ARTISTIC EDUCATION COURSES

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: COMPOSING EXPERIENCE THROUGH PERFORMANCE

Workshop Format and Delivery

This workshop combines autoethnographic methods and practice as research, drawing from performance, choreography, and theater-based techniques. Participants engage in writing, movement, and vocal activities to articulate and analyze cultural experience as singular, collective, and evolving.

Designed for BA, MA, and doctoral students, the workshop is tailored to disciplines including peace and conflict studies, performance, artistic research, critical theory, design, and education.

Core Modules

The course includes four modular workshops that may be facilitated as stand-alone sessions or integrated into the full course:

Writing About Self

Explore the materiality of language and gesture of naming as gateways to layered understandings of identity.

Morning Ritual

Attend to the transition from rest to wakefulness using somatic awareness to explore how everyday gestures carry communicative and ethical meaning.

Vocalizing Embodied Knowledge

Investigate the relationship between voice, memory, and emotion. Learn to vocalize from embodied awareness, beyond binaries of rationality and feeling.

Performing Cultural Selfhood

Engage in solo and group performance-making to examine how identity is co-constructed across physical, social, and virtual environments.

These workshops are not only reflective, but generative, offering frameworks to support socially engaged and interdisciplinary research practices. Whether culminating in a performance, curriculum design, or dialogic facilitation model, the course nurtures embodied insight as a foundation for creative and ethical transformation.

Zoya was a facilitator who was considerate and patient with the participants. It was impressive that she allowed us to connect by observing the process as well as the results of the learning. The class was fruitful because it allowed each individual to express what we felt. It was surprising how the class was managed flexibly and changed to suit the members. This teaching style allowed us to fully feel each other’s energy, so we could talk in a comfortable mood even when heavy topics came up. -Vicky, MA Performance

The specific methodology where we analyse with individual name and its meaning and how we connect with others later during the session stood out the most for me. It has helped me reflect on my initial learning of self as well as certain other communities in Nepal helping me be more empathetic and understanding in many ways. -Shila, Artivist

The morning routine experience also stood out. In this we were guided to remember and perform for ourselves the things we did in the morning, in some way mimicking the different actions, trajectories, and gestures we did recalling our state in the studio. After several iterations, I found I could remember more parts and nuances, to a simple moment such as waking up! It was insightful to reflect on the many things that happen even in the very day-to-day activities that I did not consider "artistic" potential, and the relevance and importance of everything we live has on us. -Claudia, MA Performance

We had an exploration reading and voicing out phrases coming from an academic text in different ways. For me this experience stood out as I was not used to improvise with text using academic theory, and was very revealing to find out how, through playfully speaking the words out loud (in different volumes, order, rhythm,...) I started grasping and understanding that small part of a text in a more personal and relatable way. Zozan, MA Peace & Conflict

After attending Zoya's workshop, I had the chance to integrate this methodology into our strategic and creative training with Artivism Fellows in Lumbini Province. It was an effective way for the fellows to connect with one another in more intimate way and provided way for each other to understand individual as well as collective social, cultural and life context. -Nish, MA Peace Studies