Submission Details

The theme Roots and Routes invites participants to share research stories that create new routes to flow through … like water forging its way through new soil, winding its way to the ocean … while still being deeply rooted and connected by the practices, paradigms, and research methodologies of drama education and applied theatre. Through collective listening and engagement in playful inquiry as we embrace our own roots and routes, we seek to gain insight and courage to address significant global issues and embrace solidarity while honouring the art and practices of our field.

We warmly invite contributors to gather at UBC’s campus for IDIERI 2025 to consider how our practices impact the communities within which we are rooted as we engage in our research. How might we create tendrils of vigourous ethical practice in a field where moments are in-the-making, unique within each community and context … where we expect the unexpected? Curiously, in numerology, number 11 is associated with insight, intuition, and inspiration. Our call for the 11^th IDIERI invites innovative propositions from scholars and practitioners worldwide to consider the following provocations:

• What is the importance of identifying our roots as individuals and as a field and how does that shape our understandings of the routes we take as practitioners and researchers?
• In what way does engagement with Indigenous ways of knowing and being influence the routes we take that shape our practices?
• How do we engage in our work in meaningful, aesthetic, and ethical ways?
• In what ways might we trouble, interrupt, reimagine the sometimes entrenched, rooted status quo of our field?
• What practical approaches might inform our praxis and surge new routes forward?

Due to our desire to create space for as many voices as possible, we encourage you to submit a proposal as speaker/facilitator/performer in one session only. We invite submissions that forge new routes in how we re-engage in academic discourse through workshops, performances, interactive presentations, long table conversation sessions, and other performative forms of academic play in addition to conventional academic papers and posters. Session lengths will vary in accordance to received proposals and available time slots.

Submission deadline for proposals is now past. Please contact idieri.2025@ubc.ca if you have questions regarding proposals.

We invite you to become entangled in the roots and routes of playful inquiry.

Think beyond the expected. Be the unexpected.

Questions?

Please contact the IDIERI 2025 Conference Secretariat by email