Public Scholarship:

Embodied Experiences of Democracy

Public scholarship is research and practice that can inform, facilitate, and/or necessitate partnerships between academics and community members to enrich public knowledge and creative activity. Utilizing the methodology of public scholarship enhances curriculum to prepare, educate, and engage citizens by arming them with knowledge that promotes democratic discourse and facilitates civic action. Documentary and activist theater, my topics of academic and artistic inquiry, are inextricably embedded with the values of public scholarship and political and civic engagement. Public scholarship recognizes the critical role and responsibility of the scholar and artist in all citizens.

The projects chronicled below combine my scholarly pursuits while providing and example of graduate education as a community-engaged practice. As a scholar and an artist my core purpose is to collaboratively explore and create embodied experiences of democracy or what Jill Dolan defines as "utopians performative" or "feeling together over obvious differences inspired by an intensely present moment of theater." Although each person's definition of utopian or even democracy may be different, the feeling of connection and good will toward the "strangers" who inhabit the world with us is a powerful source for change. Monica Prendergast refers to these experiences as social imaginary or "hope as enactive process.” By accessing the social imaginary one can envision what otherwise might seem impossible given the dominant hegemonic paradigm.

The power of the possible is a concept I infuse in my own graduate education. I have come to see that public scholarship is something I am always already doing (and have done). I am always an actor, teacher, student, and scholar. Public scholarship encourages a dynamic learning environment by promoting democratic values, which empower everyone to lead, follow, participate and share. Most importantly, public scholarship facilitates an embodied experience of democracy in a society that has become increasingly less democratic. The benefits of living in a democratic society go beyond just voting. Exercising freedom of speech, accessing power structures, and engaging in civic discourse through words and actions should be experienced in daily life, not just on election day.

Stat All Over Again: The Tacoma Civil Rights Performance Walk, Every Girl’s a Hero, and Pussy Riot in México are all projects the promoted embodied experiences of democracy. In each case I partnered with community members, collaboratively devised community-engaged work, and forged connections that can be activated for future scholarly, artistic, and political endeavors.

Lastly, these projects are potential models of graduate education grounded in public scholarship. I hope to highlight the need for support systems and institutions such as the Simpson Center for the Humanities that function as a conduit between academic research and community dialogue. Graduate students should do more than occupy the space where they live and learn. They should leave graduate school with knowledge of the community that has been the birthplace of their career. Scholars must share what they do and promote the immediate and long-term relevance and impact of academic pursuits and reframe all scholarship as public scholarship.

Start All Over Again:

A Tacoma Civil Rights Performance Walk

commemorate

Inspired by the history of the NAACP and the Civil Rights movement in Tacoma, Washington, Dr. Sara Freeman and I conducted archival research and interviewed members of Tacoma’s African-American community to create Stat All Over Again: The Tacoma Civil Rights Performance Walk highlighting the importance of African-American activism. A performance walk is an interactive and site-specific tour of historic locations that incorporates oral histories (either written, recorded, or performed), followed by panel discussions or workshops.

This picture of the University of Puget Sound’s first Black Student Union, the first in the state of Washington, appeared in the school’s 1967-68 yearbook. Utilizing my funds from my Mellon Summer Fellowship for New Public Projects in the Humanities I was able to enlarge and mount of this picture to display at the Tacoma Historical Society’s 11th Annual Destiny Dinner, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Black Student Union and Tacoma’s Human Rights Commission. I then donated the piece to the Tacoma Historical Society. The partnership with Tacoma’s Historical Society was critical to obtaining archival material and for connecting us with key collaborators including the members of the Tacoma chapter of the NAACP and The Black Collective.

Celebrate

As part of our ethnographic research Dr. Freeman, Dr. Grace Livingston and I coordinated a story circle tea hosted by Ms. Williebelle “Bil” Moss, the first president of the Tacoma Urban League, first executive director of Planned Parenthood of Pierce County, and wife of Tacoma’s first African-American mayor, Harold Moss. The story circle was a site for prominent African-American Women such as Kay Littles, Linda Isham, Shauna Weatherby, Billie Johnstone from the Hilltop, Tacoma’s historically Black neighborhood, to reflect on their impression of the Pacific Northwest and their strategies for combating overt and covert racism. Employing the women of color feminist practice convivencia, or the “deliberate convening [that] builds community, create a context for social justice work, and inspires new forms of knowledge,” Dr. Freeman, Dr. Livingston did I participated in the conversation at times but for the most part we listened, took notes, and ask clarifying questions.

Our research uncovered a significant amount of material on the activism of African-American men in the Hilltop but much less on the women of the community. Therefore our goal was to gather oral histories from these women through a process that was led by them, in a familiar and collaborative setting that offered an opportunity for celebration and connection.

activate

Constructing a performance walk is an ideal vehicle for critical pedagogy and public scholarship, therefore Dr. Freeman and I housed the early stages of our research within the undergraduate course Theatre 323: Project in Dramaturgy at the University of Puget Sound in Spring 2018. Cross-listed with African-American Studies, the course attracted students interested in history, politics, culture, anthropology, and ethnography as well as performance. Students conducted archival research which they used to created digital stories. In preparation for their research students read articles on public/community-engaged art and white privilege, such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” They also attended talks by local artists such as Chevi Chung from Empathos Company and activist including Billy “X” Jennings for the Tacoma Black Panther Party. Most importantly students interacted with the Tacoma neighborhood they were studying. We conducted an extensive walking tour of key sites in the Hilltop including the People’s Community Center, a recreational and gathering space and site of the only public pool in the neighborhood. Also referred as the Malcolm X Center, the exterior of People’s Community Center features a mural documenting key figures and moments in the history of the Hilltop including the 1969 Mother’s Day Disturbance.

From the beginning we wanted this project to have scholarly, artistic, and pedagogical implications To that end, the goals of the course were to teach students community-engaged research and art-making methods, provide examples of local activism, and introduce them to the city of Tacoma that lies beyond the boundaries of the campus. In fact, Dr. Freeman secured funds to hire a student from the class to work with us the summer after the class.

Sound collages created from our research were shared at the 2018 Race & Pedagogy National Conference. The final iteration of the performance walk will premiere at the 2022 Race & Pedagogy National Conference.

Every Girl’s A Hero:Community-Based Performance & Performance Ethnography

skies over seattle

In spring 2015, approximately forty graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Washington School of Drama and I embarked on a yearlong community-based performance project. Guided by award-winning performance duo PearlDamour and their associate Ashley Sparks, our goal was to build community with a local group and create a performance that captured the culture of the group and by extension Seattle’s University District. My cohort worked exclusively with the Elizabeth Gregory Home (EGH). After months of volunteering, we devised a performance piece based on interviews with and observations of the EGH community. The resulting piece Every Girl’s A Hero, was performed for the EGH clients and staff at their location, and then woven together with two other pieces to create a piece titled Skies Over Seattle which was performed for the public in the Jones Playhouse.

Every Girl’s a Hero

Every Girl’s a Hero, a collage of scripted scenes and movement pieces, interspersed with audio and video recordings, was devised with and for the EGH community. Through a deconstructed chronology, it tells the story a woman who has left an abusive relationship and her children. Her journey begins outside the doors of the EGH, where she dresses in the rain in clothes others have discarded. Eventually she enters the EGH, tells her story, and works in the kitchen to feed the literal superheroes she meets there — who happen to also be homeless women. These characters were composites of the EGH staff and clients, developed using their responses to the question, “If you could have a superpower, what would it be?” The protagonist’s story culminates while under the tutelage of these heroines, as she becomes The Siren, a woman who cannot be silenced and whose beautiful singing voice overpowers others.

Theatre Topics

In this article I document the project and discuss some of the ethical complexities of universities and community partnerships.

Viharo, Monica Cortés. "Every Girl's a Hero: Reevaluating the Ethics of University/Community Partnerships." Theatre Topics, vol. 29 no. 3, 2019, p. 197-209. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/740710.

Pussy Riot in México

Digital storytelling: #freepussyriot

I created this video as the my culminating project for University of Washington Digital Storytelling Fellowship. In this instance I uses digital storytelling as a method of public scholarship for documenting a translocal feminist network.

I also shared this with students as an example of public digital scholarship during a digital storytelling workshop for Theatre 323: Project in Dramaturgy at the University of Puget Sound. At that point in the course students had conducted a good deal of archival research on the local community so now I wanted them to dive deeply into a single story and tell it by combining artifacts, sounds, images, and an original script.