By the time you read this it is already too late: The problem of the online lecture

The challenges of online teaching have been widely diagnosed and addressed, particularly since the ‘crash course’ in remote learning forced by the COVID-19 lockdowns. Remote learning moved from a typically marginal area of pedagogical activity into the mainstream, as all educators and learners were unexpectedly having to find ways of working within a new dynamic and context in which the learning encounter to take place. The negative impacts of this shift have been thoroughly documented, in international reports such as those by UNESCO (Meinck, Fraillon, and Strietholt 2012) and UNICEF (2022), with the latter warning of the risk of a ‘lost generation’ from a variety of factors impacting socialisation and development, including access to education.

As those of us working with Higher Education at this time experienced, the abrupt shift to remote learning involved a steep learning curve in relation to telematic learning tools. This shift involved greater reliance on asynchronous learning, where learners participate in their own time and pace, such as on discussion boards, remote assignments, and independent reading and writing; as well as synchronous learning via video conference tools such as Teams or Zoom, which assume that both teacher and learner will be seated before a computer screen and camera and as such depend on a variety of material factors, such as access to reliable internet connections, availability of a quiet room and up-to-date hardware, and ability of participants to maintain attention for the duration of the lecture. In this context, numerous pointers and guides were produced by university educational and technological support departments, software providers, and teachers who were experienced in online learning, often in the form of FAQs, or frequently asked questions.

The challenge for online learning, as Peter Shea et al. (2006) articulated well before the COVID-19 pandemic, is to create a sense of ‘presence’. In a quantitative survey, Shea et al. measured online learners’ sense of being part of such a classroom community in relation to ‘perceived levels of instructors’ teaching presence’, which they measured according to a variable they defined as ‘the Teaching Presence Scale’ (178). Their study was predicated upon a ‘participation’ rather than ‘acquisition’ model of learning, in which learning is conceived as ‘a process of becoming a member of a certain community’ (Sfard 1998, 6). Shea et al. concluded that ‘The respondents to the survey were significantly more likely to report higher levels of learning and community when they also reported that their instructors exhibited more salient “teaching presence” behaviors’ (184) through instructional design and directed facilitation.

Within the context of theatre and performance studies, educators wrestled with these new challenges in various ways. A trio of articles in a post-pandemic issue of Research in Drama Education reflect on some creative approaches to this challenge. As high school classrooms in Canada became virtual, Christine Balt (2024) found herself ‘adrift in adrift in practical, pedagogical and philosophical challenges’ (3), which she engaged with through a process of ‘feeling together’ with her learners. ‘Togetherness’ was something which was built, through online ritual and embracing the shared and ‘messy’ affects of isolation (17). Similarly, Michelle MacArthur et al. (2024), taking inspiration from philosophies and practices of care ethics, argue that centring care in online learning might both counter the deficiencies of the virtual encounter, and also harness this interruption in learning as an opportunity to foreground practices of care more broadly: ‘In spite of its limitations, we argue that this provisional virtual space offers new, altered modes of caring (and imagining care) through its disruption of boundaries and de-hierarchisation of many theatrical and training norms’ (25). Surveying the impact of COVID-19 on youth performing arts in Australia, Bryoni Trezise et al. (2024) argue that the innovative practices developed here exemplify what they refer to as ‘creative literacies’ of resilience, agility, and adaptability (44, 48ff). Elsewhere and with other collaborators, Trezise expands on this theme to argue that performance-based practices that foreground bodily intuition and kinaesthetic sensibility are precisely the approaches needed to cultivate creativity in online and hybrid learning (Trezise, Tálamo, and White 2023).

This piece, the one you are reading now, shares an interest with these other makers and scholars in the ways in which online learning presents challenges for performance-based learning, and also how performance-based practices might offer creative parameters for thinking and acting through these challenges in ways that are generative of agential possibilities—not just in spite of these constraints, but embracing them as creative material with which to work. Like Trezise et al. (2023), the implicit argument of this piece is that such creativity is relevant not only to online teaching of performance-related practices, but also that all remote learning might benefit from such a performance-based perspective on its pedagogic modes.

However, this piece thinks through the problem of the online lecture from a performance philosophy perspective—that is, to think through the problems that the format raises as (both) philosophical and performance problems: problems of synchronization, of asynchronous engagement and distraction, of remoteness and spatiotemporal ‘lag’, and of the parameters that enable the performance/pedagogic encounter itself. And this piece also thinks through the method of performance philosophy—that is, by understanding performance as itself a mode of thinking—and so it engages with these problems in a performative mode. The mode that it chooses is that of the performance-lecture, as both its subject of enquiry but also the format that it itself takes—at least in its original presentation, in which this piece was itself an online (performance) lecture, though now adapted for the (digital) page. How might the format of the performance-lecture allow learning to engage with its own conditions of production?

2. Frequently Asked Questions

The text for this video is composed of phrases from FAQ guides from a variety of sources, including internal university memos, online forums and tutorials, and help sections of websites. As ephemeral guides, original sources no longer exist.

Hello! Learn how you and your team can stay informed, organized, and connected—no matter where you are.

Careful planning of your course is essential for creating a positive and effective learning experience for your students. Before you begin to design your course online, review your current teaching strategies, the course learning outcomes and the learning activities used to assess the outcomes. Articulating the learning outcomes and aligning them with teaching and assessment strategies—”constructive alignment” (Biggs 1999)—will help you select your course content and plan the learning activities for your students.

A photo of the course instructor and their relevant contact details situate the teacher in the course. This is the first step in creating teacher presence that is strongly linked to “students’ sense of learning community” (Shea, Sau Li, and Pickett 2006).

If you receive error code 10003, it may be due to a certificate issue on your device. If your device is managed by your organization’s IT department, it is recommended to reach out to them to fix this issue.

There are two options: 1. Instructor submits a request for a new self-enrolment key to be created. 2. Super TELT Admin manually corrects the user’s inactive account.

Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—whatever works for your team!

Create media content for stakeholders (3D models, scans, art/visuals, 2D/360 video, editing/cleanup, audio, user interfaces, etc) and bring them together as needed.

Create instructions and guides for teachers and their students. Scope, design, create, test, deploy, and maintain immersive experiences for stakeholders.

Type in the session name that you want here: typically, ‘Lectures’ or ‘Tutorials’. This will create your first sub-room. This will generate a ‘dial in’ box that you should ignore.

If you hear audio echo or audio feedback during your meeting, there are three possible causes: A participant has both the computer and telephone audio active; Participants have computer or telephones speakers that are too close to each other; Multiple computers with active audio are in the same conference room.

Hello, our UK based company is currently using the Phone with Calling Plan Trial but when attempting to purchase it states (country zone 1 - US) and obviously we are UK based. How can we confirm that this is the correct calling plan given there are no alternatives?

Hello, does anyone know if it possible to allow members to edit post/announcements? Trying to work in a channel to provide information for user, we would ideally like to work collaboratively on areas and enhance first drafts announcements.

Hi, my name is Didi. I’m happy to help you today.

It is possible if we assign a messaging policy for specific users to be able to edit sent messages such as announcements. After we’ve created a team and added members to it, added users get automatically added to public channels. For private (and shared) channels, however, members need to be added manually.

Catch up on all your unread messages, @mentions, replies, and more under “Activity”. Use the Search box to find and filter specific items or people, take quick actions, and launch apps.

To isolate the attendee: Host can mute the attendee one at a time; Host can mute all, and unmute one at a time; Attendee can mute themselves.

Hello, the “Immersive Technologies team” partner with academics to explore, create, and deliver effective immersive experiences to enhance students’ education.

Note: Escalation option will not be visible until after 24 hours of the support ticket submission.

Note: When choosing a page format, consider all the pros and cons. The “Collapsed Topic” page format provides the best flexibility and advantages. “Topic” and “Weekly” formats are also very useful, and are simpler to use.

Note: Don’t use too many fonts or colours. Two font styles are adequate: one for headings and another for body text.

Give each section a short title by entering title text in the section summaries. Don’t use long activity or resource names. These are hyperlinked names, not full descriptions. Place any further information in the item’s “Description” or “Introduction” field, which displays when the item is accessed. If necessary, select “Display description on course page”, but if you do, keep the description short.

Note: Include short labels to break up resources and activities lists and help users find things quickly.

Note: Indent items below labels to indicate the hierarchy of information, but don’t overdo it. Too many levels of indenting can detract from the usability of the page.

Note: On October 1, 2021 the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) e-mandate directive will be taking effect for recurring payments using India Bank Cards. Starting October 1, 2021, customers who are using India bank debit or credit cards may need to use PayNow for their recurring payments.

Note: Use images in section summaries to enhance your course page, but keep them small so that they don’t dominate the course page.

Note: Obtain feedback from self, peers, facilitators and teachers, clients, friends.... Ask yourself: What do my peers think? What does my teacher think? Did my performance meet expectations? Would my performance be acceptable in the real world? What do I think?

I will wait for you to catch up.

Go ahead, I will be right behind you.

I am listening, just like you.

We might say this together.

We might say this together:

I am listening just like you.

Go ahead, I will be right behind you.

I will wait for you to catch up.

3. Performance’s double-hold

Consider this as a definition: performance is that which attempts to hold that within which it itself is held. This may take the form of an explicit theatricality, foregrounding and reflecting upon the conditions of being seen and being heard, of the speech and appearance of an actor—which can have both dramatic as well as political dimensions. This politics of making an appearance is foregrounded in what might be called an Arendtian turn of political philosophy (Damian Martin and Schmidt 2019), following Hannah Arendt’s descriptions of ‘spaces of appearance’, which Arendt writes, ‘come into being whenever [persons] are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government’ (Arendt [1958] 1998, 199).

Arendt’s view presupposes an equal capacity of anyone to make an appearance. Elsewhere Arendt makes the theatrical metaphor more explicit, writing that ‘Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. The stage is common to all who are alive’ (Arendt 1978, 21). But as others following Arendt have pointed out, this stage is not common, and one definition of politics might be formed by a distinction between what is and isn’t common to all. Judith Butler writes that that certain actors and actions are deemed ‘prepolitical’ or ‘extrapolitical’; ‘they break into the sphere of appearance as from the outside’ (Butler 2015, 78). Butler argues that ‘any conception of the political has to take into account what operation of power demarcates the political from the prepolitical’ (Butler 2015, 205). And we might think about Jacques Rancière’s provocations around the distribution or apportionment of what is and isn’t sensible:

The appearance of politics is dependent upon a politics of appearance, one that attends to the conditions that make politics possible: who speaks, who is seen, and into what categories such speech and action is perceived to fit by those who are standing by. As Butler has described extensively, the claiming of the right to appear is a performative politics, where the performative is that which generates the conditions that allow the performative to be recognized as such.

All of which is to suggest that a self-reflexive attention to the conditions of appearance—the stage that supports certain kinds of speech and action—is, or at least can be, a political domain. In their ambivalent propositionality—consider this gesture as gesture, consider these words as words—those words and gestures that are explicitly framed as ‘performance’ can also reach outside their frame from within, claiming the circumstances under which they are produced as the material of the performance itself.

4. Planetarity

It’s late, 11pm where I am, 9pm where he is, but 8am where some of the others are. I can hear the gathering of bats in the fruit trees in the dusk outside my window, and morning birdsong from other time zones through my speakers. There is a hot cup of tea in my hands and the steam where it collects on my glasses is a half-gauze between me and the screen.

We might say this together,

that within which it itself is held,

performance is that which attempts to hold

all of the words gathered here.

All of the words gathered here.

Performance is that which attempts to hold

that within which it itself is held.

We might say this together.

My friend Felipe is on the screen, describing the difference between the planetary and the global. He’s quoting Spivak (2003) and as he’s talking I’m downloading the PDF in another tab, because I no longer have a library of books, just bookmarks. The global is the globalised, an expansion of a specific, White predatory capitalist locality to encompass the globe. It is a thing done to this planet where one set of norms and hierarchies and disciplinary structures have been exported, imposed, regimented, coerced, advertised, superimposed, or otherwise sold on the basis of an underlying juxtaposition between a centre and a global spread. But the planetary precedes and survives the global, he is saying. It is not a historical condition but a superposition, a multiversal simultaneity of hyperlocalities, a multipolar distribution rather than a single axis of orientation and occidentalisation. It is not even a thing, but a mode of awareness, a fact of relationality, a nonhuman assemblage that defies rationalisation.

Or at least that’s how I understood it, or how I’m remembering it now, as I think back to the image of me sitting in my Sydney apartment on stolen Gadigal land, as my tea got stronger and Felipe gestured emphatically from within his little glowing box on the screen, and other boxes lit up as the others in the conversation joined in.

Before then, or after then, or in parallel, anyway, we try some experiments in planetary pedagogy (Cervera, Schmidt, and Schwadron 2021). In these experiments, I act as a remote guest lecturer and also as a remote mentor for groups of performance students in Singapore who are working in proximity to each other as they think through some of the fundamental precepts of performance development. I don’t meant that what they are doing is fundamental in the sense of basic or unsophisticated, but rather that they are stripping performance back to some of its fundamentals to work through dynamics of liveness, co-presence, spectatorship, self-representation, autobiography, polyvocality, spaces populated with characters, etc.

With my mentor groups I gave and received ideas, an exchange mediated by online platforms—Google Docs, and Telegram, most prominently, with its parallel channels all populating themselves from multiple contributors to a linear stream of words, images, video clips.

For some of this time I am back in the US, visiting my family. I am standing outdoors on our wooden deck in the wintertime of rural Georgia, pine trees sharp and distinct against a bright blue sky, my phone held up in a search for a good signal; and coming to me from another hemisphere are pieces of rehearsal footage, to-camera attempts at explanations and prefaces and reflections on the group dynamic; and I am sending a message back as I walk indoors, my dad’s favourite cat curling against my legs; and then some time later I am again returning to the thread and this time I am in Montreal where the snow has long been on the ground; and then later still I am back on Gadigal land, and all the time we are talking about these fundamentals: liveness, co-presence, spectatorship, self-representation, autobiography, polyvocality, spaces populated with characters, etc.

All of the words gathered here,

they are lined up just for you.

There are memories stored here.

By the time you read this it is already too late.

By the time you read this it is already too late

There are memories stored here.

They are lined up just for you,

all of the words gathered here.

5. Writing and its material conditions

At a micro-political level, performance-writing is a strategy for attempting this reflexive double-hold, in which the content reshapes the container of delivery such that it becomes an instance of that which it is also describing. As Ric Allsopp put it in a formative essay on the topic, performance writing foregrounds ‘the transformative play of text as performance’ (Allsopp 1999, 79), emphasizing the materiality of writing—the act itself, its material conditions, the circumstances in which it takes place and that allow it to be seen or legible. As an example, John Hall’s “Reading Illegible Pages” (2004) begins by exploring the materiality of the very word that appears self-evident in its title:

Hall goes on to describe the materiality of the page itself, consisting, as he puts it, of three ‘field vectors’. One is the compulsive forward motion of the top-down, left-to-write conventions of printed English:

For Hall, a second vector of the page considers the page as frame, reinforced by a margin, where we might step back and look at the page as “marks that form visual constellations rather than with linguistic tracks” (Hall 2004, 18). And the third vector considers a page as a map, one that may stick in our memory, perhaps, where we can’t remember an exact phrase but remember where on the page it appeared; we scan the page looking for that place where we lingered.

But of course, even as we read Hall’s text, we are enacting the very process that he describes: engaging with the printed page across these material vectors—and Hall’s writing is aware of itself as materiality, as ink on paper, as in the image of the ‘illegible’ graphic above. Hall’s text is thus performative in that it not only describes these dimensions and affordances of the printed page, but also enacts those encounters. It is bound up in its own material conditions even as it analyses them. What makes it performance-writing is not a specific form or style of writing, nor determined by its content, but rather its self-reflexivity about the context in which it appears. As Della Pollock observes,

In this way, we might think of all writing as performance-writing. To describe a thing is to give it a context, and the context shapes the meaning; or, to put it another way, how we talk about the work is the work (Schmidt 2018). These levels of discourse, description and performance, are not ontologically distinct from each other, but mutually constitutive—just as this text that you are reading now both holds and is held by its ‘performative’ elements.

6. The performance-lecture

If performance writing takes the materiality of the page and the meaning-producing functions of text as contextual frames with which to play and interrupt, then the performance lecture takes not only the conditions of textuality but also those of the apparent liveness of speech, and the claims to authority of the lecture, as both its subject and its terms of interrogation. As Maaike Bleeker writes,

We might think here of the self-described ‘non-academic lectures’ of Rabih Mroué, which often address autobiographical narratives, acts of representation, or political symbolism that emerge from the Civil Wars in Lebanon, the country of his birth. A central preoccupation of Mroué’s is that of fabrication, the epistemic acts of making new truths, and the erasures that accompany them. But to talk about them is also to undertake such a fabrication, and so his lectures are characterized by a self-reflective theatricality about their own of fabrication, acknowledged through impossibilities, half-truths, verbal slipholes, and fantastical forms of knowing.

Mroué’s work The Pixelated Revolution (2011) exemplifies this interest in fabrication and representation. The work recounts the phenomenon of videos made on camera phones and other widely available media by protesters in the early phases of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria; these were distributed via YouTube and other forms of social media, and sometimes seemed to show the deaths of these protesters and resistance fighters. As Mroué recalls at the opening of the lecture, ‘It all started with this sentence that I heard by chance: “The Syrian protesters are recording their own deaths”’ (Mroué 2012, 25). These amateur videos are a form of resistance to dominant distributions of images in a very literal sense, providing an alternative account of events on the ground; but what Mroué is interested in is the way in which they might present not only an alternative set of subjects for images from the government narrative, but also an alternative sense of what an image might be and do—what its effects are and how shifting ontologies of the image might shape and reshape reality. While these acts of recording one’s own death are a form of testimony and witness, Mroué uses his lecture-performance to explore what the effects of this mediation might be on our understanding of the acts of testifying or witnessing—the very act in which we are participating by being in attendance at the lecture.

In Mroué’s works, the subject matter of make the political stakes clear: in relation to the ideas of Arendt, Butler, and Rancière described earlier, we can see how an example like The Pixelated Revolution is political both in the way that it concerns the ‘space of appearance’ in which the Syrian protestors can be seen and heard, but also the demarcations of what is and isn’t counted as politics, including Mroué’s lecture-performance itself. As Clio Unger observers, the ways in which the lecture-performance both thematizes the politics of representation and also enacts those very politics make it a useful tool for marginalized voices to intervene within hierarchies of knowledge production:

But if, as I claimed above, all writing might be considered performance-writing, then we might also put forward the claim that all lectures are lecture-performances, even those taking place within the ‘homogenised’ space of the university. Every lecture not only takes place within a classroom, but reproduces a performance of what a classroom is: what counts as knowledge, what learning looks like, and what forms of relationship and responsibility are demanded of those present. But the interruption of the ‘problem’ of the online lecture might be a chance to think these qualities anew. The shift to a new context forces us to reflect on what a lecture is and what it does, what it is that is necessary for it to do and what is needed for it to do these things, and how it can do these things in a different way. We have an opportunity to remember it as an ‘epistemic practice’, to quote Unger, in which every lecture is an act of imagining the classroom, perhaps as if for the first time.

7. Imagining the classroom

Imagine the classroom.

Imagine the classroom where you learnt to read.

Imagine the classroom where you learned right and wrong.

Imagine the classroom where you learned to keep a secret.

Imagine the classroom where you learned the power you have to shame and to be ashamed.

Imagine the classroom of the future.

Imagine the classroom under the weight of what is to come.

Imagine the classroom that opens to the stars.

Imagine the classroom that is formed when we are holding hands with elders past and present, walking on Gumbaynggr country, in the dawn before the stars have faded, listening to country, listening to dreaming.

Imagine the classroom that has a trapdoor in the middle of the room, that leads from one hemisphere to another, that cuts you off at the shoulders, the classroom that kicks you out, that mutes your voice when you are not speaking, that freezes you in flight.

Imagine the classroom we might weave together, out of fibres and story, hyperlinked together from where you sit to where I type tap tab away at the thoughts becoming characters, one after another.

Imagine the classroom with the mirror down one side of the room, and your back is to the mirror as you turn your gaze out to the others, and you are here together to explore liveness, co-presence, spectatorship, self-representation, autobiography, spaces populated with characters, etc

Imagine the classroom in your childhood home, your childhood bed, your childhood clothes, your childhood books, your childhood light, your childhood face, your childhood fears, your childhood bones growing, your childhood eyes growing tired, your childhood stories falling falling falling falling falling all the way into the forgotten past.

Imagine the classroom where we hand off the words to each other, our mouths keep moving but the sounds come from somewhere else, another voice takes over, it’s no longer me speaking or you speaking but just speaking, no longer my face or your face but just faces, no longer my classroom or your classroom but just the classroom, no longer my imagining or your imagining but just imagining, no longer my longer or your longer but just longing.

Imagine the classroom that we wake up into, here, present and alert, already online, in whatever we happen to be wearing, with whomever happens to be at the other end.

Imagine the classroom that has linoleum floors, smelling of stale tobacco, a faint green tiled wall, a low ceiling and wooden doors.

Imagine the classroom as a spiral, that loops slowly through our lives and through our parents’ lives and through our ancestors’ lives, not progress but all at the same time, the same spiral, the same but different.

Imagine the classroom on a loop, whenever you log-on it just keeps going, a flickering film frame, a stuttering of the algorithm as it makes room for one more, all of us linked together going on and on and on into the incalculable future.

Works Cited

Allsopp, Ric. 1999. “Performance Writing.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 21 (1): 76–80.https://doi.org/10.2307/3245984.

———. (1958) 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Balt, Christine. 2024. “Reconfiguring Togetherness in the Virtual Drama Classroom.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 29 (1): 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2023.2249407.

Biggs, John Burville. 1999. Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bleeker, Maaike. 2012. “Performing the Image: Rabih Mroué’s Lecture-Performances.” In Rabih Mroué: A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder, 178–99. Utrecht: BAK.

Butler, Judith. 2015. “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.” In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 66–98. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cervera, Felipe, Theron Schmidt, and Hannah Schwadron. 2021. “Towards Planetary Performance Pedagogy: Digital Companions in Multipolar Classrooms.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 12 (1): 20–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2020.1829694.

Damian Martin, Diana, and Theron Schmidt. 2019. “Sites of Appearance, Matters of Thought: Hannah Arendt and Performance Philosophy.” Performance Philosophy 5 (1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2019.51291.

MacArthur, Michelle, Kimberley McLeod, and Scott Mealey. 2024. “Distance, Disruption, and De-Hierarchisation: Negotiating Care in the Virtual Space of Zoom Theatre.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 29 (1): 24–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2023.2247335.

Meinck, Sabine, Julian Fraillon, and Rolf Strietholt, eds. 2012. The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Education: International Evidence from the Responses to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS). Paris: UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380398.

Mroué, Rabih. 2012. “The Pixelated Revolution.” Introduced by Carol Martin. Translated by Ziad Nawfal. TDR/The Drama Review 56 (3): 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00186.

Pollock, Della. (1995) 1998. “Performing Writing.” In The Ends of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, 73–103. New York: New York University Press.

Rancière, Jacques. (1995) 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Schmidt, Theron. 2018. “How We Talk about the Work Is the Work: Performing Critical Writing.” Performance Research 23 (2): 37–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464751.

Sfard, Anna. 1998. “On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One.” Educational Researcher 27 (2): 4–13. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X027002004.

Shea, Peter, Chun Sau Li, and Alexandra Pickett. 2006. “A Study of Teaching Presence and Student Sense of Learning Community in Fully Online and Web-Enhanced College Courses.” The Internet and Higher Education 9 (3): 175–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2006.06.005.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press.

Trezise, Bryoni, Alexandra Tálamo, and Maria White. 2023. “How to Play in Slow Time: Embodying Creativity Literacies in Digital Learning Environments.” Convergence 29 (1): 61–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221148106.

Trezise, Bryoni, Nitin Vengurlekar, and Malcolm Whittaker. 2024. “Shared Uncertainties: Mapping Digital Teaching Artistry in Youth Performing Arts during COVID-19.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 29 (1): 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2023.2227579.

Unger, Clio. 2021. “Share Your Work: Lola Arias’s Lecture Performance Series and the Artistic Cognitariat of the Global Pandemic.” Contemporary Theatre Review 31 (4): 471–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1976166.

Biography

Theron Schmidt is Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and works internationally as an artist, teacher, and writer. He is committed to modes of research, learning, and making that are collaborative and experiential, alive in the thick of things and responsive to the complex and contested entanglements of diverse bodies, politics, histories, and alliances. He assembled Agency: A Partial History of Live Art (Intellect 2019), a collection of interviews with almost 50 artists, curators, and thinkers in the field of contemporary performance and activism (winner of the 2021 TaPRA Editing Prize), and he is the author of The Theatricalists: Making Politics Appear (Northwestern University Press 2024).