Other Publications

Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance, New Essays on Canadian Theatre, vol. 8. Edited by Peter Dickinson, CE Gatchalian, Kathleen Oliver, and Dalbir Singh (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2018).

Winner of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research's 2020 Patrick O'Neill Award, presented to the best edited collection published in either English or French on a Canadian theatre and performance topic.

This collection, based on a successful 2016 conference co-sponsored by IPS, seeks to understand why it is important not just to continue to tell queer stories on stage, but also to piece together the larger historical narrative of Canadian queer theatrical production and reception through academic research. Through these essays, artist reflections, and curatorial statements, the contributors generate theories and new ways of understanding how queer theatre and performance have contributed more broadly to the political and social development of LGBT2Q communities in Canada. Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance asks what a comparative analysis of contemporary queer performance practice in Canada can tell us about current appetites and potential future programming.

To order a copy, click here.

Q2Q: Queer Canadian Performance Texts. Edited by Peter Dickinson, CE Gatchalian, Kathleen Oliver, and Dalbir Singh (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2018).

Nominated for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Anthology.

A companion anthology to Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance, the work contained in this volume provides a snapshot of Canadian contemporary queer performance practices—from solo performance to political allegory to family melodrama to intersectional narratives that combine text, movement, and music.

To order a copy, click here.

A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Edited by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

This collection, co-edited by IPS Steering Committee member Dara Culhane, and featuring contributions by additional IPS faculty and associate members affiliated with our friends at the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, builds on the sensory ethnographic trend in contemporary sociocultural anthropology. Based on ideas and exercises introduced in different IPS workshops and classes, the collection introduces the idea of a different kind of ethnography: an imaginative and creative approach to anthropological inquiry that is collaborative, open-ended, embodied, affective, and experimental. The authors treat ethnography as a methodology that includes the whole process of ethnography, from being fully present while engaging with the experience to analyzing representing, and communicating the results, with the hope of capturing different kinds of knowledge and experiences.

The book is structured around various methodologies–sensing, walking, writing, performing, and recording—and includes innovative exercises that allow both seasoned and aspiring ethnographers to develop a practice that can deepen and extend ethnographic inquiry.

More information here.

Réinventer l'ethnographie: pratiques imaginatives et méthodologies creatives. Eds. Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane. Translated by Geneviève Deschamps (Laval: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2021).

French translation of A Different Kind of Ethnography.

PUBLIC 53 (Spring 2016): "MEGA-EVENT CITIES: Art/Audiences/Aftermaths." Edited by IPS Director Peter Dickinson, IPS Associate Member Kirsty Johnston, and Keren Zaiontz.

MEGA-EVENT CITIES brings together leading scholars, artists, and activists to examine the role of the arts in articulating the social agendas of urban mega-events like Olympic Games and World Expos. As mega-events circulate from one city to the next, they leave complex (often ruinous) infrastructural legacies for artists and communities, with scenarios of national celebration transiting swiftly to austerity measures and socially cleansed urban cores. The contributors to PUBLIC 53 engage with the exhilaration and sober aftermaths of the “mega” by taking stock of the fluid politics of officials who seek to commemorate mega-events through public art programs, and activists who choose to question the same events through creative acts of resistance. With particular focus on Vancouver and London—but ranging beyond to Sochi, Rio, Milan, Calgary, and Baku, Azerbaijan—this issue asks how art and culture can intervene in the pressing security, human rights, and environmental issues that shape mega-events. Mega-Event Cities addresses the local politics of global placemaking and shows the shared artistic practices, performative interventions, and resistant acts that can be found across host city sites.

More information here.

Canadian Theatre Review 164 (Fall 2015): "Vancouver after 2010." Edited by IPS Director Peter Dickinson, IPS Associate Member Kirsty Johnston, and Keren Zaiontz.

A startling correspondence across former Olympic and Paralympic host cities is that aggressive social welfare cuts have followed the event. These cuts have serious material consequences for those very artists and minority groups that proved so central to winning bids and staging Opening and Closing ceremonies. Five years after the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, with the city’s arts communities still recovering from a series of provincial funding cuts that actually began in 2009, and with post-Olympics development projects encroaching on artist live-work spaces, this special issue of Canadian Theatre Review brings together scholars, artists, and cultural producers to ask what kinds of resources remain after a mega-event has left town? How do artists and companies adapt to new economic circumstances and leverage audience attention for and investment in new projects? And what might a reading of the specific aesthetic, social, and affective legacies of different Olympics- and Paralympics-related performances tell us about the state of arts and culture in Vancouver today? From public art and sound walks, to hockey games and real estate speculation, this issue reveals the pervasive power of the Olympics to continue to shape how Vancouverites move through and live within the city. Fix, the published script by award-winning playwright Alex Bulmer, demonstrates how citizens of host cities from Vancouver to London must continually renew the fight to the right to the city. Bulmer’s “audio provocation” seeks to engage youth in the deep questions of citizenship, particularly concerning disability and inclusion. Her script is one of many battle cries in this issue that show art and performance to be more than a stage for official culture, but a political force with which to be reckoned.

Click to read the introduction here.