline for papers: Friday 26 September 2025.
- Publication: October 2025.
Please note that the journal is now published online, so we welcome the integration of rich digital format such as images, video footage, sound files etc. Please also note that all submissions must adhere to the journal style guide here.
https://www.adsa.edu.au/dbpage.php?pg=journalsubmit
Please send enquiries or article proposals and drafts to the Guest Editors:
Janet Gibson: janet.gibson@mq.edu.au
Meg Mumford: m.mumford@unsw.edu.au
Care, Discomfort and Performance
In his recent call to attend to the importance of care within socially engaged arts, James Thompson contests the assumption that experiences of discomfort are necessary for successful artistic practice (1). Building from the idea that many people today experience disruptive shock in their everyday life, he asks: “Where is this comfort that needs to be dislodged?” (2) Thompson refers to economic hardship, mental health struggles, and violence as typical contemporary causes of shock, associating these with political cultures that “value strident individualism” (3). Other causal factors might include the ever-increasing speed of the world, which threatens the necessary temporal conditions for care (3), and the ongoing legacies of capitalism and colonialism, which generate displacement and environmental distress. In contexts that are often described as ‘uncaring’, it is not surprising that many theatre, drama and performance makers are creating new, rich practices that engage with care during both preparatory processes and public events. That is, they are engaging with how to “maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (4).[1] Ironically, our care-less world is also spawning an unprecedented surge of initiatives that seek to enhance well-being and safety across diverse domains including health, education, work and entertainment. Consequently, arts engagements centring care run into challenges such as being instrumentalised to provide band aid and/or highly regulated protective care, as well as to manage social and creative risks; or being pressured to achieve measurable outcomes and successful impacts. When navigating ‘discomfort’ in performance and care practices, artists have to reduce, strategically deploy, or experience multiple forms of discomfort.
Given these complexities, how are theatre, drama and performance artists navigating relations between care and discomfort? And how do we now approach the nature and role of discomfort in performance practice and scholarship, both past and present? Relationships between performance practices, artists, spectators, trainees, participants, and institutions invariably involve types, states and degrees of discomfort. This is particularly the case when experiences of uncertainty, disruption, marginalisation, pain and/or loss are to the fore. Recent feminist theorisations of discomfort have defined this emotional response as an unsettling visceral and geomaterial sense of dissonance, dis-ease or dislocation, and as a process of rupture that punctures our equilibrium and potentially offers different ways of thinking and knowing (5). In relation to research practice, avoiding feelings of discomfort can contribute to the maintenance of hierarchical and dominant power relations and knowledge production (6). Given the transformative potential of discomfort, what forms of it are antithetical to care-full performance? How do the various artists and/or other parties involved in performances that engage with care negotiate discomfort across artistic processes, practices, and works, as well as their residue after the curtain falls?
For this special issue, we invite authors to reflect on performance and participation concepts and practices as methodologies of care. In particular, we invite papers that consider care and discomfort in relation to performance (including theatre and drama). Topics to be addressed include but are not limited to:
- Performance or drama and care ethics
- Relational, spatial and/or temporal patterns arising when performance or drama projects adopt care as a guiding principle
- Metrics for success, time pressure and care-full performance
- Performance or drama and ‘after-care’
- Performance or drama and environmental care
- The politics of care and/ or discomfort in historical or contemporary performance or drama practices
- Relationships between discomfort and agency in care and performance or drama contexts
- Temporality and the value of discomfort, e.g. the long-term benefits of short-term discomfort or shock in performance or drama
- Re-negotiation of ‘ambiguous’, ‘ephemeral’ or ‘static’ modalities of practice in socially engaged performance, arts and care contexts
- Risk management and ‘safetyism’ in performance or drama training, institutions, events and works
- Instrumentalization of performance practices for health and well-being.
References
- James Thompson, Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art (London & New York: Routledge, 2023) 10.
- Ibid., 100.
- Ibid., 6, 10-11, 100.
- Laura Salisbury and Lisa Baraitser, ‘Depressing Time: Waiting, Melancholia, and the Psychoanalytic Practice of Care’, in Elisabeth Kirtsoglou and Bob Simpson (eds), The Time of Anthropology: Studies of Contemporary Chronopolitics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021) 104, 113.
- Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring’, in Emily K. Abel & Margaret K. Nelson (eds), Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1990) 40.
- Rachelle Chadwick, ‘On the Politics of Discomfort’, Feminist Theory, 22: 4 (2021) 560-561, 564
- Rachelle Chadwick, ‘On the Politics of Discomfort’, Feminist Theory, 22: 4 (2021) 563
[1] Referencing the post-humanist work of Maria Puig de La Bellacasa in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), James Thompson argues that this definition of care needs to be revised to accommodate a more dynamic version of interdependency that takes into consideration not only human-to-human care relations, but also those with other animals, objects and material phenomena. To this end the focus on human will and goals needs to be transformed by an emphasis on everything that is done to maintain, continue and repair the world so that all (rather than ‘we’) can live in it as well as possible. See Thompson, p. 71. Fisher and Tronto note that their argument about caring has strong affinities with feminist ecological arguments that ‘view care globally’ (1990: 57), and Thompson’s re-wording suggestion heightens this affinity.