Abstract
The author looks at what the catchword of ‘internationalization’ does to the practice of performance research, especially in terms of its pedagogical implications. If internationalization is seen as the answer, what is the question? What vision of the university could the discipline of Theatre Studies hope to offer by way of this enticing and ambitious call for internationalization? Beyond the critique of the financialization of higher education that most universities and especially Humanities faculties around the world are facing, the author offers hope generated from the classroom, based on the experiences of the MAIPR programme. The task that internationalization confers upon the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies is the task of thinking and doing beyond the myopic limitations of the national framework. Two aspects of internationalization are charted here: the use of English as its language, and the translation of the concept of performance as epistemology into pedagogical practice.
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- 1.
An earlier version of this chapter was published in Dutch (Bala 2014).
- 2.
The Netherlands Education Support Offices (NESO) of NUFFIC are located in countries of purported strategic (read financially profitable) importance to the Netherlands. Their main purpose is to attract and recruit students to study in the country. For the Netherlands, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it follows a competitive trend started in the 1990s in the USA, the UK and Australia. The presence of foreign desks of international agencies such as NUFFIC in countries like India has led to the sprouting of events such as educational trade fairs, professional university mobility consultants, educational loan providers, specialized visa and insurance companies, retailers and distributors of educational materials, and preparatory tuition courses for International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) examinations.
- 3.
The distinction between ‘premise’ and ‘promise’ is taken from Paolo Virno (2004, p. 25).
- 4.
‘Scattered speculations’ is a term borrowed from Spivak (2012, pp. 429–442).
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Bala, S. (2017). Scattered Speculations on the ‘Internationalization’ of Performance Research. In: Bala, S., Gluhovic, M., Korsberg, H., Röttger, K. (eds) International Performance Research Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53943-0_4
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