Kimberly Skye Richards is a settler scholar whose research and artistic work engages performance as a vehicle for resisting extractivism, protecting lands and waters, and inspiring just transitions. She co-edited an issue of Canadian Theatre Review on “Extractivism and Performance” (April 2020) which won the 2022 Patrick O’Neill Award for editing from the Canadian Association of Theatre Research. She has also published in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Research in Canada, and multiple edited collections in theatre, performance, and the energy and environmental humanities.

Committed to fostering coordinated and impactful climate action in the arts sector, she has served on the Mission Circle of SCALE (Sectoral Climate Arts Leadership for the Emergency) and on the Board of Directors for the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA). She was one of 100 B.C. based artists selected for The Only Animal’s Artist Brigade and acts as “librarian” for the Department of Utopian Arts and Letters, where she collaborates with artist-educators to develop self-guided, free courses that cultivate collective visions of green and just futures, and nurture the imaginative and relational skills to dismantle the systems that stand in our way.

In her teaching in Writing, Research, and Discourse Studies, Richards emphasizes decolonial and anti-racist writing practices, supporting students to develop critical, situated, and ethically engaged approaches to research and communication.

WRDS 150 Research Area: Futurisms
WRDS 151 Research Area: Performance and Power

• Cultural Studies
• Environment
• WRDS (Writing Studies)

WRDS 151: Performance and Power

From public apologies issued by politicians for historical violences to theatrical strategies activists deploy to draw attention to injustice, performance is an important mode and medium of political communication. In this course, we will study some of the ways that political actors use performative strategies on stage and in everyday life with real consequences in the world. We will examine how diverse actors use scripts, choreographies, rehearsal practices, acting strategies, stage design, and recording technologies to persuade audiences of their righteousness, legitimacy and authority, and gain social, cultural, political and/or economic power in the process of doing so. We will observe how scholars working in social movement studies, critical Indigenous studies, discourse studies, celebrity studies, gender and women’s studies, and critical media studies describe, analyze, interpret and critique how power is gained, invoked and maintained through performance analysis. Doing so will help us to become more attentive and engaged citizens.

WRDS 150: Futurisms

As the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of the future seems to accelerate in local and global contexts with massive socio-environmental planetary challenges, there is an increasing interest in reimagining futures beyond dystopias and utopias. Futures studies is an interdisciplinary effort to aggregate and analyze trends to predict what is likely to continue, and what could plausibly change. Predicative techniques, such a forecasting, are being used to develop design solutions to wicked problems, like the impacts of rising waters on coastal communities. Planners and policy-makers also attempt to prevent, manage, and/or minimize crisis through methods of systems analysis and futures study. Such efforts at strategic foresight are always bound up in cost-benefit analyses, and decision-making processes that either reify existing inequities, or strategically undermine entrenched colonial and supremacist thought. The exploration of alternative futures by Indigenous futurists and Afro-futurists and other traditional knowledge perspectives marginalized within modernity invites investigation of the worldviews and mythologies that underlie possible, probable, and preferrable futures. Together, we will explore critical concepts in futures studies alongside personal and collective practices for creating desirable futures at the individual, collective, and societal level.