Delivered by Dr Patrick Duggan

For sociologist Frank Furedi, the contemporary moment is defined by the emergence of what he calls a ‘culture of fear’ in which fear and anxiety have become so prevalent in public discourse, and personal and political relationships, as to have a profound impact on how people interact with one another as individuals and as democratic agents. Taking this as a broad starting point, this paper investigates the philosophical, political, and socio-cultural nature and ‘function’ of performances that attend to, intervene in, challenge, and/or (re)articulate discourses of fear.

Dr Patrick Duggan joined the Drama Department at University of Surrey as Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance in February 2015. Prior to that, he was Lecturer in Drama at University of Exeter (2012 – 2015) and previously a lecturer in the Division of Performance Studies, University of Northampton.

As well as numerous journal articles and book chapters, his publications include a special issue of the international journal Performance Research, entitled On Trauma (2011), a monograph investigating the relationship between contemporary performance and trauma – Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester UP 2012), and an edited volume on the history and politics of small-scale British theatre – Reverberations Across Small-Scale British Theatre: Politics, Aesthetics and Forms (Intellect 2013). He have recently published a co-edited collection entitled Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, Crisis and Extremity (Palgrave 2016); the book examines performance practices that emerged in and during moments of conflict, crisis and extremity (rather than applied practices or on post fact representations).He is currently working on a full length monograph under the title Performance and the Politics of Fear (for publication 2021), a co-edited special issue of the international journal Performance Research entitled Staging the Wreckage (Vol. 24, Issue 5, 2019), and a collaborative research project exploring the interrelation of performance and resilience in city contexts (see https://performingcityresilience.wordpress.com for more information).