In this article I explore the placebo and the placebo effect from a performance-studies perspective. I use this examination to argue for the placebo as a possible dialogic starting point between performance studies and qualitative health scholars. Using Lock and Scheper-Hughes' concept of three bodies (the individual body, the social body, and the body politic), I explain how the placebo as performance opens dialogue by speaking across these three bodies. I argue that the placebo as performance offers a yet-unexplored and heuristic way to bridge the unfortunate divide that often exists between qualitative and quantitative ways of understanding healing. By exploring these connections and offering a history of blind testing in the medical community, I explain how the placebo requires multiple lenses to be understood in the healing process, and by extension opens up traffic between different ways of knowing.
We understand new media as performative*a medium that is an active participant in a political dialogue. 1 It is political in its iterability; it performs, over and over, passing as/with information. We see this in our Facebook NewsFeeds and ReTweet of Tweets long gone. In this forum, we hope to show how new media scholarship can be purposefully enacted within performance studies (perhaps marking a slippage . . . perhaps not) to work towards larger critical goals. New media changes what it means to be a performance studies scholar.This forum germinated from our own discussions about the role that new media played in our scholarship. We were curious as to how other performance/critical communication studies scholars might articulate their own relationship to the shifting landscape. We contacted five other scholars who embrace new media in their scholarship. We asked them to reflect on the performativity of their own new media projects. The responses we received were provocative and enlightening.Michael Levan and Marcyrose Chvasta reflect on the performance and politics of distribution in the online journal Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Jonny Gray considers how the online performance group @Platea exemplifies the possibilities of Web 2.0 for interactivity and innovation in the production of art. We contribute an essay that centers around our podcast (The Critical Lede) that explores how new media breaks down barriers of access that have long been present in academia. Ted Striphas addresses how his blog Differences and Repetition (and a companion wiki) trouble the idea of peer review and collaboration. Finally, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook offers a response to these projects and the essays that accompany them by reflecting on how their use of new media transforms scholarly conventions. This forum will not only reside within these pages. We will incorporate new media into this project and, keeping in line with Gingrich-Philbrook's exploration of the
Autoethnography has become legitimized through its ability to connect culture to personal experiences. This legitimization has occurred alongside a titanic shift in communication made possible by digital technology, which has rapidly transformed, multiplied, and mediated the ways through which we engage one another. This essay explores and exemplifies the necessity of autoethnography to evolve in concert with the ways our lives have become inextricably tethered to digital technology. Due to this shift, we propose that contemporary autoethnography is digital autoethnography, a method we propose that relies on personal experience(s) to foreground how meaning is made among people occupying and connected to digital spaces. Digital autoethnography is distinguishable from traditional autoethnography because the cultures analyzed are not primarily physical; they are digital. In short, the work of digital autoethnography is situated within and concerned about digital spaces and the lived experiences, interactions, and meaning-making within and beside these contexts. Embracing digital autoethnography pushes us to consider and reflect upon the ways we have changed over time with the influx of digital technology. Additionally, the method provides a framework to keep autoethnography relevant in spite of the inevitable changes to human experience that will occur as digital connectivity becomes increasingly enmeshed in our everyday lives.
By using straight and white teeth as a metaphor for a straight and White identity, the author reflects on how this identity is performed, maintained, and often problematic. Using literature about identity performance, three different voices speak to and from straight and White identity. Using irony by blending arrogance and ignorance in the voice of the straight and White author, these voices illustrate the cracks in straight and White performance by taking the extreme positions that these performances often rest on. These voices illustrate how education, religion, and hygiene make and maintain (often) arrogant and ignorant straight and White identities. These three voices speak to each other to demonstrate how a methodology that foregrounds our bodies provides space to understand the visibility of identity performances and the politics of writing about with that visibility.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.