Teaching

Imani Williams (UNC '22), Former Student and 2022 Outstanding Achievement in Performance Studies Awardee

The core values that ground my approach to teaching are empathy, equity, respect, responsibility, courage, honesty, creativity, rigor, resilience, and perseverance. Animated by these values, I strive to create classroom conditions that give students the opportunity to practice vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and grace alongside their commitment to rigor and academic excellence.  As a professor specializing in embodied, performance-centered communication, my overarching teaching objectives are to provide the students who enter my classroom with a set of competencies that allow them to:

  • better attend to and interpret non-verbal embodied communication
  • script, direct, and perform original scholarship around a clear rhetorical purpose
  • create solo and ensemble performances as a means of analyzing history, culture, and the workings of power
  • engage performance as a method for understanding the purpose, possibilities, and limits of theoretical perspectives and
  • produce publicly engaged, performed scholarship that opens a space for productive dialogue and debate.

“Performance” serves as a process–oriented, collaborative, and experiential approach to scholarship that engages in open rehearsals, public revision, and the dissemination of knowledge on the stage as well as one the page. I approach performance-centered communication not only as a method of aesthetic creation and embodied analysis, but as a humanities approach to ethical world-traveling that aligns with my commitment to anti-racism and social justice. In her 1994 essay entitled, “Playfulness, ‘world’-travelling, and loving perception,” feminist philosopher Maria Lugones discusses world-traveling as what I would call a method of practicing critical empathy and engaging in ideological bridge-building. She discusses it as a means of traveling between worldviews that embraces, or at least accepts, vulnerability as part of the process.  Each of my courses requires students to use performance as a means of ethical world-traveling— to place the authors’ poetry, literary expressions, testimonies, and/or oral histories in their mouths and on their bodies as not only a means of understanding the work better but also as a means of understanding something meaningful about the humanity of the artists that created it.

COURSES DEVELOPED & TAUGHT  |  INNOVATIVE APPROACHES  |  FUTURE TEACHING GOALS & INTERESTS