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How is dance used as a tool in relation to conflict, whether it be to prepare for it, survive it, subvert it, or heal from it? In this course we explore and experience dance’s relationship to violence and adversity. We investigate and imitate how it is used to train and prepare for fighting, to avoid or replace fighting, to sublimate conflict and rage, and to tell the stories and heal from what went down when conflict does take place. This is a studio course with key contextual readings and an emphasis on in-person work and the use of the body for sharing experience and gaining knowledge. Excellent course for students interested in Conflict Resolution, Psychology, Art Therapy, Culture and Politics, and kinesthetic learning.

TPST-2008-01
Dance & Conflict

3-credit | Studio | Fall 2026

Instructor: Emma Jaster

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This is a studio course with key contextual readings and an emphasis on in-person work and the use of the body for sharing experience and gaining knowledge. Excellent course for students interested in Conflict Resolution, Psychology, Art Therapy, Culture and Politics, and kinesthetic learning.

This course integrates scholarly investigation and studio practice to explore the art of theatrical directing. Skills and techniques explored in this course include, but are not limited to: analyzing plays and other texts for staging; crafting and communicating a vision for a production; collaborating with the design team; working with space; working with actors; giving and interpreting peer critique. In addition to discussions, readings, and theater outings, each student will take on their own directing projects throughout the semester.

Thinking of cultural diplomacy as a way to understand the people, societies and politics of countries and regions, the course will look at the ways creative expression in all its forms helps us to do that. As the 24-hour news cycle, social media, and citizen journalism upend traditional power structures, cultural diplomacy and “soft power” play increasingly important roles in diplomacy and foreign policy.

Exhausted by the current "conversation emergency” in which thoughtful, probing, and productive conversation across divides is practically impossible? Yearning for alternatives to prevailing ethos of silos and slogans, “us and them” thinking, retreat and avoidance, and zer0 sum-game approaches? Meet this moment by acquiring the skills and vision to converse honestly, build communities of trust, and identify common purpose while fully honoring the differences among us.

At a time when the world faces myriad challenges ranging from polarization to climate crisis to violent conflict and forced migration, artists and change-makers across the globe are finding innovative ways to humanize global politics through performance. This course offers students a chance to engage firsthand with artistic practices, projects, and methods --as well as with a diverse range of cutting-edge artists from around the world who are finding resilient and transformative models for how performance can operate as a humanizing force in the realm of politics and world affairs.

This interdisciplinary course employs techniques of devised performance to engage narratives from various pandemics, including both the COVID pandemic and the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, as a catalyst and developmental research process for a new performance collaboration between Georgetown's Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, the School of Health, Global Health Institute, and DC's Mosaic Theater Company.

Public diplomacy is an instrument used by states and non-state actors to understand others' cultures, attitudes, and behavior; build and manage relationships; and influence thoughts and actions to advance their interests and values. Drawing on the experiences of diplomats and a growing body of literature, we will explore what this means for the changing actors, issues, methods, and environments of diplomacy in the 21st century.

In this studio class we will investigate the many modes of movement that bring us together as humans across linguistic, cultural, generational, and national borders. We explore the concept of the body as a culture-bearer and its movement as a mode of connection with the otherwise "other." Students will learn to use empathy as a tool in everything from psychology to diplomacy.

How might the Georgetown campus or experience change when we engage across silos and divides? This course will focus on facilitating the IYS experience between students, faculty, and staff on our campus.

Encounters in Global Performance, offered in Spring 2020, was a course produced in partnership with the Kennedy Center. Co-taught by Derek Goldman and Ijeoma Njaka, this course gave students the opportunity to watch and discuss performances at the intersection of politics and performance.

Taught by Lab co-directors Derek Goldman and Cynthia Schneider, Politics and Performance combined theater exercises, live performances, and visits from theatermakers, artists, diplomats, and policy experts to expose students to the rich intersection of artistic performance and international politics. The course was centered on a spring break trip to Cambodia where students spoke with artists, politicians, and academics working to rebuild Cambodia’s social fabric and engage their troubled history with genocide.

This course will explore the changing relationship between different kinds of "hard power" (coercion by military or economic might) - and the power of arts and culture to shape identity, to unite, inspire and lead, to prevent and recover from conflict, and to counter extremism and authoritarianism. As the 24-hour news cycle, social media, and citizen journalism upend traditional power structures, cultural diplomacy and “soft power” play increasingly important roles in diplomacy and foreign policy.

This course offers a critical exploration of practices, theories, and examples of comedy across a wide variety of forms and genres - with a particular emphasis on political comedy as it manifests in a range of cultural contexts. We will explore the psychological, philosophical, political, cross-cultural and performative/aesthetic roots of comedy, investigating why and how we laugh, as well as the deep roots of our varied forms of laughter.

Outside of White-Gravenor Hall sits an iconic statue honoring Holocaust witness, Polish World War II hero, spy, and Georgetown professor Jan Karski. This course explores Karski’s story and its resonance today by centering on Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, an original theatrical production by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. Starting with the performance, this class explores how arts and witnessing can change the way we see the world. Students will meet artists from the Remember This team and attend optional field trips off campus.

At a time when our world faces myriad intertwined crises, this course offers students an opportunity to engage firsthand with performative practices, projects, and methods for building trust, cultivating new understandings and strategies of resistance, and exploring their own individual role and agency as citizens.

In a moment of particularly intense division within an already highly ideologically, socially, and politically polarized era, we find ourselves experiencing what we might call a "conversation emergency" in which meaningful, productive conversation itself is increasingly elusive. Yet so many of us yearn for alternatives that cut against the prevailing grain of silos and slogans, “us and them” thinking, retreat and avoidance, rigidity and the circling of wagons.

How do the interwoven histories of slaveholding and colonialism shape the current landscape of higher education? In what ways do their shadows restrain our designs for the future of universities? By situating the role of critical speculation as central to a liberatory design process, this course asks how higher education can be transformed, reimagined and reoriented towards building an anti-racist future.