A Critical Performance Pedagogy That Matters

This chapter is a manifesto of sorts. Performance ethnography within the field of educational ethnography is at a crossroads. While the performance turn in ethnography is well established in communication studies, this is less the case in educational research (see Denzin, 2003, 2008, 2009; Madison and Hamera, 2006). Bagley (2008) and others make the case for treating educational ethnography, on a global stage, as performance. But moving into a thoroughgoing performance space remains a challenge for mainstream ethnographic methodology (Hammersley, 2008, pp. 134-136). Yet, as Madison and Hamera (2006, p. xx) argue, performance and globality are intertwined; that is, performances have become the enactment of stories that literally bleed across national borders. Being a U.S. citizen is to be a “enmeshed in the facts of U.S. foreign policy, world trade, civil society and war” (p. xx).