Author Identifier (ORCID)
Abstract
I call myself a performance-scholar. By this I mean that I research within the field of performance studies and enact performances as a creative practice. Often, when people hear the term ‘performance studies,’ they think that I study theatre on stage. Performance studies includes theatre but is a transdisciplinary field with roots in anthropology, cultural studies and ethnography to name a few. Emerging in the twentieth century from the intersections of these disciplines, it refused the rigidity of traditional academic boundaries and instead cultivated a dynamic, open-ended mode of engagement. Performance studies treats performance not only as an object of analysis but also as a vital and responsive method for making sense of the world: it is mobile, mutable and deeply embedded in social life. From ritual and everyday behaviour to political protest, experimental artmaking and the processes of identity formation, performance studies invites us to consider how meaning is made, embodied and enacted. Whether analysing a public demonstration, a climate protest choreographed as ritualized dissent, or the quiet gesture of offering an umbrella to a stranger during a storm, performance studies attends to the embodied, affective and relational dimensions of action. It asks not simply what is happening, but what is being done – and to what effect. It calls for a radical attentiveness to the textures of experience, the politics of representation, and the ways bodies move through, contest or conform to the conditions that shape them.
Keywords
performance studies, creative practice, embodied knowledge, performative inquiry, transdisciplinary research, identity formation
Document Type
Book Chapter
Date of Publication
2026
Publication Title
Research and Teaching with Speculative Fiction: Transdisciplinary Readings and Methods
Publisher
Bloomsbury Academic
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
99689
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Rachev, R. (2026). Performing speculations: Rehearsing futures through speculative f(r)ictions. In S. E. Truman (Ed.), Research and teaching with speculative fiction: Transdisciplinary readings and methods (pp. 75–80). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350557758