Book Launch Party: "Sticking Stigma"

Venue: Institute of Health Equity and Social Justice Research, 314 International Village (3rd floor)

Address: 1175 Tremont St. Boston

Directions: Enter via the administrative entrance to International Village, not the residence hall entrance! There will be greeters at the main entrance to let guests in.

Event Description: Join us for an open house-style book launch party! Light refreshments will be served and author Dani Snyder-Young will be in attendance.

Book Description:

Stigma is the social process at the heart of discrimination and social abjection. In Sticking Stigma, Dani Snyder-Young examines the cultural technologies of power artists and cultural producers employ to manipulate stigma and its resulting affects in performance projects oriented toward the alleviation of social inequalities. This includes performances explicitly and implicitly working to reduce stigma experienced by marginalized communities as well as performances working to stigmatize behaviors aligned with facets of oppressive hegemonic power.
Applied theater projects have been used to reduce the stigma related to many health conditions including bipolar disorder, HIV, suicide bereavement, mental illness, autism, and substance use disorder. Beyond this applied theater tradition, theater and performance studies tend not to use the framework or language of stigma very often. Stigma is a more commonly used framework in social science fields such as health and sociology. However, theater and performance regularly attends to the material and affective violence of stigma power: oppression, dispossession, abjection, objectification, expulsion. Snyder-Young examines a set of activist performance projects attempting to use the force of stigma to redistribute and recenter social power.

Author Bio:

Dani is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Northeastern. Her artistic research centers on community-partnered projects examining how theater practices support human thriving in public health and public policy contexts. She leads the Data Theatre Collaborative, developing innovative methods for translating quantitative data into theatrical experiences that support community deliberation.
Dani's work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arts Work Fund for Organizational Development, and the American Association of University Women.

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Host or Publisher Center for the Arts