南安倉

The interdisciplinary approach that characterizes my scholarship informs my teaching. Most of my research on theatre, social performance, identity formation, and critical methodology has been dedicated to the develop of what I call "transversal theory." Although research in many disciplines, both sociological and scientific, seems to have made huge strides over the last few centuries in its quest to understand and influence natural processes, the organizing machinery (governmental, educational, religious, and juridical structures) of all modern societies are still far from being able to account for common inconsistencies in the management of social order. For this reason, the machinery focuses on what it knows it must, and often can, control: the range of thought, what I term "conceptual territory," of the populace. The machinery needs continually to (re)establish the scope of personal experience and perception. This scope, what I refer to as their "subjective territory," must be navigated so that notions of identity cease to be arbitrary and transitory, and acquire temporal constancy and spatial range for the subsistence of what is seen to be a healthy individual and, by extension, a coherent social body. Regardless of how actually heterogeneous the subject population (either genetically, ethnically or philosophically), the machinery works to imbue this population with a state-serving subjectivity, indeed a shared ideology, that gives this social body the assurance of homogeneity and universality.

Transversal theory, and thus transversal pedagogy, pursues understanding of the workings of this machinery in the interest of making the individual aware of the means (both ideological and material) by which his or her subjective territory has been formed and maintained; it encourages conceptual and emotional experience outside of the society's constraints. The production of such alternative thinking and feeling, which expands subjective territory and creates more cognizant individuals with enhanced self-agency, is a primary goal of transversal pedagogy. By example, through class discussion, transversal pedagogy inspires students to be "investigative-expansive" rather than "dissective-cohesive," and thus to venture into "transversal territory": a limitless conceptual and emotional space, usually only ephemerally inhabited, that defies determination and regulation, and does not serve any specific structures, dispositions, systems, or objectives.

Unlike the dissective-cohesive mode, an analytical approach (characteristic of most dialectical argumentation) that breaks its subject matter into constituent parts and examines those parts with the goal of reassembling them into a unified and accountable whole, the investigative-expansive mode insists that the subject matter under investigation be partitioned according to essentially ad hoc parameters. The internal connectedness (among themselves) and external connectedness (to other forces, such as the subject matter's social history) of the partitioned units (the variables) are then examined with a readiness to reparameterizing as the analysis progresses -- as unexpected problems, information, and ideas surface. Whereas the goal of the dissective-cohesive mode is to (re)construct an accountable whole, the investigative-expansive mode seeks comprehension of the subject matter's fluid and plural relationships to its own parts and to the greater environments of which it is a part. In my classroom, the subject matter is often a Shakespeare play, and the greater environments are the cultures that both produced and reproduce it through staged performance and reading the text. The students analyze transversally the circumstances of their own education as part of their educational experience.