Pedagogies of the Imagination: Toward a New Performative Politics

Abstract

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston has used ethnographic performances in many classrooms around the world. In this chapter, she examines performance ethnography as an important approach to a critical pedagogy concerned with social justice. Her chapter blends anthropology and performance studies to explore practice-based, engaged, and embodied pedagogies of the imagination. Student performances challenge colonial and neocolonial histories and legacies, encouraging community activism. Her use of the imagination and embodied experiences helps to construct “life worlds” to gain a deeper understanding of a human condition and to explore new ways in which people might envision their future. Overall, a sense of the “impossible” pervades many of these classroom exercises, and as a teacher/scholar, Magdalena has crafted ethnographic encounters, in one case, “performative walking,” into a variety of classroom performance genres. In particular, these classroom experiences inspired the students to advocate for possible futures and to develop a “performative pedagogical politics.”