By highlighting a collaborative praxis between performative interviewing and affect theories, this essay theorizes interpretive discernment as an orientational and conceptual foundation that paves the way for performative interviewing. Interpretive discernment—the process of sensing and interpreting affective registers—encompasses both a methodological orientation and an analytical heuristic. We argue that interpretive discernment builds an interpretive architecture that expands our vocabulary, heightens our ability to listen for the affective in interviews, homes in on methodological nuances that enrich critical qualitative approaches to interviewing, and provides a structure to performative interviewing analysis.

This essay sketches the possibilities for creative-relational inquiry through the lens of theatre and performance, particularly the writings of Peter Brook and Tim Etchells on “the empty space” and through affect theory and nonrepresentational writing, particularly the work of Kathleen Stewart, Ken Gale, and Jonathan Wyatt.

In this brief essay, the author responds to a performative panel of essays by students of Devika Chawla. He situates his reading of the event betwixt and between typical modes of performance studies research, demonstrating how the panelists reveal narrative's power to reflect on the layering of time, power and privilege, and ways of knowing.

Objects are not just material things but containers of memories. They occupy a particular place in our life trajectories, and as we re-encounter them in the act of remembering, as we assort them in new assemblages through the act of storytelling, new layers of meaning, affect, and emotion may emerge. In this performance script, the intersection of three objects—“a gold medal,” a “gun,” and “a steak”—become an avenue to explore my past experiences and re-visit, re-think the issue of the normalization of violence in my home country, Colombia.