• Four Notes on Six Conversations
• Carla Neuss (bio)

In June 2023, I had the unexpected privilege of being able to sit down, in person, with six scholars in our field for a series of open-ended and wide-ranging conversations. The occasion was, nominally, a chance to reflect on the seventy-five years of Theatre Journal’s contribution to theatre scholarship; but over the course of my conversations with Rustom Bharucha, Jean Graham-Jones, Joseph Roach, Karen Shimakawa, Patricia Ybarra, and Harvey Young, what emerged was a multi-valenced probing of the past, present, and future of what has come to be known as theatre and performance studies. As a recently minted PhD, I was conscious of proverbially sitting at the feet of intellectual giants in our field and had planned on dutifully asking a series of pre-prepared questions: What has your experience with Theatre Journal been? What do you see as the role of scholarly journals today? What are your hopes for the next seventy-five years of the journal? As in only but the richest of conversations, what resulted exceeded the narrow bounds of such questions and I found myself sharing ideas, concerns, and hopes with my interlocutors that ran the gamut from redefining diversity to the collapse of public universities, the sidelining of theatre history to the tensions between scholarship and practice.

My task since that June has been to distill the knowledges generated from these conversations in order to share them with TJ readers and the field at large. To that end, I have produced a series of short videos drawn from these interviews (which I had the good fortune to be able to record) as well as publishing the transcripts of our conversations in hopes of building an archive of reflections on the state of the field that can serve scholars in years to come. In this short essay, I cannot do justice to the richness of this archive. What I can do, though, is distill the threads of conversation into four key considerations, each of which continues to linger with me. I hope by sharing these notes with you we can collectively consider—and create—what the next seventy-five years of the discourse on theatre and performance will be and the form it will take.

1. 1. Dwindling, if not gone, are the days of receiving a journal like TJ in the mail, sitting down with a beverage of choice, and reading it cover to cover. Harvey Young suspects that perhaps only Ric Knowles still enacts that ritual of reading that was once dominant. For me, as a scholar raised in the keyword generation, reading a journal in its entirety has gone the way of listening to an entire album; instead, I usually just stream the hit single from Spotify (in this case, JSTOR or ProjectMuse.) A sense of loss surrounding this shift underpinned these conversations. What do we lose when we [End Page E-67] consume scholarship outside of its curatorial context? But in other ways, we have all benefited from the search-enginization of encountering scholarship, in no small part because we are now more likely, through algorithms and keywords, to encounter work from fields beyond our own; my own current book project’s central case studies were the results of erroneous hits on JSTOR that caught my eye and attracted my curiosity. My interlocutors also spoke to the need and desire for academic publishing to move to more open-access models. That shift, already underway with some publications (facilitated by moves like JSTOR’s free access to one hundred articles monthly for all registered users) holds the potential of lifting the paywall curtain that often keeps valuable work out of the hands of readers beyond the academy. Perhaps much more of the scholarship in our field would function as public-facing if the public could in fact access it.

2. 2. Many of the interviewees spoke to the question of diversity in unexpected ways. Yes, several praised the progress made by Theatre Journal and its peer journals in widening the range of voices and contributors to the journal; Patricia Ybarra wryly recalled a special issue on Women in Drama published in...

• 六次谈话的四个注意事项
• 卡拉·诺伊斯（简介）

2023 年 6 月，我意外地有幸能够与我们领域的六位学者面对面坐下来进行一系列开放式、广泛的对话。名义上，这个场合是一个反思《戏剧杂志》七十五年来对戏剧学术贡献的机会；但在我与 Rustom Bharucha、Jean Graham-Jones、Joseph Roach、Karen Shimakawa、Patricia Ybarra 和 Harvey Young 的交谈过程中，我发现了对过去、现在和未来的多方面探索。被称为戏剧和表演研究。作为一名刚刚获得博士学位的人，我意识到众所周知，我坐在我们领域知识巨人的脚下，并计划尽职尽责地提出一系列预先准备好的问题：您在《戏剧杂志》上的经历如何？您认为当今学术期刊的作用是什么？您对该杂志下一个七十五年的希望是什么？就像在最丰富的对话中一样，结果超出了此类问题的狭隘范围，我发现自己与对话者分享了想法、担忧和希望，范围从重新定义多样性到公立大学的崩溃、戏剧的边缘化历史与学术与实践之间的紧张关系。

自六月以来，我的任务就是提炼这些对话中产生的知识，以便与TJ读者和整个领域分享。为此，我制作了一系列从这些采访中提取的短视频（我有幸能够录制这些视频），并发布了我们的谈话记录，希望能够建立一个反思档案。这个领域可以在未来为学者服务。在这篇短文中，我无法公正地评价这个档案的丰富性。不过，我能做的就是将谈话线索提炼成四个关键考虑因素，每一个因素都一直萦绕在我心头。我希望通过与您分享这些笔记，我们可以共同思考并创造未来七十五年的戏剧和表演话语及其形式。

1. 1. 收到像TJ这样的邮寄日记、坐下来喝一杯精选饮料、从头到尾阅读的日子，即使没有消失，也正在逐渐减少。哈维·杨（Harvey Young）怀疑，也许只有里克·诺尔斯（Ric Knowles）仍然保持着曾经占主导地位的阅读习惯。对我来说，作为一个在关键词一代长大的学者，读完整一本日记就像听整张专辑一样；相反，我通常只是从 Spotify（在本例中为 JSTOR 或 ProjectMuse）播放热门单曲。围绕这种转变的失落感支撑了这些对话。当我们[E-67页尾]在策展背景之外消费学术成果时，我们会失去什么？但在其他方面，我们都从接触学术的搜索引擎中受益，在很大程度上是因为我们现在更有可能通过算法和关键词接触到我们自己领域之外的工作；我自己当前的图书项目的中心案例研究是 JSTOR 上错误点击的结果，它引起了我的注意并引起了我的好奇心。我的对话者还谈到了学术出版转向更加开放获取模式的需求和愿望。一些出版物已经开始进行这种转变（JSTOR 为所有注册用户每月免费获取一百篇文章等举措所推动）有可能拉开付费墙的帷幕，而付费墙往往使学术界以外的读者无法获得有价值的作品。如果公众实际上可以访问的话，也许我们领域的更多奖学金将成为面向公众的。

2. 2. 许多受访者以意想不到的方式谈到多样性问题。是的，一些人赞扬了《戏剧杂志》及其同行期刊在扩大期刊的声音和撰稿人范围方面所取得的进展；帕特里夏·伊巴拉 (Patricia Ybarra) 挖苦地回忆起《戏剧中的女性》出版的一期特刊……