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Project Description

Dissertation Overview

Digital Autoethnography and Reflexive Performance: Navigating Intercultural Aesthetics in Practice as Research

This dissertation by Scott Felluss delves into the dynamic relationship between digital media, reflexive autoethnography, and intercultural performance. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and Practice as Research (PaR), it examines the ethical and methodological challenges of using digital platforms as both a research tool and a performative space.

Felluss’ work engages deeply with rasa theory, a key aesthetic concept from Indian performance traditions, exploring how these emotive states—particularly the rasa of fear (Bhayanaka)—can be transmitted and transformed through digital mediums. The research critically interrogates the role of technology in shaping the aesthetics of intercultural dialogue, focusing on how online platforms mediate, distort, and sometimes commodify artistic processes and cultural exchange.

Through three case studies—Position, The First Performance Poem, and Shared Horizons—Felluss dissects his artistic practice to reveal how the digital medium alters narrative, embodiment, and performative agency. The project’s trajectory is marked by a constant tension between creation and critique, exploring the uneasy intersections of artistic autonomy, cultural appropriation, and technological surveillance.

Accompanied by an archive of visual, audio, and written materials, the dissertation is a reflexive documentation of a performer-researcher’s journey in the digital age, offering critical insights into the ever-evolving landscape of intercultural aesthetics, performance studies, and ethnographic research.

Explore the full dissertation and its supplementary materials, including video documentation and original music, on Jarjara.com.

The Role of Practice as Research (PaR) and PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH (PAR)

Practice as Research (PaR) and Performance as Research (PAR) emerge within this dissertation as a methodologies and critical praxis that attempt to destabilizes the boundaries between theory and practice, subject and object, researcher and researched. PaR and PAR are deployed as both instruments of inquiry and a modes of documentation, enabling an intimate and embodied engagement with the cultural and artistic practices under scrutiny. It is through PaR and PAR that the research moves beyond disembodied analysis and instead, inhabits the performative and digital spaces it seeks to understand.

The significance of PaR and PAR in this context lies in its capacity for autoethnographic reflexivity. The researcher, by engaging directly with the creative processes of the cultures studied, becomes reflexively entangled in the fabric of the cultural intersection, thus rendering the research itself a site of performative (Self)intervention. This dissertation posits that PaR and PAR are not ancillary to traditional research methods; rather, they constitutes a hopeful reimagining of ethnographic practice, particularly when situated within digital contexts that demand renewed forms of engagement and representation.