Upcoming Courses
Fall 2025
Through engagement with GU's Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics resources, students will connect with diverse artists worldwide who create transformative models for performance as a humanizing force in global affairs. We will examine how performance reimagines community, care, power, justice, citizenship, and democracy. Performance practitioners will contextualize their work geopolitically, while international relations, politics, diplomacy, global health, and justice students will gain experiential understanding of performance's role in these fields. No prior performance experience needed. X-listed with CULP and JUPS. Fulfills comparative methods/breadth requirement for TPST.
TPST-2230-01
Performance and Politics
3-credit | Seminar | Fall 2025
Instructor: Dr. Derek Goldman
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.
Perspectives from fields like critical university studies and design justice will frame class discussions around the lingering effects of exclusionary designs in higher education. Alongside the theoretical context, this class also features the fantastical and the visionary; students will engage with speculative fiction, poetry, visual art, fugitivity, and Afro-futurism as both exemplars and essential components of a liberatory design process. By the end of this course, students will harness the power of rigorous imagination through an original, creative project so as to craft possible and future anti-racist institutions of learning.
LDES-7302-01
Critical Speculative
Design for Anti-Racism
3-credit | Seminar | Fall 2025
Instructor: Ijeoma Njaka
How do the interwoven histories of slaveholding and colonialism shape the current landscape of higher education? And how might these legacies restrain our designs for the future of universities? By situating learning design as a liberatory process, this class will use the practices of critical speculation, speculative play, and design fiction to reimagine our educational institutions for an anti-racist future.
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. In order to meet this moment with wisdom, these times call on us to slow down and clarify our vision, strengthen our resolve, and acquire the skills for more productive engagement with one another when significant social, ideological or political differences are present among us. We can derive great benefit for ourselves and others from experiences that nurture our resilience, fortify our empathy, inspire our search for unity of purpose while at the same time honoring our real differences, and build diverse communities equipped to forge new ways forward together.
UNXD-5123
Conversations Emergency
3-credit | Seminar | Fall 2025
Instructors: Rabbi Rachel Gartner & Dr. Elton Skendaj
In a time of ideological, social, and political polarization, Conversation Emergency gives students a space to pratice verbal and nonverbal communication skills in a creative and engaging environment. The course features an engaging exporation of our experiences by using the In Your Shoes performance process
What does it mean for live performance to be political? How can artwork alter our perceptions of political issues and hot topics? And why does live performance remain a powerful venue for communicating critical messages? Designed for students across the disciplines with an interest in the power of performance and the arts to engage with critical issues in our world, this one-credit course offers Georgetown students exposure to and intensive engagement with a diverse set of acclaimed theatrical productions presented in the Washington, DC area—including in-depth interaction with artists from these productions. No previous experience with performing arts is required.
UNXD 4460 Encounters in Global Performance
1-credit | Seminar | Fall 2025
Instructors: Ijeoma Njaka & Ersian François
Designed for students across the disciplines with an interest in the power of performance and the arts to engage with critical issues in our world, this one-credit course offers Georgetown students exposure to and intensive engagement with a diverse set of acclaimed theatrical productions.
