Welcome to ADSA2021 – the online version. 

This year, as we gather remotely as a community of scholars, teachers, practitioners, and artists, we acknowledge the precarity of the times. Our field is under 
substantial pressure to reinvent itself, and to work together as our sector, our community and by extension our discipline face unexpected challenges to form, to content and production, and in reaching audiences.

We welcome you with hope and gratitude.  
We are grateful for the response to our call for papers.
We are grateful to you as presenters and delegates as we have sought to create a gathering in real time. 
We are grateful for your response to the need to change this as we took the hard decision to move online. 

Kiri Tawhai

We want to recognise and thank the traditional owners of the lands on which we work and live. Deakin campuses are on Gunditjmara, Wurundjeri, Wadawurrung lands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to elders, past and presen. We acknowledge the absence of a treaty that recognises that these lands were never ceded. 

We thank our sponsors, community, and academic colleagues, who were generous and understanding as we developed our vision for the conference and worked to bring it all together. 

We call on you all to engage, listen, and contribute to Performers, Makers,  Methodologies – Crafting Conditions for Decentring Scholarship and Pedagogy in Drama, Theatre, Performance Studies and Dance, the 2021 ADSA conference. 

We invite you to examine our/your assumptions, reflect on and critique past practices in scholarship and pedagogy; to interrogate as a source of insight, a range of practices within the broader remit of decentring, and to engage in self-examination within a spirit of solidarity.  

Rea, Kate, Miles. Katya and Ashlee  
ADSA 2021 conference organising committee