Professor Debra Vidali presented her ethnographic theater project at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto recently in November 2023 and has been featured in a blog by Dr. Mitra Emad, the Associate Dean at the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Dr. Emad at this to say about Professor Vidali’s project:

“Recently at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, I attended a follow-up event to a workshop in which anthropologists explored theater making initiatives by clearing a room of furniture and embodying/acting out the text of on ethnographer’s fieldnotes. Many of them had never met before this experiment and the workshop organizer, Debra Vidali (Emory University) functioned as the group’s choreographer. Vidali managed to choreograph a quick (“moving at the speed of light”) and profound sense of belonging in a context (academic conferences) that rarely attend to the body or the flow of resilience that moves between and among the participants. Watching the re-enact and comment upon their experience at a roundtable event the next day, I was struck by how working in and through their bodies to explicate the fieldnotes quickly created a powerful and productive sense of belonging for the impromptu group.”

Read the full blog here!