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Black women faculty building their academic lives can be treated as or made to feel invisible (i.e., ignored) or hypervisible (i.e., overly scrutinized). Subsequent harms can follow, such as stress, insecurity, power/voicelessness, and job attrition. Through the fusing of sister circles focus groups with Theatre of the Oppressed Forum Theatre, we explored how five Black women faculty confronted issues related to visibility utilizing this culturally informed critical arts-based methodology. Through introspection and performance, they brought in elder wisdom, and through rehearsal and performance, they left with shared knowledge on how to mediate at the extremes of visibility to improve their academic lives. We discuss the findings and their implications for academic healing via culturally responsive arts-based interventions and methodologies.

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This article brings forth the difficulties and possibilities of enacting the role of “Joker” from Boal’s (1979) Joker System—formerly called the poetics of the oppressed. The authors acknowledge jokering as an apprehensive performance of brokering, of bodies that matter and are matter, that can provoke anti-oppressive actions and reinscribe oppressions. As such, four backdrops are engaged to further the methodological, theoretical, and curricular/pedagogical force of jokering as a performance that unsettles the status quo: Latina/Chicana feminist theories used in mentoring, performance-based action research with middle-school students, professional leadership development for schools, and socio-technological analysis with theatre in online/distance education. Each example from our praxis illustrates how the roles of emerging researcher, mentor-researcher, and researcher-practitioner are performed and troubled (jokered) from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to foster social justice praxis and outcomes.