Editorial: taking a snapshot of theatre and performance studies

Abstract

When, in September 2018, Tom Cornford, Glenn Odom and Marilena Zaroulia joined the editorial team of Studies in Theatre and Performance as new Associate editors, we were presented with the task that all incoming editors had to complete within the first two years of their tenure: to collaboratively curate a special issue that would offer a ‘snapshot’ of the field of theatre and performance studies at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Even though the three of us had very different research trajectories and expertise, we agreed that this issue was not going to be driven by particular research agendas but by our shared commitment to the important, unfolding debate of decentring the field of theatre and performance studies, a debate that followed global calls for ‘decolonizing the university’. This editorial tells the story of the issue from call for papers to the finished works that the reader is about to encounter. When we started working on this issue, we felt that there was a momentum building up that necessitated an issue that centred the processes of decentring across diverse contexts and methodologies. As we are finalizing the editorial in the last days of 2020, a watershed year for what the COVID-19 pandemic began to unleash, severely impacting the most vulnerable bodies and communities, wefeel how imperative it is for everyone to contribute to this task of decentring. We are acutely aware of how any inherent limitations of any one approach to this task as the principle of decentring applies to voices, subjects of study and methodologies equally.