On January 18th, the Distinguished Lecture Series, sponsored by the TransCanada Institute / School of English and Theatre Studies (University of Guelph), presented Dr. Diana Taylor’s lecture entitled “Taking to the Streets: Mass Mobilization Online and Off.”

Listen here:[audio:taylor.mp3]

As Taylor asks in the abstract for her talk, “What options for political and economic justice do people have when the electoral process has been violated, the media sequestered in the hands of the power-brokers, and official institutions cannot adjudicate in a way that is seen as transparent and legitimate?” In pursuing these questions, Taylor’s lecture compares public protests following Mexico’s contested election of 2006 to the public protests of Occupy Wall Street.

Dr. Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997), and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) which
won the Outstanding Book from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for Best Book in Latin American and Hispanic Studies from the Modern Language Association (2004). Dr. Taylor is founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.