Censor/Censure: A Roundtable

In an issue about censorship, we wanted to have a way to include a variety of voices and perspectives on the topic. With everything moving so fast when it comes to government censorship and fascist orders being enacted, gathering ATDS members to discuss some of the issues we were facing seemed the best way to go about this. Even so, this conversation was held on March 11, 2025, and, in the past few months, things have continued to change at a rapid rate and the full extent of government censorship has seriously degraded research and study in both the Humanities and STEM disciplines. The editors wish to reiterate our thanks for those who joined us for this conversation, and we hope that it serves as a starting point for other conversations within our discipline. 

Note: This record has been edited for clarity and length and all involved have had the opportunity to review the document to ensure it represents their words and thoughts clearly and accurately. 

Pria Ruth Williams (she/her)

My name is Dr. Pria Williams. I am currently at the University of Mississippi as an Instructional Assistant Professor…I am shared between the Theatre & Film Department, and the Gender Studies Program. I teach online classes for both of those programs, and I am really concerned. My institution has gotten rid of the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion on their website. I was part of a committee that created a Diversity Statement and a Land and Labor Acknowledgement for the Department of Theater & Film for the Department of Theater and Film. So far, we have not been told to take those down. But I don’t know how long it will be before that.(1) I am [also] not allowed to use the women's rooms on campus because I’m a trans woman. And technically, that’s illegal in the state of Mississippi. So, when I do visit campus, that is an issue. And especially for all the trans and non-binary folks who are on campus all the time. So those are two of the key areas that are, that have been sort of more impactful to me over the last year. 

Claire Syler (she/her)

In 2016, I came to the University of Missouri (MU) as an Assistant Professor and as an alumna. In fall 2015, MU had high-profile racial protests inspired, in part, by the events in Ferguson, Missouri (MO) following the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. MU’s protests in 2015 were led by a Black student movement who wanted the university to recognize that racism is not isolated, but structural and exists at MU. When I arrived on campus in 2016, I began collaborating with colleagues in Black Studies, Journalism, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity to explore how theatre and performance might contribute to the goals of the student movement. As a white woman who grew up in MO and has a background with the institution, I contributed by writing internal and external grants to commission a new play about MO’s civil rights history, bring guest artists from St. Louis and Kansas City to campus, and create new “diversity”-oriented curriculum; I also published about these performance-based projects to make the work legible to larger audiences. By 2019, however, university momentum for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity work began to wane and decreased until last summer, in 2024, when the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity was dismantled. As these changes occurred, I watched many colleagues leave MU and I considered it myself. What is currently happening at a national level feels a lot like what started happening at my local level a few years ago.

Amy Hughes (she/any)

I am a professor of Theater and Drama at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I'm also a faculty associate in the Department of American Culture. For the past six months, I've been one of the faculty associate directors of the ADVANCE Program, which is the university's 20-year-plus program originally founded to support and increase the representation of women in STEM fields. ADVANCE was first established through a federal grant program. Now, it is fully paid for out of university funds. Over that time, the program has grown to support faculty diversity and excellence in every form and every discipline. I'm the first person from an arts discipline to be in this space as a leader or administrator. It's a partial appointment and I still teach half-time. When I saw this call [for the roundtable], there were many reasons why I stepped up. 

I joined the University of Michigan five years ago, after thirteen years of teaching at Brooklyn College. The University of Michigan has a fascinating, long history of “push forward” and “push back” around diversity, equity, inclusion, excellence, belonging, accessibility, indigenous justice, and so forth. We're in a moment where a lot of decisions must be made to resist or comply, and to be aware of what is possible and what is not possible. I'm noticing the importance of collaborating in order to ensure that we all are aware of what is legal or illegal at this moment, and to encourage each other not to obey in advance or pre-comply in an anticipatory way. Because the University of Michigan does have this history– beginning, first and foremost, with the Anishinaabeg, who ceded land to US settlers in 1817 in exchange for a promise that the university would educate their descendants. Although the circumstances surrounding this “gift” were incredibly complicated, I like to think of the agency of these indigenous ancestors as activists for educational access. Then, the multiple Black Action Movements in the wake of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And now, this history continues with Palestinian activists and allies on campus, some of whom have been brutally punished, including felony charges brought against 11 student protesters by the Michigan Attorney General. So, yet again, we're at a crossroads, where we can either continue this history of justice and advocacy, in spite of many forms of pushback over many, many years, or pre-comply, pre-obey, and so forth.

Karen Jean Martinson (she/her)

Thank you for getting this space together and everyone for sharing these stories. It's really nice to connect and just hear where everybody's at because I think we're all feeling a lot even though our circumstances might be different, or similarly different, or differently similar. I am an assistant professor of dramaturgy at Arizona State University. And the reason I responded to this call is [because] my work tends to be quite political. I write on dramaturgy, and I also write on the performance artist Robert Lopez, who performs as El Ves—the Mexican Elvis. My book is coming out in May, and it literally starts with his forward, where he makes fun of Donald Trump and calls him a would-be king, “but not in an Elvis way.” And the title, Make the Dream Real, comes from a song that he redid. It's a Morrissey song, “Margaret on the Guillotine.” He sang it as “George Bush on the Guillotine;” “make the dream real” is a line in the song. I bring that up to say [my book] is incredibly political and from the start. [I feel some] trepidation about that, releasing that in the world, even though I'm also of the mind that, for all the things that we do as professors, if we can't speak a truth, why are we even here? Yet, these little worries creep in. 

I'm also developing a class for going on two years, Theatre and U.S. Democracy, and it too is very political. I have forty students in the online course, and I have mostly students from outside the School of Music, Dance and Theatre where I'm housed. And that gives me a little bit of pause because Arizona is where Turning Point USA was founded, right? Charlie Kirk lives here. So, I don't know how students outside of the discipline are going to respond to it. And again, I'm sort of like, well, I'm just telling you some facts and interpreting them in the way that I do, but you're allowed to disagree. But still, again, sort of that doubt creeps in. 

I will say I do feel very protected by ASU. President Michael Crow just gave a speech. He addressed the Faculty Senate, and he specifically brought up the way we use DEI, specifically inclusion, because it is in our charter. I'm just going to read the first part of it: “ASU is a comprehensive public research university measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” That's literally etched in granite around our campus. So, the inclusion is right there. In his speech he confirmed that academic freedom is protected, and they're not going to ask us to change what we're teaching. But he also said the way that they're talking about DEI, who opponents of DEI are talking about inclusion, is not what we do. We bring people in who are qualified, and we help them succeed. Pure and simple. Which I think is really, really great. And so, it's that weird thing of like feeling pretty secure, but also feeling, “oh, I don't have tenure,” and “oh, I'm teaching things that somebody might not like.” 

David Bisaha (he/him)

I'm an Associate Professor of Theater at Binghamton University, which is one of the university centers of the State University of New York (SUNY). And within that context, there is not a lot of obeying in advance or compliance that I see. New York State has its own sort of protections that it might offer to the university for its mission. I'm a co-editor with Pria on this issue and here I suppose partially as a facilitator. 

What interests me in the call, and in this conversation too, is the changing nature of censorship, particularly its public and digital nature. I was interested in the idea of public censure. Some of the other submissions and material that we've been looking at over the course of this editorial process talk about different vectors and modes of censorship, that engage with the public, however we conceive of that public. That [could be] a student public that gathers and protests performance because of the way it is cast or the way that it is being positioned within a department. We had a situation related to that: a production of Anna Deavere Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles that we attempted to produce over the course of the pandemic. It was by no means perfect, but coming out of that there was something that transformed the project. The project was not censored, per se, but it was challenged by a studied campaign. Ultimately, the project was changed. That student campaign used a sense of the public and social media to connect its goals with other protest and resistance actions on campus. Binghamton is a quite active campus politically, and students have also used ways of gathering, in person or digitally, to shape a perception of public sentiment, or perhaps public sentiment itself, through those kinds of new means. And I also see in the new, top-down authoritarianism of the federal government an engagement with social media, a social idea of the public and public sentiment in some interesting ways. That's maybe more theoretical than practical, but those are sort of where I'm thinking in preparation for this discussion.

Pria Ruth Williams

I would love to reiterate something that Amy said that I think is really important and talk about how ATDS might be involved with this: the idea of working with each other to understand what is legal and what is illegal. How are we as faculty at these institutions becoming more responsible for knowing and gathering knowledge and information outside of our realms, our typical theater areas, to look at legality and how it works within universities and states and the federal level. I don't know how well I'm being prepared or given information by my university administration at the University of Mississippi they have been largely silent on all of these issues. When you brought that up, Amy, what are some of the things that you were thinking of in terms of those issues of the legality for things and maybe open it up for anybody to talk about their encounters with legality and their encounters with how we go about supporting each other with helping disseminate some of this information.

Amy Hughes

Thanks, Pria. I'm glad that resonated. I feel like I've been thinking about this a ton. There have been some interesting articles in, say, The Chronicle of Higher Ed recently, where they've been tracking universities that have scrubbed their websites or eliminated their DEI programs, when legislation is just introduced at the state level. We've got a lot of evidence of that. And it made me start thinking about this more deeply, because one way that power works is through performance, right? Performing its power and performing threats to people's livelihoods and safety. We see that with the executive orders. We see that with legislative efforts at the state level and federal level. We see that, too, at the level of institutions. 

At my institution in October [2024], the Regents (they're like our trustees, but they are elected by Michigan voters, so they are political positions) passed something that other universities have passed as well: an institutional neutrality bylaw. The problem—or rather, the interesting, horrifying thing—about this is that there is no such thing as neutrality. This bylaw, it's clearly intended to protect the institution by keeping its employees silent and afraid about “disobeying” this institution by defying “institutional neutrality.” It works, in other words, as a performance of intimidation rather than being a specific, transparent, and detailed policy. 

Another action that happened along these lines was the Regents called for a working group of faculty to examine the utility and effectiveness of DEI statements in faculty hiring. The working group produced a report.  The group was told by the Regents to go back and reassess its report, which supported the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring – suggesting that the Regents had already decided they were against the practice. Ultimately, in December [2024], the provost made an announcement that DEI statements would no longer be used in faculty hiring. And yet there is no policy specifying what that means, how that works, what the consequences are. It was an announcement in the University Record, which is basically the institutional newsletter. And now, each of us on the ground has to decide and work together to figure out, well, how do we get the information we need about research and activities related to diversity, inclusion, and equity from candidates that we're considering and hiring? What are the methods and best practices in requesting that information? And that happens only through collaboration and talking to each other, because the institution isn't calling on us or investing resources in making that happen. 

So, as I was thinking about this and preparing for our discussion today, I started to type out all of these grassroots efforts that I'm noticing, because I wanted to acknowledge these exciting, dedicated, courageous people who are working together through emails and listservs and in-person events and meetings that aren't transcribed or recorded, to make sure that we hear from each other what's happening on the ground. And encourage each other to not be afraid, or at least to handle our fear in a more appropriate and honest way, as opposed to just bowing to it. And I was typing all that out, and then stopped and said to myself, “I should keep these folks protected and safe, despite how gloriously and brilliantly they are collaborating, because that's how people in grassroots efforts survive: by protecting each other.” Especially at a university like University of Michigan, which is intentionally segregated into autonomous units (and culturally, students and faculty really like that autonomy), it is all the more difficult to know what's going on across campus. So, at this moment, I'm really trying to lean into that reality. We are without a faculty union for tenure-track people, so I've joined AAUP, we have a local chapter. It's become a really great place for me. All of us who have local chapters, I hope we will consider joining or participating in them, and any other efforts of solidarity that might be available locally. That's how I think we'll be able to encourage each other, to really be attentive to whether something is possible or not and give each other the confidence to move forward.

Karen Jean Martinson

One thing that I am seeing as a tactic is having these conversations verbally, without issuing guidelines or memos. The idea is that, if we put our intentions in writing, then people who want to cause harm can take these things in bad faith and use them against us. 

Claire Syler

This reminds me of Diana Taylor’s “the archive and the repertoire” and its different forms of knowledge. Right now, it seems, we've been asked to rely on the repertoire. And yet, as academics accustomed to working with texts, we seek, perhaps even crave, the archive: “Please give me a document!” I see this tension as being part of our larger profession. My academic husband has been very involved in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at MU, and we've hosted many events at our home. Seeing the AAUP members work—watching them ask questions to protect academic freedom and shared governance—has been impressive. It has also helped me realize how we, as academics, are a group of people beholden to varying kinds of texts, work practices, and institutions, and how most academics—including me—have been trained to be obedient. Academics are really good at working with texts to pass that milestone or accomplish that goal. Within our own discipline, I think theater and performance studies people identify as scrappy and “alternative”, so we have that alterity going for us. But, as a professional category, I’ve come to see how obedience seems embedded in our established knowledge structures, ways of working, and institutional homes. 

Pria Ruth Williams

I do think that of our structures that allow for somebody to get a PhD are designed to inculcate that kind of [attitude]. You don't want to rock the boat because you need to get your PhD. And then once you get a job, you don't want to rock the boat because you need to get your tenure. By the time you get tenure, do you have the muscle memory of disobedience? All of these things are practices, right? We know this from Theater of the Oppressed. We know this from Augusto Boal. We know this from any number of approaches in our field. We know that we need to practice things in the body in order to have a facility for those things. I think the way that the carrot and the stick work in academia makes [disobedience] harder. Certainly not impossible. And we all know people who are incredibly courageous in our discipline, in our field, and in our universities. And you will, you know, and I'm not necessarily one of those people. I have not developed that to the extent of some people. We all have different ways of addressing things and we don't all have to do the same kinds of things but finding ways to short circuit our own natural tendencies to be good students, because we all had to be to get where we were, is definitely something that requires practice. 

Other thoughts on this particular area? Does anybody want to sort of shift to something that somebody has said or shift to one of the more general questions that I emailed?

Karen Jean Martinson

President Crow operates out of an awareness of the realities of public education. We get very little money from the state at this point, less than 9%. And because Arizona politically is a purple state and it goes back and forth, but oftentimes it's fairly conservative and our legislature has opposed educational funding in general. So, the way to counter that is to attract international students and attract out-of-state students and online students. That's our huge growth area. So, we've had this longstanding edict to make big, super popular online courses that attract people from outside your unit because with the way they calculate what money goes where, your unit will get more when students are from outside majors. We also just switched our Gen Ed credits. So now we're operating on a new Gen Ed system. One of the critiques of our previous Gen Ed offerings is that there were too many courses being taught that could qualify as a Gen Ed credit that didn't actually meet the idea behind Gen Ed, of going out and exploring the big university and learning from experts not in your field. All of this lead up to say there was a new gen ed category of American Institutions, which is like a civics credits. And I was like, great, I could actually do this—because I don't really like online classes—but I could see how [Theatre in US Democracy] could work and work ethically because I wanted to get people from outside of the program, students who never thought about theater as democracy, even though I think we as theater scholars do quite a bit. And so that was the whole point in developing it. 

It took about two years of work, of making sample syllabi, and then filling out the gen ed requirements. It was approved in November just after the election. So, the way I had been thinking about it during those development years shifted; I suddenly felt like, “oh boy, this is a different reality that I'm now entering into.” But also, like I said, I didn't want to change what I was going to say. I started tactically with Hamilton because it's big but the very first lecture talks about the musical coming up through the Obama administration and then how the meaning shifted with Donald Trump. And then I just sort of end that lecture with like, what does it mean now? Who knows? I feel like most of my lectures end with what do you think? Who can tell right now? Because I don't really know how to conclude any of these thoughts that I'm having. 

I just don't know what to expect. The last time I taught a super large gen ed class here, it was during Trump's original administration. It was in 2019. And I brought up things like Black Lives Matters versus Blue Lives Matter and a lot of the students were fine with it. And then some of them, it's like the moment you say those words, they're angry. So, I guess I'm anticipating that in advance. But again, I keep telling myself, well, isn't that the point of what we're doing?

Pria Ruth Williams

I'm getting ready to launch an Intro to Gender Studies online class online and I just read the introduction to Judith Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender. One of the questions that I sent to the group was about experiences that are causing us to self-censor as teachers, as artists, as scholars. I think that Butler’s introduction is really powerful. I think they really frame the problem of gender in a compelling way. Butler is really addressing how the notion of gender has become kind of a phantasm and it's a repository for all kinds of fears and it's not so much that we need to just point out the facts, but that it is this kind of construct of story, construct of fantasy that is doing a lot of things. Unless we engage with it that way, it becomes really difficult to actually deal with it. I think that there's a lot in there that an introduction to gender could benefit from. But I'm also really struggling with the fact that she says true and demonstrable factual things about right-wing ideologues. And she names them that. And I'm really, really struggling with putting this into my materials. Butler is simply saying this is what these [right-wing idealogues] are doing. And it is factual that this is what they are doing and this is what they want to do. They say that. Right-wing people say this is what they want to do. This is what they are doing. And yet, because Butler uses that term “right-wing”, I keep getting really scared of using it in the classroom. I assume that that is happening all over this country. On different levels. 

Amy Hughes

Thank you for sharing that. I was sitting with that question and, you know, I'm speaking only for myself, and I think each of us has to speak only for ourselves because the answer will be different regarding what we feel our power is. Materially, structurally: our power is different in different spaces, depending on how we're embodied. I've tried to really lean in, as I know others here have, into my whiteness – meaning, being absolutely mindful of my whiteness, being absolutely mindful of my tenure and full professor rank, my socioeconomic status, the benefits of education I have, especially at a moment when right-wing ideologues seem to be working together (for decades now) to basically destroy higher education and make it less and less accessible to people who can't afford it, or simply defaming it. And I keep reminding myself of my power because I still have acculturated fear, deep fear, that has been imposed upon me by people and institutions throughout my life. I'm always going to have to be mindful of that and continue dismantling those fears. And yet, as I deal with that, [I need to] speak up and encourage others not to be pre-compliant, in meetings and conversations, informal or otherwise. Being mindful of my privilege made me decide recently to devote more of my time in the ADVANCE space, especially my work with one of its programs, the STRIDE Committee, which helps search committees recruit and retain a diverse and excellent faculty. I sign every petition because I know I shouldn't be afraid to see my name on there. I remember, too, that my greatest freedom, because of my privileges, is in the classroom, actually. That I am called to continue integrating anti-oppressive pedagogies and ideals into every teaching setting I'm in, that I have a responsibility to do that, and to view student pushback or colleague pushback as a sign of success rather than as a threat or failure. 

The New York Times did this huge exposé—I should say, a journalist at The New York Times did a big “exposé” [air quotes]—on the vast DEI programming at University of Michigan, back in the fall [of 2024]. A colleague, an incredibly wise, brilliant colleague, pointed out in the wake of that publication, “they're coming for us because we're so successful.” And yet I say that knowing, again, that for each of us, the answer to the question “how much power do I have and how vulnerable can I be” is going to be different. What's important is to do that investigation honestly and transparently with ourselves, and perhaps, hopefully, in community with others, supporting each other in that effort, so that those of us who need greater safety have that safety, and those of us who don't need that safety can let it go.

Claire Syler

Thank you so much for that Amy, it's really powerful. I read the NYTimes essay and wondered how folks at Michigan felt about it. You mentioned the word community and I'm going to suggest that sometimes I self-censor to keep information private until I go to another community group to check in before proceeding. I view such actions as community-based and working in coalition. My background is in community-based theater, serving as an education director for a regional theatre company. That work taught me to get to know the city I was working in (Nashville, TN) and its people—and it taught me how to connect with a wide range of arts-focused people and institutions and view them as vital resources to engage in a common pursuit. These coalitional tactics have been crucial for me in terms of IDE work. I’m constantly checking in with somebody who's a colleague on a particular program to ask, before sending an email, “would this idea be amenable to the group?” And then, even further, “how is a particular person doing today?” (before pressing send on the email!). This kind of relational work may sound like a lot of labor. But it is a lot like the feminist epistemologies that community organizers routinely use. It's the relational work I grew up watching my mother pursue in her community-building efforts. And that kind of private and dynamic “context knowledge” is an important way I navigate institutional worlds. It's about accessing social levers of power to establish a solid foundation and footing before doing public work. 

David Bisaha

This conversation is making me reflect on the relationship of power. What influence you have is context dependent and audience dependent, and I'm connecting that back to what I was thinking about at the beginning, with regard to the digital and the sort of loud, broadcast nature of some digital social spaces: some more relationship and socially based, some more direct message or closed community social spaces. I think that might also be contributing to some of this feeling of self-censorship and indeterminacy of audience. Whether it's an online course that is synchronous or asynchronous, whether it's something that's recorded, to whom are you speaking? 

When you're writing in The New York Times, or you're speaking for your university, there is a pretty clear sense of audience. But when I'm speaking in the classroom, I feel I have a sense of audience, and that might be true in that moment, or it might not be true. And online teaching…I speak differently and think differently about what I'm putting out there when I know it's going to be online, whether that's pre-recorded or in Zoom land. I think one part of this is how do we think about audience and how is the idea of audience being turned back on itself in the context of censor or censorship?

Pria Ruth Williams

We see that in particular with Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia. He was attacked online by a specific organization that used online methods through Twitter, and they literally called people out to come get this person. One of the things that important for us, particularly in the field of theater and performance, is to really start appreciating how much power as performance and performance as power is shaping the world around us right now. We are not unique, but we do have a set of skills and a set of perspectives on performance, on audience, on the ways in which performance works materially that needs to be a part of our work moving forward. As members of ATDS, as people speaking to an audience who are going to be reading JADT, what ways can we provide community to allow for our, you know, our particular perspectives, our particular skill sets to be used in combating some of this self-censorship, some of the public censorship, the ways in which power is performed? [To help] our students and our communities, not necessarily just our universities, but our communities understand that sort of performance of power and critiquing that performance of power? 

Claire Syler

I'm thinking that one performance of power is economic. This reminds me that when you can bring money to a university from an outside institution to support a project, you bring public and economic sanctioning to the project you want to do. I think there's performative power in that. By getting grant dollars from outside your institution to fund IDE work (because there are still institutions interested in IDE work) you help confirm the project's worth. Sure, it's more work to write the grant and form the relationship with the outside organization. But it's about bringing more stakeholders to the project and creating a literal and figurative “buy-in.”

Amy Hughes

I don't know if this fully addresses your prompt, Pria, which is a great one, but I'm thinking a lot about ATDS and how important this community has been to me through every stage of my career, and how much I value it, because of the various forms of support that it has offered folks at different career stages and in different institutional contexts (or extra-institutional contexts). When I say “ATDS,” of course what I'm actually referring to is a group of brilliant, courageous people who decide to gather together in various places, formally and informally, digitally or in person, to support each other in various ways. I definitely want to mention Dr. Donatella Galella and the work that she has done, especially as a leader of our organization for the past three and a half years, and before that. The programming that she and others have offered have really impacted us in many ways, both financially through grants, and also the community that's fostered – by the First Book Boot Camp, for example. Those relationships go in many different directions, beyond the stated purpose of the program. Of course, there’s also the anti-racism series of events, and the way it [anti-racism] manifests in the organization in various ways. In fact, the event that ATDS sponsored with Dr. Koritha Mitchell back during the lockdown period of COVID utterly shifted for me my thinking in my book that's coming out in September 2025 [An Actor’s Tale]. Thanks to Koritha Mitchell, her article and her wisdom that she shared with us about white mediocrity, and especially white male mediocrity, I was able to understand better what was fascinating to me about the subject at the center of my book, a very mediocre white male actor who worked in the mid 19th century, and how he participated in systems of oppression that continue to influence today's theater industry. And without ATDS and Dr. Mitchell, and so many other moments along the way, I wouldn't be who I am, or be doing what I'm doing, in the ways that I hope I'm advancing justice, in large and small ways. I felt like I needed to talk about ATDS there for a moment. And you, too, Pria and David, are part of that, making this special issue happen and inviting this conversation and encouraging us to be brave and share our experiences in this forum. You're a part of that, too. And I'm grateful to both of you for that.

Karen Jean Martinson

I think there's a power and a definite value of having these spaces to get together and say, “I don't actually know what we should do. What do you all think?”  And it was funny because as you were speaking to me, I emailed Donatella [Galella, ATDS President] about something else. And I asked if ATDS going to be doing anything—I'm thinking of the postcard writing session that we did. And just having that space. And she's like, yes, we're going to figure something out. 

But I really did come to ATDS. It was one of my action places that I could trust. Even if we don't know what action we can take, there's a power of getting together and saying, how do we do this? What do we think? Let's see if we can find something, some way to respond, especially because I think we're all also feeling so much exhaustion. And it's like, I want to do something, but I don't want to just scream into the wind. I want it to have a landing point, too. And I don't know what that is yet, but maybe with all these bright, brilliant people that are around us, we can figure something out.

David Bisaha

One of the pieces of reading in relationship to the special issue has to do with alternate approaches to thinking about censorship. In particular, the generative qualities of censorship. So rather than thinking of censorship as only that which is negative or squashes, it strikes me after doing some of this reading that thinking about it only as the force of “no” is a disempowering place and it works against some of the skills that theater performance scholars maybe have, in particular. Ways of understanding how performance, scenography, environment, and embodied relationships produce effects that cannot be understood other than through the tools of performance studies or theater studies. So, what does censorship produce would be the question that comes out of that. What does it generate? 

Some of it may be approaching a world that we don't want. That is a possible generative quality. But, also, censorship creates networks, ways of speech that we can observe and theorize that elliptically go around, or that aren't specific, or that don't record. And all of those are generative effects. So, censorship is not simply a “no, not that,” which is maybe a historical understanding that we carry with us, but rather a generative choice to make certain things and not others. And therefore, it maybe puts us more in the driving seat of being able to see what is being created, if we care to change it, or if we care to just to observe it as historians and thinkers. Generatively, because censorship is doing things in its imprecision and in its vagueness and in its power. 

Amy Hughes

I love that, David, so much. It makes me think about how on the federal level, for example, at the NSF [National Science Foundation], the list of words that the staff are required to flag in grant applications. And then, of course, the weaponization of the words diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in the executive orders, among other concepts. In one of the executive orders, or maybe more than one, it is said that DEIA activities shall be terminated “under whatever name they appear” [E.O. 14151]. It's made me think a lot about the power of these words, and how they're trying to make us believe that those activities, or even those words, are illegal or unacceptable. It does provide an opening, maybe – if we can think optimistically – for being more specific about what we mean [with these words] and why we care about [them] while also fighting for those beliefs, those ideals, those core values, in situ – diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging, and so many others. Try to be very specific, transparent and thoughtful about what our goals are in championing those values, and not letting them [the words] go, because they have histories that are important, and complicated, and fraught. They include histories of disagreement – about the corporatization of those concepts, and the negative impact of that process. 

Take “disability.” I identify as someone with a dynamic disability, so I think about this a lot. I was just watching a video by a performer and disability advocate, Sofiya Cheyenne. She has a great video where she argues “disability is not a bad word” and . . . “we need to continue to have that word be spoken and speakable.” And we need to defend it because of the histories of advocacy and activism by people, many of whom are no longer here, who fought to have that word become visible, and to become visible themselves through it. So, as we think about censorship, it hits language. I'm thinking a lot about how to keep doing the work in a thoughtful, honest way without relying exclusively on terms that are now incendiary, and yet balance that with, you know, the reality that these words have histories, these ideals have histories that we don't want to disappear. 

Pria Ruth Williams

It’s really important to note just how acronyms have become used by people who want to censor ideas. You don't hear people going “we're going to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Sometimes they do say those words but most of the time, it's “DEI.” Most of the time they use these acronyms because that's an easy target. And in part, because once we start using the acronyms, we stop using the terms that those acronyms are supposed to be providing. So perhaps one small thing that all of us can do and we can encourage is we can stop using “DEI” and start always calling it diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. And making people hear those words, making people say those words. I think resisting those small ways of using language the way that they frame it is [important]. 

And I think, but I think, David, to your point of that generative ability of censorship: one of the things that doing a search on the word “gay” for the military means that they are banning pictures of the Enola Gay, which has nothing to do with what they were banning. The generative part of that is also humor: making fun of and demonstrating their lack of seriousness, their lack of thought. I think the generative uses can emerge. And I think looking for those, is, again, a really important point that David brings up.

Karen Jean Martinson

I don't want to take us back because I think we're on this really interesting topic, but I also was thinking about what David said about new technologies. And then Claire bringing up the archive and the repertoire. And I realized that part of my concern about this class that's starting is because it is online. I think of teaching as existing in the repertoire, like we're having a conversation in the classroom, you know? And you can provide so much context in that. I had to record all of my lectures. I can update things around it, but there's a different feeling of permanence around that. An audio recording becomes an archive—one that can be extracted, potentially.

Claire Syler

I have thought of that, Karen. And I appreciate that so much, especially in terms of IDE efforts and accountability within theatre companies and universities. We do need accountability concerning IDE efforts in these institutional spaces. And yet, accountability—as a kind of metric—can be used against those companies and universities, as IDE programs are currently being swept away. 

Amy Hughes

Maybe another way we can help each other as a community is by sharing strategies about how to mitigate or circumnavigate those technologies of archiving. Certainly I have those same thoughts – like I'm being recorded now in this moment, even though you've created a really safe space. Maybe each of us can, as individuals, think about that and share with each other what conditions are available to create safety as we continue doing work that we're passionate about and that we feel is necessary and feeds our souls. You know, for some of us, that will be moving more things in person. For some of us, that might mean shifting communications to other forums. For some of us, that's just reminding someone “don't make that call to your elected congressperson on your university-provided device.” You know, taking care of each other with those small reminders about the reality we're in. Educating ourselves and each other about FOIA requests and what we might put in writing versus not in writing, on the level of the quotidian. 

So this is another objective in the coming years that I have for myself, and the dear ones around me that I work and teach and collaborate with: making sure that we keep each other safe in this primarily digital environment that most of us now experience, especially in the wake of the lockdown period of COVID, where there’s a lot more remote work, a lot more use of devices, a lot less in-person interaction – which has made a huge impact on people being able to access opportunities, resources, and so forth. I don't want that to go away. “Both/And.” We need to be mindful of how powerful it can be when we're offline, too, as we struggle to maintain the safety of others and ourselves.

Pria Ruth Williams

That makes me think using ATDS to create a white paper or a committee to help with digital security and digital safety issues because so many of the tools that we have are great. But like I said, one of the reasons I don't want a transcript of this roundtable done in the cloud by Zoom is that means that it's going to be taking all of our voices to an “AI” and using that to do work. And, you know, Signal is much safer than most messaging things. But a lot of people don't know even what questions to ask. They see a shiny button that makes the labor a little less laborious, and we want to do that because we're humans, and that's what we do. We try to find the shortest path between us and some kind of work or some kind of thing. As somebody who is trying to be aware of security and safety and providing those spaces, I think that's something that ATDS can maybe help our membership just be aware of.