Host Nicolas Shannon Savard and (returning guest!) Katya Vrtis turn their practice of crip theorizing-in-process to Mia Mingus’ concept of access intimacy and the possibilities it offers as a way of thinking about and practicing accessibility in higher education.

Key Questions:
What is access intimacy, and what interventions might it make where higher ed’s other models of accessibility (ADA, Universal Design, DEI) fall short?
How did you come to thinking about and practicing access intimacy in the academic/artistic spaces you inhabit? In other words, for you, why did access intimacy feel so necessary?

Key Texts:
Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link”
Desiree Valentine, “Shifting the Weight of Inaccessibility: Access Intimacy as a Critical Phenomenological Ethos”
Katya Vrtis, “Access Intimacy as a Philosophy of Care in Post-Pandemic Academic Theatre.” Theatre History Studies 42 (2023). (link)
Nicolas Shannon Savard, “Do we Get More Points if we Take Bigger Risks? Modeling Boundary-Setting in the Undergraduate Acting Classroom,” Journal of Consent-Based Performance 2, no. 1 (2023). (link)

Additional Links:
Transcript: Episode 8. Access Intimacy in Academic Spaces
Zotero Library: for theatre scholars who’ve been cut from the syllabus to make room for Shakespeare
for theatre scholars | Zotero
Pedagogy in Process Blog on DRNSSAVARD.COM

Guest Bio:
Dr. Catherine (Katya) Vrtis is an independent scholar of Theatre and Performance Studies. They graduated from Tufts University with a PhD in Drama in 2017. Their dissertation, titled “Black or Red: The Creation of Identity in the Radical Plays of Langston Hughes,” examined performance of identity, Black v. White Communism in the United States, and anti-Fascist activism prior to World War II. The Journal of African American Studies published a revised chapter under the title “Proletarian Plays for Proletarian Audiences: Langston Hughes and Harvest” in the September 2021 issue. Dr. Vrtis has also expanded their work on the performance of marginalized identities into the study of cultural discourses of freakery and monstrosity, especially as it applies to medicalized queer and disabled bodies. This research can be seen in “Defending the Patriarchy: The Monstrous (Queer) Other and the Anti-Carnivalesque,” in the anthology Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification edited by Dr. Michael Chemers and Dr. Analola Santana and will also appear in “Freakish Fecundity: Reproductive and Large Family Reality Television as Eugenicist Discourse” in Freakery Too: Further Explorations of the Extraordinary Body in Performance edited by Dr. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Dr. Michael Chemers, and Dr. Analola Santana. Their writing on disability/crip informed pedagogy includes “Access Intimacy as a Philosophy of Care in Post-Pandemic Academic Theatre” in volume 42 of Theatre History Studies and “Mission Possible: Practical Steps to a More Accessible Classroom” in Theatre/Practice 13, which was co-written with Cassandra White, Florida Division of Arts, and Culture and Deborah Kochman, University of South Florida. Dr. Vrtis co-founded and served as the inaugural chair of the Disability, Theatre, and Performance Focus Group for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and currently serves as the Accessibility Officer for the Mid-America Theatre Conference and in additional positions across the field dedicated to improving access and representation for disabled scholars.

Pedagogy in Process—a podcast by and for educators working at the intersections of social justice, the arts, and the humanities. Hosted, edited, and produced by Nicolas Shannon Savard.