Volume 2 of Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance investigates performances that illuminate the hidden recesses and inscrutable mysteries of the natural and human-made worlds. While the first volume of this series prioritizes public, outward-facing, and activist work at the intersections of art and science, this volume considers performances of localized, concealed, inexplicable, or intimate phenomena, from the closed-door procedures of biomedical trials to the impacts of climate change. Interdisciplinary science dialogues have long been shaped by the cultures and identity communities in which they arise and circulate. The essays, interviews, and creative works included here not only expose the historical and contemporary harms created by exclusive and prejudicial processes in art and science, they also contemplate how a diverse, inclusive body of science performers might help deepen how we “see” the unseen forces of our universe, contribute to novel scientific understandings, and disrupt disciplinary hierarchies long dominated by white men of privilege. This collection expands upon extant scholarship on theatre and science by foregrounding identity as a crucial thematic and representational element within past and present performances of science. Featuring interviews with science-integrative artists such as Lauren Gundersen (The Half-Life of Marie Curie) and Kim TallBear (Native American DNA) as well as creative works by playwrights Chantal Bilodeau and Claudia Barnett, among others, Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 2: From the Curious to the Quantum proposes shifts in perspective and procedure necessary to establish and maintain sustainable cultures of science and art.

Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 1: From the Lab to the Streets is the first of two volumes dedicated to the diverse sociocultural work of science-oriented performance. A dynamic volume of scholarly essays, interviews with scientists and artists, and creative entries, it examines explicitly public-facing science performances that operate within and for specialist and non-specialist populations. The book's chapters trace the theatrical and ethical contours of live science events, re-enact historical stagings of scientific expertise, and demonstrate the pedagogical and activist potentials in performing science in community settings. Alongside the scholarly chapters, From the Lab to the Streets features creative work by contemporary science-integrative artists and interviews with popular science communicators Sahana Srinivasan (host of Netflix's Brainchild) and Raven Baxter (“Raven the Science Maven”) and artists from performance ensembles The Olimpias and Superhero Clubhouse. In exploring the science performance as a vital but flawed method of public engagement, it offers a critique of the racist, ableist, sexist, and heteronormative ideologies prevalent across the history of science, as well as highlighting science performances that challenge and redress these ideologies. Along with its complementary volume From the Curious to the Quantum, this book documents the varied ways in which identity categories and cultural constructs are formed and reformed through science performances.

Digital Performance in Everyday Life combines theories of performance, communication, and media to explore the many ways we perform in our everyday lives through digital media and in virtual spaces. Digital communication technologies and the social norms and discourses that developed alongside these technologies have altered the ways we perform as and for ourselves and each other in virtual spaces. Through a diverse range of topics and examples—including discussions of self-identity, surveillance, mourning, internet memes, storytelling, ritual, political action, and activism—this book addresses how the physical and virtual have become inseparable in everyday life, and how the digital is always rooted in embodied action. Focusing on performance and human agency, the authors offer fresh perspectives on communication and digital culture. The unique, interdisciplinary approach of this book will be useful to scholars, artists, and activists in communication, digital media, performance studies, theatre, sociology, political science, information technology, and cybersecurity—along with anyone interested in how communication shapes and is shaped by digital technologies.

With "race" being discredited as a rallying cry for populist movements because of the atrocities committed in its name during World War II, "culture" has been adopted by right-wing groups instead, but used in the same exclusionary manner as racism was. This volume examines the essentialism, which is implicit in racial theories and re-emerges in the ideological use of cultural identity in new rightist movements, and presents case studies from different parts of the world where researchers were confronted with racism and worked out ways of coping with it.

Artificial Culture is an examination of the articulation, construction, and representation of "the artificial" in contemporary popular cultural texts, especially science fiction films and novels. The book argues that today we live in an artificial culture due to the deep and inextricable relationship between people, our bodies, and technology at large. While the artificial is often imagined as outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of humanity, paradoxically, artificial concepts are simultaneously produced and constructed by human ideas and labor. The artificial can thus act as a boundary point against which we as a culture can measure what it means to be human. Science fiction feature films and novels, and other related media, frequently and provocatively deploy ideas of the artificial in ways which the lines between people, our bodies, spaces and culture more broadly blur and, at times, dissolve. Building on the rich foundational work on the figures of the cyborg and posthuman, this book situates the artificial in similar terms, but from a nevertheless distinctly different viewpoint. After examining ideas of the artificial as deployed in film, novels and other digital contexts, this study concludes that we are now part of an artificial culture entailing a matrix which, rather than separating minds and bodies, or humanity and the digital, reinforces the symbiotic connection between identities, bodies, and technologies.

This volume addresses key conceptual issues and case studies dealing with contemporary Jewish identities amidst globalization processes, with special emphasis on Latin American socio-political, communal, and cultural milieu. The book brings together a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches that range from political science to sociology and from art and literature to demography in order to offer the reader a multidimensional and multifocal analysis of the diverse constitutional elements of the Jewish experience. Using as its point of departure the wide horizon of historical trajectories and current challenges, the articles analyze the transnational, regional and local processes that inform the different Jewish Diasporas and Israel. Simultaneously, its content provides a snapshot of the current state of research on collective identity building processes and a lively analysis of the challenges posed by cultural diversity and primordial and civic belongings in the framework of political transitions, as well as new and old forms of expressing through cultural creativity individual and collective identities.