User:Envyzero/sandbox

The Centre for Performance Research and Cultural Studies- C PRACSIS [/si: praksiz/]- is a community of people based in Thrissur, Kerala, India to study culture through performance based research. It can be described as a collective of scholars, students, intellectuals, activists, teachers, authors, students, practitioners, professionals in arts and culture and performers who considers culture critique as a vital force of social transformation. The prime thrust of the organization falls on performance based discursive articulations that come within and beyond the cynosure of the academia. One of the driving threads of the CPRACIS is that it contests the conventional norms which regulate the concept of performance; that performance is an activity that remains confined within the walls of theater. Contrary to this, CPRACIS promulgate the notion that it is feasible to consider ‘everything in terms of performative values and degrees. For example, politics is itself a form of performance. Likewise, the tribulations and agonies which a homemaker encounters in her/his everyday practices within the domestic sphere could be read along the axis of performativity. The focus of this endeavour as its name suggests is Visual Culture and the epistemological practices associates to it. This institute experiments in cultural studies by employing anthropological, psychological, philosophical, theatrical, archaeological, folkloristic, cultural  and linguistic research; and to invigorate academic and scholarly innovations in inter-disciplinary areas. Promotion of academic understanding and research aspirations in interdisciplinary mode in Social Sciences and Cultural Studies is one of the most spectacular features of this initiative. Various projects of this organization foster and support the development of research and study in local histories, performance forms, contemporary art, diaspora and the politics of cultural practice. Publication of journals and monographs in cultural studies and performance research is another vital arena of its activity. Performance workshops and research laboratories are pivotal in designing the objectives of this organisation. The associates of CPRACIS do believe that performance as described thus offers us a point of epistemological break or shift, since such a restructured picturing of ‘performance’ compels us to rethink many of the cultural and political norms which are deemed to be correct, normal and universal. By including the topic of ‘diaspora’ as one of its prime concerns, the CPRACIS is able to embrace the marginal zones of fluidentities, cultural hybridities and social peripherals. This embracing gesture has another landmark within the faculty of English studies. Most of the practitioners of English Studies in Kerala take the Rule of the Genre for granted as an essential and foundational norm for all critical practices. But the notion of hybridities overwrites this kind of generic rigidities and offers an exodus to the diaspora of deviant, aberrant and subversive genres, persona, performers, artists/artistes and intellectuals of the limit experience.