Northwestern’s Performance Studies PhD reframes protest marches, TikTok dances, courtroom rituals, and AI chat-bot banter as performative events that reveal—and remake—social realities. Students combine ethnography, critical theory, and practice-as-research: teaching devising workshops in Chicago shelters, coding motion-capture archives of diasporic dance, and curating VR exhibits that place audiences inside climate-justice demonstrations. A required public-scholarship lab trains candidates to translate scholarship into community partnerships and policy briefs.
Choreograph an interactive data-visualization translating eviction statistics into movement
Document ritual adaptations on livestreamed funerals during pandemic lockdowns
Analyze gesture politics in televised presidential debates with multimodal software
Develop an AR walking tour layering Indigenous histories onto urban landmarks
Produce a verbatim theatre piece from interviews with gig-economy couriers
Study affective labor in K-pop fan-chant practices through auto-ethnography
Compare courtroom performativity across restorative-justice and adversarial systems
Prototype a VR empathy-training tool simulating refugee border crossings
Research sonic protests—pot-banging, chanting—as collective resistance acoustics
Stage a mobile performance exploring surveillance culture via wearable cameras
Evaluate therapeutic outcomes of playback-theatre sessions in oncology wards
Map meme choreography flows on TikTok using network-diffusion models
Write policy recommendations for equitable arts funding of community performances
Curate a living archive of pandemic porch concerts and neighborhood spectacles
Investigate algorithmic curation’s impact on user participation in livestream theatre
Interrogate and create performance to transform culture and policy.
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