Who's who

PhD, MA, BA

Keywords: Walking, engaged and dialogic practices, participation, site-specific, performance of culture

Research interests

Misha's research involves the production of socially engaged, dialogic and paricipatory events activated through collective acts of walking, singing, writing or other performance mechanisms, that invite participants to reflect on and articulate their experience and inhabitation of particular places and landscapes. Her project ‘way from home' involved an online interactive interface mapping walks and conversations with refugees and asylum seekers based in Plymouth, created in collaboration with refugee support organizations. This work is available on her website www.homingplace.org or www.wayfromhome.org. This work extended to other refugee groups and organisations across the UK through her consultation on the AHRC Knowledge Transfer project ‘Trans-national Communities: A Sense of Belonging'.

Recent publications and research considers the theatricality, sociability and techniques and technologies of and for voicing and listening in audio walks, the emergent and proliferating forms of collaboration, self-organisation and social interaction in participatory choral works in contemporary performance, and how memories of changing cultural and physical landscapes are re-framed, re-constructed and made sense of through walking and the use of locative media. These concerns have led to collaborations with geographers, sociologists and anthropologists and contribution to inter-disciplinary and international networks exploring related areas of enquiry, including the ‘Nomadic Work/Life in the Knowledge Economy' project (University of Limerick, Ireland), the Performing Biographies Research Network 3 (EU Sociological Association) and the Creative Community Development (DCC Granollers in Granollers, Spain). Myers will be presenting at the final open network event of the ‘Anticipatory Histories of Landscape and Wildlife' project (April 2011) involving a partnership between University of Exeter Geography Department and National Trust. She will also be presenting at the 2nd International Research Forum on Guided Tours at the University of Plymouth (April 2011).

Misha works within the Articulating Space research group in University College Falmouths' Department of Performance, a group whose membership has been central to new developments in practice and theorisation of walking and guided tours as modes of performance, and in contextually-based, socially engaged and site-specific theatre.

Recent and forthcoming publications

• Myers, M. (2011) ‘Sharing an "earpoint": The theatricality of sound in audio walks', Theatre Noise, David Roesner and Lynne Kendrick, eds., Cambridge Scholars Press.
• Myers, M. (2011) ‘Walking again lively: towards an ambulant and conversive methodology of performance and research‘, Special Issue on Mobility and Nomadicity, Mobilities Journal, London: Routledge
• Myers, M. (2010) ‘"Is that a pistol in your pocket ...?": Corral Consciousness and the Performance of Enclosure and Concealment', Performance Paradigm, Special Issue, Interruptions: Letters to Jimmie Durham, Vol 6 (June), [Online] Available: www.performanceparadigm.net/journal/issue-6
• Myers, M. (2010) ‘Walk with me, talk with me: The art of conversive wayfinding', Visual Studies, Vol 25, No 1, April, pp 59-68, London: Routledge.
• Myers, M. (2008) ‘Situations for living: performing emplacement', Research in Drama Education, Vol 13, No 2, pp 171-180, London: Routledge.

Selected earlier publications

• Myers, M. & Harris, D. (2004) ‘way from home', Performance Research, Vol 9, No 2, June, pp 90-91 and DVD supplement, London: Routledge.
• Myers, M. (2005) ‘Journeys to, from and around', Art in the Age of Terrorism, Graham Coulter-Smith, ed., pp 213-227, London: Paul Holberton Press. Developed from the exhibition ‘Art in the Age of Terrorism' (Millais Gallery, Southampton Solent University, 12 November 2004 - 29 January 2005)
• Myers, M. (2006) ‘Homing Devices', Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol 14, No 3, Locative Media Special Issue, unpaginated [Online] Available: leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Membership of learned societies, subject associations

• Higher Education Academy
• Performance Studies International
• European Sociological Association, Research Network 3: Biographical Perspectives
• Arts and Humanities Research Council Performance and Asylum Network

Editorial Boards

• Social and Cultural Geography, Peer-reviewer
• Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), Peer-reviewer
• International Journal of the Arts in Society, Vol 1, No 2, Common Ground, Associate Editor

I am particularly interested in supervising research in: Walking, site-specific, dialogic, relational, socially engaged practices; mobile, ethnographic or geographic methodologies; migration; intercultural/transcultural communication.