About performance ethnography

Performance ethnography, also known as ethnographic theatre, performative ethnography, performed ethnography, or ethnodrama, is an innovative interdisciplinary approach to research. It leverages performance – broadly conceived as staged theatre, site-specific works, community theatre, protest art, performance art, and other performative events – as epistemological, methodological, and theoretical approaches to ethnographic inquiry and a medium of ethnographic representation.

Four women wearing black with headscarves and two men wearing black are kneeling at a low table covered with a white tablecloth. Another woman wearing a white dress and white headscarf stoops over the table. All are looking out into the distance.

Many scholars believe that the collective nature of performance can facilitate collaborative research relationships, wherein the ethnog­rapher and interlocutors can co-create both the research process and its performance. The interplay of dramatic text, image and sound has also been seen as a means of documenting and representing research findings, and potentially facilitat­ing an embodied, sensory, engaging, and accessible knowledge exchange. Moreover, performance ethnography has gained recognition as a platform for collaborative, embodied activism, bridging research with social change.

Performance ethnography has emerged in the past few decades in response to shifts in global power dynamics following the Second World War, anticolonial liberation movements, and, since the 1970s, Indigenous, antiglobalization, and environmental justice struggles. It also arose in response to postmodern critiques of scientific positivism and the power imbalances that have traditionally defined ethnographer-participant relations.

A woman with a white head scarf and dress kneels on the floor, holding her hands in front of her, and looking into her hands and showing surprise or shock on her face.

Performance ethnography within anthropology, performance studies, and related fields, has predominantly explored at the representational level. It often employs performance to stage interview transcripts, field notes, and journal entries, using embodied and sensory techniques to communicate research findings to both academic and non-academic audiences. These performances also serve as pedagogical tools in educational settings and as vehicles for social critique and activism in engaged, applied research contexts. However, methodological experimentations that integrate performance into the ethnographic process itself remains rare.

This website features my collaborative performance ethnography projects that advance performance ethnography experimentations at the level of ethnographic process while at the same time addressing questions of performance as representation.

For more information, please contact mkazubow(at)yorku.ca