“Where do we find ourselves?” We ask some permutation of this question in response to life events, as Ralph Waldo Emerson does to open his haunting essay on the death of his young son, the magisterial “Experience” (1844). Commemorations also compel us to make such accountings, to break from the requisite, often monotonous routines of everyday life to assess our evolutions. The sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the American Society for Theatre Research offers such an occasion, and this forum's invitation to imagine and, perhaps, sway the direction of the organization's discursive and institutional practices over the next decade or more requires, first of all, estimating where we, as scholars of theatre and performance culture, find ourselves. Although these inspections would certainly reveal actions and innovations worthy of commemoration, the more important task is to lay bare and come to grips with those assumptions, ruts, and shibboleths in our respective fields of inquiry that have become so ingrained that they have achieved a kind of sacrosanctity. We must contest and, in many cases, abandon these conceptual and analytical habits: such efforts, though to the detriment of ideology, will be to the good of the discipline and the enrichment of our individual scholarly sensibilities.

中文翻译：

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扰乱蜂巢

“我们在哪里找到自己？” 我们根据生活事件对这个问题进行一些排列，正如拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生 (Ralph Waldo Emerson) 开启他关于他年幼儿子死亡的令人难以忘怀的文章，权威的“经验”（1844 年）。纪念活动也迫使我们做出这样的计算，打破日常生活中必不可少的、通常单调的例行公事，以评估我们的进化。美国戏剧研究协会成立 60 周年提供了这样一个场合，而本次论坛邀请想象并可能影响该组织在未来十年或更长时间内的话语和制度实践的方向，首先，估计我们作为戏剧和表演文化的学者，发现自己的位置。尽管这些检查肯定会揭示值得纪念的行动和创新，但更重要的任务是揭露并掌握我们各自研究领域中那些根深蒂固以致于取得某种成就的假设、陈规和陈词滥调神圣不可侵犯的。我们必须反对并且在许多情况下放弃这些概念和分析习惯：这些努力虽然有损意识形态，但将有益于学科并丰富我们个人的学术感受。