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Campus Courses

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

Instructors: Derek Goldman

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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
CritSpecDesign for Anti-Racism

3-credit | Seminar | Fall 2025

Instructors: Ijeoma Njaka

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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. 
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Past Courses

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. At the same time, performance, film, literature, and media increasingly engage international issues and/or topics of concern around the world and, in some cases have an impact on shaping those issues.
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.
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 characterized by polarization and distrust, the need for approaches that humanize others through narrative and empathy has never been greater. The Lab is dependent on outside funding in order to make our work possible.

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A joint initiative between the School of Foreign Service and Department of Performing Arts.

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