A Foothold in the Margins: Theatre Studies and Education

Taken from a lively panel discussion at Canadian Association of Theatre Research 2014, Kathleen Gallagher’s comments remark on the kinds of cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional, and cross-cultural collaborations that help to bolster the position of theatre within the academy in neo-liberal times that are generally inhospitable to the arts and humanities as disciplines and legitimate forms of knowledge. Her personal exploration of such collaborations makes an argument for the ways in which such expansive thinking about theatre as a thing to be studied and a way of seeing strengthens theatre’s foothold in public institutions and discourse.