In advance of an upcoming special issue of RiDE, which will gather survival practices for the performing arts in the neoliberal university, participants at this one and a half day symposium will explore together the issue’s central concern:

if we are experiencing a “crisis” in the Humanities generally and the living arts specifically, and that crisis is attributable in large measure to a now-normative neoliberal governance model both inside and outside the university that devalues or marginalizes the arts as “luxuries” unrelated to neoliberal goals, how can we most effectively redress the neoliberal university’s assumptions about the arts, and reconfigure the way it perceives arts value, or lack thereof?

The symposium will feature several brief keynote “provocations”, followed by a series of roundtable and large-group discussions. Each participant is asked to bring an example from their own institutional context of either a problem or a solution – a challenge, or an emerging “best practice” – related to our central concern above, as well as a question arising from their example.