 morning and so I think it will feel less like a restart and more really kind of building on momentum and issues and it needs to be quite interactive quite early on so we'll you know be hearing from each of these panelists but I think with a sense of kind of propagation and opening the room up. I just in the sort of course of even this morning and during the extraordinary presentations and starting to feel the questions I took just a few what are sort of stray thoughts that might just frame some of what might emerge in the next in this next session. So we're talking here of course somewhat specifically about training the next generation what we're building what we're shaping but implicit in that of course for us where whether we're positioned in academic institutions or wherever we are we work in a field of that's about imparting right it's about collaborative spaces and facilitating so the most fundamental questions about our practice belong here not just questions of a syllabus for a certain course but the questions of how we impart. It seems to me that the question of what we even mean by cultural diplomacy is very live in this space and so many people in this room Daniel Jonathan Paul Cynthia Roberta have spoken to this powerfully there's a sort of reading list we could build and we should post on the website to inform this but this is a really it seems to me a huge question and I think many of us feel that there's a kind of paradigm shift away from a notion of display right we bring this to you we are from here and we bring this to here and towards deeper kinds of models of facilitation collaboration activating others the skills that we may talk about here aren't just skills of art history though they are art history in the traditional sense but at the imparting agency to others how do we do that and that feels like something I'm sorry to talk about the kind of tolerance for the unknown and the unknowable because it's not necessarily a a reportable commodifiable outcome so I think just a few things that happened this morning this idea that see me Madsen talked about so beautifully in terms as he was talking about performance tactics performance as a methodology this is a foundation of what we mean at Georgetown and others who are teaching performance studies is we learn a craft but performance is a way of doing other things in spaces the quote of Tony Morrison's about the beauty and the politics being mutually enforcing mutual enhancing what does it mean to learn to do both in harmony how do we teach that how do you have both going on and what about for the many of us probably the majority who kind of you know one better than the other it's like having a really strong right arm and then but believe in the other so I'm an artist I want you know I'm not talking about me in the first person but you know theater training to give me this piece of it but the other part of me is migrating to this but how do we get to have those both really operational together and then the last thing I'll raise before introducing Emma will begin the panel and again I think it's very likely where is the question of privilege in this conversation who gets trained where who's at this in this room who isn't in this room but is being spoken for this has come up already but I think needs to surface here because this is about certain contexts for training certain people to go do certain things with other people is it possible to imagine a truly diverse context culturally aesthetically economically for training and learning within some of the elite institutions that have resources how do we create that space can we do that look like it's certainly a dream of you know that I think for George to do what the promise would be or a place like it that needs to be carefully and I was just really struck by Carol and paying talking about that project so forcefully talking about what happens when students are inspired about this work and the responsibility of then caring for that student as they move through the world they want to go out and do it what are we cultivated reverse comment about do no harm which is so huge for us like what are we sending them out to especially in spaces like this one and where many of the institutions right where the students have so many choices actually like to do this work so we're really fortunate at Georgetown and I know we aren't alone but to have so many students specifically invested in this and passionate about this intersection between theater practice and international politics some of them sit in the school of foreign service but basically at the end of doing a theater major they just don't pay credit for it although the fact it shows up at this maybe that's maybe they're in frontiers being built there and some of them are theater performance studies majors but who are incredibly active in courses around and Maya our director of our program will speak to this but in all kinds of interdisciplinary courses around performance and activism performance and social change political theater performance in society learning tactics practices and I'll just give a shout out to the extraordinary actor together on the one-stage project it's gonna be a coin and her colleagues that project has given us an anchor I feel like in that work that I've been searching for for years and so many other pieces so I want to begin this panel and then we'll introduce the others by introducing you to one extraordinary undergraduate student here at Georgetown it's summer she's one among many so she's speaking for a lot of people but she's very much speaking for herself who is emblematic of this of this intersection and she's just gonna talk for a few minutes about her specific work and sort of what's happening here at Georgetown because I think it's a way in to us all rappeling together with what are we making and what are we doing together so this is on the part. I wrote down what I wanted to say otherwise I've probably forgotten every single bit of it but first before I start I just wanted to echo what Derek said about about Carroll and paying your work I think if you gave any student on this particular campus a ticket to the Congo and you know said go to your theater we would be on the plane before our parents could say no. I think the fact that you were so focused on finding those kind of opportunities and finding that trajectory for students is really heartening for some of the cleaning of friends here. So thank you and so good afternoon everyone. I just want to start off by saying it's been such an honor to be here and to listen to all of you on the panels. It's kind of rare that you get to see the embodied people that you've been studying and aspiring to and their work and you know to see you all in this room. It's a really rare opportunity for this undergraduate student. As Derek mentioned my name is I'm Clark and I'm actually going to be an undergraduate senior in the School of Foreign Service here which is what houses all of our international relations or international affairs degrees so it's a little different than most schools in that we don't just have one international relations degree as a whole school devoted to global affairs and we come out with Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service. But generally I spend all of my free time in this building because I do theater. Student theater is a wonderful community here and so I ended up being as Derek said basically a theater major without the credit and I'm also an international politics student. So just a little background on sort of why I'm here right now but Len you here. As most of you probably do I personally have a intense sense of wanderlust. I have always since I was very small been obsessed with workload and throughout some really wonderful international sort of exchanges that I had in music and sports when I was in high school. I suddenly felt myself sort of face to face with a possible degree in international relations. I was applying for college and wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do but I realized that you know I want to know more about the world and that seemed like a great way to do it. So I applied to schools and had to study international relations and ended up here which was wonderful because this really is one of the best locations and the best schools for that particular work. I entered Georgetown intending to do theater extracurricularly because I wasn't really sure what there was academically and whether it was just a theater major and you know some schools you can only do it if you're a theater major. So I tried out for the clubs and I ended up getting into a musical and since then I got way more than I ever ever anticipated and have sort of sucked in irrevocable way because what I came into contact with was a crash course in sort of theater community and culture that's happening on this particular campus that I've never heard of among my friends who went to other schools and that I've never seen before or never imagined before. So I sort of from that on out resigned myself to the fact that I needed to have my hands in theater in this department and as well as I wanted to continue studying international politics I didn't want to you know transfer schools because I very much still wanted to learn about politics and global affairs. But I wasn't going to accept doing one or the other and I needed to have my hands in both in a large way. So instead of the sort of vaguely defined notions that I had before when I was a major in the school board service has this wonderfully special major that's here in my heart called the cultural and politics major and yes because I'm here representing that as a professor but it's really a unique and wonderful program in that it's the only major in that school that is sort of self designed and has a large degree of freedom. The other majors have a much more defined and strict core classes that you have to take which is great for the more specified areas but in culture and politics you sort of you take the area of culture that interests you and the area of politics that interests you but so you can come out of a wide variety of interests and sort of areas and backgrounds. So what I ended up doing it's at first it felt sort of like an upstream swim because I didn't really know I was like well I'm in the international fair school but I wanted to feed her. That sounds silly and sounds like something you're not able to do but it turned out that it very much was and that I was sort of a part of a tie of students who had already been doing that and will continue to do that and were presently doing it. Right now my sort of self designed theme is I think it's worded as theater as a means for post conflict reconstruction and reconstruction. So in that vein I've taken a lot of classes I've been able to pick and choose from different departments all across the campus in history, international fairs, justice and peace studies. So I can study anything from international development to war conflict studies as well as take classes in the theater and this department has a wonderful tradition of offering classes that really engage both those areas. You know performance point of view so with my I've taken world theater history with Derek I just finished a class in performance in society, I've taken performance in activism and I've combined those with social justice classes, conflict studies classes, international development classes. And so that's kind of where I've carved this major out of and it's really trying to engage both all of those worlds. Thanks to, in part to Derek's recommendation, I will also be departing for a fellowship in Cambodia in next week actually to study nation building post-genocide and sort of how traditional Cambodian arts have fit into that and I got the chances to speak at it with Catherine Vue who was referenced yesterday. She's provided me with some advice and guidance so I'm really trying to do this out in the world in a sort of self led way at the moment. And to tell you a little bit more about the undergraduates here at Georgetown, it's kind of been funny the past couple of days hearing students with like they, so being one of them, it's great to have some opportunity to speak to all of you as a student. And from the perspective of an undergraduate student here at Georgetown, the soul of this work that we do here, as much as it's located in the professors and their amazing, to me it's very much located in the sort of the passion and the hearts and the minds of the students here. It's an incredible student populace and I'm very biased to my degree from other institutions but I think this is one of the first communities I've experienced academically in which nearly like ubiquitously, nearly all of the students are just so passionate, so engaged and so active. And no one here is passive in whatever it is they care about and that doesn't have to be politics per se. I mean if you're studying history or health, science, whatever it is, everyone I've encountered on this campus is just so active and dedicated and willing to challenge and debate and confront these issues in a really, really active way. And I think part of that is because of the nature of the atmosphere that's created here at Georgetown and the chance to be in Washington DC, which is a wonderful resource for us obviously. So given that this atmosphere here and the chance to be in Washington DC, it's created sort of an experimental playground I like to think of in us for some conscious and engaged art here on this campus. This past fall, one of my close friends here, he's an international student from Indonesia, he directed an original advice piece called hashtag courage, which responded to sort of the impact of social media and the change in context of revolution in May or spring. And that was all done through our student-grid MoMAX Festival on one of our several entirely student-run leader companies on our campus. This spring, one of my classes put on a showcase performance for our semester's work in ethnographic research, an interview performance based upon our exploration and sort of living experience of what Occupy DC is doing here in the city. I mean my friends, we can throw around names, thanks to these other faculty professors that sort of are of interest. We can throw around names like Bawal and Brecht and the same Brecht as like Shakespeare or Sondheim. It's that breadth of interest that they've really helped cultivate in us. As students here, we crave a creative outlet for our sort of curiosity for and our questions about engagement with the world just as much as we crave knowledge of how to become better theater artists, which is a little bit of what Derek prefaced with, and that how you combine the teaching of students who, you know, want to become their actors. You know, as a director of state theater, which whatever it is, with students who want to really study politics, to policy other issues and bring those two together, because they can often be seen as mutually exclusive. I think that's sort of what a lot of my friends and I have been trying to do, is we want our hands in both worlds, so how do you help that and foster that? Devise an ensemble-based work here, coexist with more traditional play production and sort of a unique laboratory of exposure that I had never, I mean I didn't know what devise was when I graduated high school, no idea. As students, we're blessed to have a program and an entire group of student run theater clubs that allow for students by diversity of background to interest who have access to ownership over and involvement in theater making. On this campus, anyone who wants to be a part of theater can, in some way or another, no matter where you're coming from. In the span of three years, I've been an actor, producer, designer, and more in a few short months, I'll be a director for the very first time. And I've done this alongside students from all four undergraduate colleges with as many combinations of majors and minors as you can possibly imagine. So the work for finding our voices and reflecting back and saying something about our society, our politics, and our ways of seeing the world is really intertwined with our group of students who understand the elements of creating theater in a way that is really personal, really singular here. And at times very confusing. All this being said, I'm naturally left with many questions. For example, how can we make it possible for theory to meet practice when university schedules and logistics make it very difficult for students to be sort of up close with community in a really meaningful and sort of time intensive way. How can students learn to be quality theater artists in their traditional sense and be evenly involved in a wider area of academic studies such as international affairs? How can we increase transparency, access, and networks for students coming out of college like I'm about to do? Who want to do this type of work but may not necessarily know where to begin? And all of these questions are acted in the minds of our panelists. And with that, I will turn it over to them. Thank you. Thank you. I think we'll turn it over to Professor Sheldon Bouchard. He's coming to this gathering, so I think it's kind of wonderful. Coming to this gathering, cold as it were, but not, you know, obviously we've been in a lot of parts of London. She's an assistant professor of cultural and politics in the School of Foreign Service. They're just given out as preferences. She also struck, you're interested in how to combine geography, architecture, and performance studies. And so for me, as we were corresponding, and it's interesting to see Professor Randy Bass and John Gregg struck here, who are extraordinarily inventive thinkers about our curriculum here at Georgetown. And have been influential to me in terms of thinking about how even to me this question actually is a question of geography and architecture and performance, like how these things come together in a very direct way. So we might get to that. Okay. Well, I'll just start with a little bit, very brief background, just to position me here a little bit since I'm coming later in a conversation, right? So I'm really excited to be here. It's very exciting. And I would really enjoy listening to you guys. You guys speak a little more about things. Okay, okay. So in terms of my sort of two overarching interests that I work on and my roles in practice kind of circle around. And the first would be, I'm a geographer by training, but the first would be this notion of exhibitionary modernity. And what I just mean by that is to think about an approach to culture that looks at the exhibitionary field of cultural production. So this might be, for me, has been a way to think about the relationship of sort of the arts and diplomacy for policy and so forth. To think about the activities of education, performance, cultural diplomacy, expertise, pedagogy in general together in that way. And so this kind of, you know, I did a bunch of dissertation work that looked at emergent museums in contemporary urban China. And so I did a lot of work on thinking about the genealogy of sort of the exhibition or modernity. And the second realm, I think that's really interesting, something that kind of I could pull out of my work would be to think about the intersection of, it might be of interest to some of you would be to think about environmental justice and politics. This certainly is a very active area, as a sort of huge convergence of arts and policy around the environment, landscape, different science, bioethics, this whole realm. And for me, as a geographer, thinking about the nature society kind of interfaces, just the bread and butter and the discipline, but my work sort of went in the direction here of looking at issues of toxicity and militarism. And so I have all sorts of work that I've worked on speaking in terms of collaboration. All those things come out of kind of interrogating the notion of form. Really other thing I wanted to sort of pop into this is something that I was talking about at the table as well, which is that as I've been hearing on the news the last couple of days about all of the new domains that Doc Google and Doc Volvo and whatever that we're going to start seeing in entire domains that people are paying 185K a piece just to apply for. And I thought a dot art is that the idea of what is the, can there be a container big enough where we can do the interrogating both virtually and in face to face, where we can learn a language that's more effective so that we don't continually have what happens here, the emblem that we all think of in America of the NEA4 and what happened when we didn't have a language that was as effective a language as the right had. And until we have a language and structures that are as effective as, I'm going to get into an us and them thing here, but there needs to be a way in which we can talk to each other in ways that are not, as one of my colleagues was saying at the table today, are not just opaque to everybody else that you get in a room, how do we have language where we can talk to each other and I think a lot of that comes in our processes and in our forms that we may work in. I'm going to turn in a second to Joseph Miegel because that question of form and processes at the center kind of what you've been dealing with in the chat. I'm just curious though, it feels like there's been some how questions, Erwin said how and then you just said how. I just want to like, we have to take the temperature of the room and see if there's thoughts on the how questions before I turn to Joseph. Yes, please. I have a question. My name is Allie. I'm in the school in South Africa, Georgetown. And I just found that although Georgetown has all these amazing opportunities, the problems with the mentality of the school and the mentality of being in Washington and being known for its school-born service, how do you change the mentality so that students who have these artistic interests are able to take these courses and not deterred just because it's not the way the school is known for. I have friends who are in the school of foreign service and have a great interest in the arts but are simply majoring in international political autonomy because culture and politics, I mean I don't mean this in a sense of way because I am a culture and politics major, is seen as a soft means. You know, I say I'm a culture and I say I'm in the school for its service and then I say I'm a culture and politics major and you would go, oh, as if that is not in the same category as school and service. So how do you change the mentality of Georgetown, of other universities so that the arts aren't seen as, you know, wish the side. You can create all these amazing opportunities. Yes. How do we then actually make that change the student body mentality? This is, as you said, it's not just a Georgetown problem. It has its particular flavor here but it's a problem and it's not just a university problem. It's a problem. But it manifests in a specific way of Georgetown, of Georgetown specifically. And the same, you've been talking about it on such a global scale that, you know, if we zero in that the problem is how do we change the university level. You know, I'm 20 years old, my arms are, you know, young. If we're not given the opportunity to experience the arts and if we're not pushed and motivated to take these arts classes then, you know, we're just going to generate the future generation which has a lack of appreciation for arts. For example, it's not required in our core at Georgetown because other disciplines are. You can take it to fulfill the humanities reading and writing requirements in our course. That's not required. So we're servicing a lot of how's, which is good. And, you know, thoughts on ideas, responses, John? I was just going to react to that point because studies have been done that show that in the State Department itself, the cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy area is the lowest of the low. And that it's very rare for somebody who comes through the public diplomacy home to rise up to the level of Ambassador at a almost ever-compens. Cynthia is a great exception. But you didn't rise up. You were a political appointee. You were cherry-picked. You know, so I think it's a societal issue and reflected here, unfortunately. And at the institutions that many of us teach at, the practitioners somewhere below the scholar. I mean, you know, the stratification continues. Yeah, Stephen Sperry. For the very same James Wilkinson, who was a virtual biologist at the Kennedy Center and all of these festivals, I was part of a 14 in the late 90s that helped him develop a culture and sustainable development initiative at the World Bank. Which flourished and faltered. And one of the great connections that we made is that there were trusty engineers going out into the world who, when we started pushing culture and putting them in touch with culture, realized all along they were doing culture without knowing it. And there were powers and capacities to be tapped. Now, there are advantages to being a cultural sector and building up that sector in such a role. But that doesn't really do it. The whole notion of development is how different cultures do their own self-development, how you come in as an intervener from all of this. And when the economists take it over, sometimes for good, one of the greatest things that the economists at the World Bank did is show everyone that investing in women's education is the best investment you can make. It's cultural. It really is possible. I saw time and time again when I was there and someone I was in this culture and sustainable development, they said, oh, your background makes sense. And to show the sense out in the field and the world with people and cultures trying to develop themselves, it's a long, long fall that there are possibilities. And just as a quick observation, it feels like some of our challenges are internal to the arts and cultural, because we also structure ourselves in terms of, I mean, I think a lot of the organizations I'm part of, like, you go to the TCG conference, as great as it is, and then like the managing directors meet with the managing directors and these people, you know, and so, like, in fact, we're in our own kind of enclaves, it seems, in a lot of cases, that, you know, the position or stratify or ghetto-wise or whatever ourselves, even within our kind of core skill sets to reach across. So, you know, it's a big societal question that we're not victorious over and others are the problem. But that's what I think is so exciting to see now in America, I feel, where theater companies and theater buildings, so to speak, are starting to collaborate with universities. Because for a long time, there was also the academia was kind of lower, where it wasn't as interesting as the actual field out there. And now the two are starting to move to each other, and I think that's a very good movement. Great. I'm going to, that's a great, I want to, can you just briefly give an example, as artists and residents at UNC Chapel Hill and building the process series, working some internationally with graduates, because they are a professional kind of identity within the campus there. Do you want to speak to that? Sure. You know, I think a lot about how hard it is to do cross-disciplinary work, even though it's so encouraged and talked about at the university because of the borders that we create in disciplines and people getting stuck. And my background being new play development, I ran a theater in New Jersey, a playwright's theater in New Jersey, which was exclusively on developing new theater. I wanted to take some of that work into the university, and I do it both in the classroom and then in a program that I've created with Caroline Formiart and Namiel Kang, the presenting arm of UNC. And that would be called the process series, which is new works in development. And it gives room and space for artists to develop new work over time in the performing arts, not just theater, but in music and dance, cross-disciplinary work, hybrid work, mediated work. All of these types of different pieces come into the process series. We give them time to develop them at the university in space. And what I've discovered, and a very exciting discovery, is that the university then becomes a really interesting and active incubator because we've got actually experts. We've got scholars available to those artists who don't necessarily have access or direct access. So if someone's doing something on physics, we can take them to that department or environmentalists or an urban planner. So that artists have begun to discover that unlike the O'Neill or other professional developmental environments that give you some space and time to work on your work, the university actually has resources that go beyond the library. And there seems to be some energy back from the scholars. There seems to be, you know, to be asked and to be engaged with different pieces artistically becomes innovating and exciting to those scholars. I'm sort of surprised at sort of the willingness because, you know, everyone's trying to avoid being on another committee or two university. But the opportunity to work with a city company, you know, on a piece or the opportunity to work with Mark Webudy Joseph on his environmental piece that he's taking across the country becomes something exciting and a place for interactions to happen. And so, you know, the purpose of the process series is to demonstrate to students and the community and the campus to demonstrate what artists do to develop new work and to create a laboratory that has a visibility, that has a transparency in terms of watching artists. So, you know, we're going to bring, we're going to bring some puppeteers like Dory Vendor or Aris of the Twist, Basil Twist, to the community and watch their new works happen both in rehearsal and development. And then there'll be some sort of presentation of the work wherever it is. And we engage with the critical analysis of that work. And the other thing, you know, you do learn as you work with more and more disciplines, like composers don't want to think that they're not done when they're done. You know, they've written all the notes and what could more could they do, right? Whereas playwrights are seem willing to listen in here and watch. So you also feel a elasticity about what development is and what that form of that thing is that you're creating. And how does that particular artist get there? So, it seems to me that the university is a great place for that work to happen. And in the series we always pick one student work that has arisen to the top. The first year was this student who went to Tanzania and did all of this ethnographic work and about, you know, politics of development and AIDS and performance and how performance is used for education in different ways in Tanzania. And she put all of this in one performance and I worked with her in my practicum to develop it. But it was such a remarkable piece at the end where she played all of these different beautiful people that she met there in this ethnographic performance that we sort of put into the process series and she's been able to travel around many, many different congresses around the country and indeed was invited back to Tanzania to perform it and I went with her. So those are the types of things and those are the types of interactions that can happen. And I think uniquely at the university. I think I'm just to pull up language again. Even the word development is interesting to me that we use the word across these disciplines and mean different things by it, but there are ways that we might mean similar things by it. And looking for worlds, you know, of understanding and development as always. We have development officers who do one thing for an arts organization. We talk about student sciences companies that are working in development. I don't know what they're talking about. Are they developing a new play? Are they writing a brand? That's interesting to me in terms of the fact that they might be doing all three, you know, and what's the connection there? I want to turn, we're privileged to have one of the most distinguished members of this community, Professor John Hull of Islamic History and Associate Director of the Center for Muscle, Christian Understanding. There's so many things I think you can bring from your perspective. You know, there's a lot of, I'm curious about these hows, this kind of the hows. How do we do this? How do we do this? And you, I think, have insight potentially into the perspective of people who, you know, who might have some responses to those hows or ideas about those hows. So I'm curious. Okay, yeah, there are a couple of things just to be kind of quick. There are two things that I just want to explore in terms of the how. The discussions have been talking about how do we do X, how do we get performance, how do we cross disciplines and so on for basically young adults and adults. When we talk about curriculum, we've been talking about college level and maybe graduate student programs. It seems to me that to deal with your sort of issue, if we have not been successful in introducing an appreciation of the artistic dimensions of human culture before people are freshmen in college, we've lost the battle. And I really think that if we're talking about the next generation curricular approaches, if we're thinking about curricular approaches to create the broader world that we're seeing as desirable, you start when, well, you start by playing Mozart or exotic music of some sort of my favorite Arabic music next to the womb before you're born. There are these studies that say fetuses that have listened to Mozart for nine months have different thought processes than fetuses that didn't. And so I think that part of the challenge is that we are all very involved in the intellectually challenging kinds of issues that deal with our age grade. Now, my age grade is a lot different than most of the other. I mean, I think there's only one other person that's in my age grade here. But what we've got is a challenge of saying how do we get from womb to grave appreciation of the kind of issues that we're talking about. And I think that the starting place where the arts have lost is in the elementary school. And if, truth in advertising, I was a Suzuki parent and my daughter and I lived with the violin from the time she was two and a half. Now, her violin was about like that. And I couldn't even hold it in my hand. But watching the thousands of... I mean, when we went to Suzuki camp, when she was in fifth grade and sixth grade, these thousands of people from three feet high to six feet high all playing twinkle, twinkle, twinkle. But they came out of it with a kind of artistic literacy that simply was totally different from the kind of literacy, the kind of sensitivity that you have if you have a formal music appreciation course when you're in high school. And so our curricular issues mean that we have to invent and develop stronger ways of having appreciation for and involvement in all of the arts from elementary school through what I like to think. I'm more interested in religious instruction. I mean, I work more in religious instruction than in artistic instruction. But I think of my activities with people in the State Department and with other sort of various and sundry people. I think of it as adult continuing education. We've got to... we can't stop. We've got to continue to educate both ourselves and everybody else. But the curricular issues are not just sort of college. They're everything. The second thing, then, is in terms of, then, again, the more kind of specific how-to. And Shinelle was talking about what she does in classroom. Increasingly, we all have the advantage of being embedded in immense amounts of information. But increasingly, because of the kind of media through which we have access to the information, increasingly, information is performance. That, again, truth in advertising, I'm a pure constructionist. No human being, no human being, in my view, knows the absolute truth. The only truth that any human being knows is what their senses provide their particular internal computer with. And so that all of our knowledge is construction. And construction is performance. And so I think that one of the things that I have found as we have increasing access to information is performance is that we have to change how... I'm a historian. We have to change how we train people to do analysis. When I grew up... I'm old enough that I grew up in a time when Orientalism was a respectable academic discipline and language was important and textual criticism was important and so on. I think now texts are important, but texts are now performance. And so we have to shift from the old-fashioned, we're all into the textual analysis mode and shift into even our documents as being performance modes rather than textual modes. And just as closing, then, we have lots of different performance modes. And one of the lovely things now in our seminar room and in lots of our rooms, you can clunk into YouTube and things like that. And YouTube is an unending joy for finding really strange things. And when we were in my class on Islamic movements, in my class on Islamic movements, one of the movements that we talked about is Hisbola, the, quote, radical Islamist Shiite movement in Lebanon. Well, I found on YouTube a marvelous 10-minute segment which took a major speech by Nasrallah, who's the head of Hisbola, and took out of this sort of hour-long speech all of the jokes that he told. And so you have this sequence of about 10 minutes of Nasrallah, the head of Hisbola, telling jokes. And by then, he's a really great stand-up comic. And so what we did in class then was we talked about his stand-up comic rate as a performance for expression of political views. Now, you know, before YouTube, that's really not possible. But we now have this kind of access, and it emphasizes, you know, we could have gone, we could have gone through the text. We could have gone through the text of Nasrallah's speech and done a textual analysis, and Professor Sir Hamilton Gibb would have been proud of the textual analysis that we could have done. But instead, what we had was this grand performance mode of the stand-up comic. In this, it was a shared learning experience because the graduate students in the class pay a lot more attention to stand-up comics than I do. But, you know, we could talk about the stand-up comic rate as a mode of political critique and political criticism or sit-down comic rate like John Stuart and so on and work on it this way. And I think that performance, if we expand our sense of performance to the idea of performance as knowledge, that we can also find ways, then, vehicles for incorporating into anthropology, into sociology, or interlinked or whatever, we can find ways of incorporating performance arts into our social science and humanities analysis. It's great. I mean, I think it makes me think so much of the work of Shafiq Nadeem that we've had in here. And you've given us a really interesting how. The hard how as a parent, I'm like, I don't solve the problem of our kids not getting arts and literature. That's the one I don't know that we have an answer to. But this idea of laughter, which those of us is a very deep, it's not, you know, we understand that, like, actually Stephen Colbert in certain ways is creating aspects of a revolution. And when we work on the Greeks, we understand how close laughter is physically to empathy and opening and to tears and to sort of spaces where things get exchanged. And it strikes me as one how that if in these moments, these forums, these places where the ice needs to be broken and deeper understandings are created, if part of the strategy is to, like, get some laughter going between people around something that is about deeper stuff as Shafiq's work is so emblematic of, that's a how.