About D. Soyini Madison

D. Soyini Madison is professor emeritus in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, USA. Madison’s work focuses on the intersections of Performance Ethnography, Environmental Justice, and Poetics within Political Economies of Race and Gender. Her book, Acts of Activism: Human Rights and Radical Performance, is based on local activists in Ghana, West Africa and how they employ modes of performance, as tactical interventions, in their day-to-day struggles for women’s rights, water democracy, and economic justice. Madison’s recent books include: Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance and PerformED Ethnography and Communication: Improvisation and Embodied Experience . Madison adapted and directed her ethnographic experiences in Ghana in two staged productions: Is It a Human Being or A Girl? a performed ethnography on traditional religion, modernity, and gendered poverty in West Africa; and, Water Rites, a multi-media performance on the privatization of public water and the struggle for clean and accessible water as a human right. Madison also wrote and directed, Labor Rites, a mosaic of the USA labor movement as it has been variously organized, valued, and contested. Madison’s earlier public performances include I Have My Story to Tell, a staged adaptation of oral histories from laborers and service workers in North Carolina, USA; Mandela, the Land, and the People, a montage from the life and writings of Nelson Mandela. Madison’s recent performance work, Seahorse, is an allegory based on interrelations among pan earthling species—across land, air, water, and time—under environmental extraction and ferment.