CACHE Member Funding Success: Performing Citizenship: Then and Now

CACHE is delighted to announce the successful funding of four member initiatives for 2022! Our next mini-series for CACHE News introduces all our successful CACHE initiatives and the project teams .

Our first initiative is titled Performing Citizenship: Then and Now. The team includes A/Prof. Eva Anagnostou (History and Archaeology); Prof. Sarah Sorial (Macquarie Law School); and Dr Daniel Johnston (Research Innovation and Enterprise).

The Performing Citizenship: Then and Now initiative will investigate ethics and citizenship with a mix of Australian and international students through a workshop, performance, and forum discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone. Specifically, the team will explore the rights and duties of characters in the context of their relationship to others and their own self. After the performance event, the audience will engage in a discussion on these themes and probe their response to the work. Through the lens of “phenomenology” (the study of the way the world shows itself to conscious experience), performers will be prompted to think about “selfhood” and the co-constitutive relationship between self and other. Inevitably, this sense of self will manifest differently across cultural contexts, yet certain elements may well remain constant.

This project has four aims. It seeks to:

1. Engage both local and international student populations to interrogate the nature of citizenship through performance;
2. Stage a discussion about contemporary understandings of rights and obligations to others;
3. Explore international student perspectives and how they might differ from and be affected by Australian notions of democracy; and
4. Create a sense of wellbeing and belonging among international students and local students.

Through a series of exercises, the workshop will find embodied expressions of citizenship and power and enable a conversation around cultural differences in these concepts. The performance workshop aims to raise the question of an Australian understanding of citizenship through these diverse perspectives. At a time when social media and different social structures are challenging Western liberal democracy, this is an important project investigating young people’s attitudes to the rights and obligations of individuals in the modern state. The research will benefit both international and local students who participate as well as audience members. A theatrical setting will provide a safe place for this sensitive discussion and lead to self-reflection on the part of participants.

Congratulations to A/Prof. Eva Anagnostou and the team. CACHE looks forward to following their continued success exploring this important initiative.

Photo (above) @Jean Louis Mazieres IMG_2160C Giorgio de Chirico 1888-1978 Rome Antigone conso… | Flickr under Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-SA 2.0