Deadline for Abstracts: March 16, 2026
What does it mean to perform Europe—and to perform in Europe—today? What are the political stakes of such performances? Performing European Publics (4-5 June 2026) invites researchers from Theatre & Performance Studies, Politics, and allied fields to critically reflect on how performance, publicness, and the idea of Europe itself intersect, collide, and transform across diverse cultural and political terrains. European nations today face, in varying guises, democratic ‘backsliding’ or the rise of ‘illiberal’ democracy, encroaching authoritarianism and erosion of civil liberties, the gathering strength of ethno-nationalist and identitarian populist movements, and a polarised, fragmented, even ‘post-truth’ public sphere. This conference asks how performances—embodied or digital actions, in physical or virtual public space, that establish a performer-spectator relation—and performatives—utterances that do what they state—shape this political terrain, and how the concepts and practices of performance, broadly construed, might help us to navigate it. The conference invites delegates working on and in a range of European contexts to consider performances in public space as street-level acts of political theorising, at once locally intelligible and potentially mobile.
The conference approaches performance in its widest sense, from protest actions to choreographed and scripted theatrical events. Such performance might be commissioned as part of the network of European festivals dedicated to art in public space, from the UK and Spain to Finland, Hungary, and Kosovo; EU-funded arts platforms such as In Situ and Circostrada explicitly link their artistic and theatrical work in public spaces to the promotion of ‘European values’. But ‘performance’ can also name the embodied action-in-concert of the march, the demonstration, and the sit-in, particularly when protestors use theatrical tactics to encourage circulation of their message in the transnational, digital public sphere.
The conference also invites consideration of performatives and performativity: language performs in the public sphere, and identities (such as ‘European’) can take shape through iterative, citational performance in everyday life. Recent scholarship in both Theatre & Performance Studies and Political Philosophy has begun to reevaluate the relationship between performance, performatives, and performativity and the implications of that relationship for contemporary politics. To date, these disciplinary reckonings with the performative have largely remained separate, despite some shared reference points. This conference invites scholars to build on those shared reference points to develop a truly interdisciplinary (rather than multi-disciplinary) research agenda, to clarify their thinking for and with each other.
Europe, too, is a contested idea and ambivalent identification as much as a geographic location: shaped by debates over universalism, liberalism, (transnational) citizenship, (transnational) sovereignty, migration, race, ethnicity, and religion; haunted by legacies of colonialism and genocide; and fraught with generalisations and homogenisations. Even decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the performative division of Europe into East and West creates complex relationships to European belonging in the former Communist Bloc.
Publics and the public sphere have long been central to understandings of European democracy, particularly since Habermas’s (1974) articulation of the public sphere as an immaterial ‘realm of our social life in which private individuals assemble to form a public body’ (49). Plenty of well-known thinkers have challenged Habermas’s emphasis on consensus and rational deliberation, proposing the existence of plural publics, counterpublics (Fraser 1990, Warner 2003), and agonistic and transnational public spheres (Mouffe 2005, Balme 2013, Fraser 2014). Perhaps less well-known are alternative concepts of the public sphere from East-Central Europe that account for local specificities, such as the historical notion of the Czech parallel polis that steps in when official structures fail (Havel 1979), or the ‘second public sphere’ (Cseh-Varga 2018), where artists and performers operate in the background of the official public sphere sanctioned by authoritarian regimes. Theories of the public must account for regional particularity and the possibility of transnational social formations.
The contested character of performance, Europe, and the public is the conference’s premise, not its conclusion. This conference will investigate discursive performatives and embodied performances as street-level, quotidian forms of political theorising. Publics can take shape through address, through discourse, and through the massing of bodies. To examine the performance of European publics is to examine the discursive and embodied forms of doing European politics.
We invite scholars from across Europe to apply. Thanks to support from the University of Manchester’s Hallsworth Conference Fund, we are able to provide limited funding towards travel costs to supports speakers travelling from abroad. If you’d like to be considered for the limited funding available, please briefly outline what other funding is available to you and provide an estimate of your travel costs. There is no conference fee, and we will provide free conference lunch and dinner to speakers.
Please, send 300 word abstracts and a short 150 word bio by 16 March to PerformingEuropeanPublics@gmail.com