Education

BA Philosophy/Theatre (Manitoba), MFA Interdisciplinary Studies (Simon Fraser), PhD Anthropology/Theatre (Simon Fraser)

Biography

Professor Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston is an anthropologist, performance theorist, and theatre director. Her research interests include experimental, imaginative, and performance ethnography; ethnographic storytelling; research-creation; autoethnography and memoir; ethnofiction; embodiment, emotions, and affect; grief and mourning; political/activist performance; disability anthropology; political anthropology; environmental anthropology; futures anthropology; gender and ethnicity; migration; aging; socialism/postsocialism; and human rights. She is a co-founder of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE), which won the 2019 American Anthropological Association General Anthropology Division New Directions Award. She is also a co-founder of the Emergent Futures CoLab (EFC) for transdisciplinary experimentation and collaborative future-making.

Professor Kazubowski-Houston’s research has explored performance as an ethnographic research methodology and a form of representation. She has worked on performance ethnography projects with Romani communities in Poland and Canada, Nazi-Holocaust survivors in both countries, and low-income residents in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her research has also bridged bioethics, policy and gerontology. She collaborated on a study that investigated theatre as a method of public engagement in health policy development regarding the use of reproductive technologies. Her current research explores dramatic storytelling as an affective and reflexive ethnographic methodology for studying aging, disability, migration, illness, grief, and loss.

She is the author of three books: Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women(McGill-Queens University Press 2010), In Search of Lost Futures:

Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography (co-edited with Mark Auslander, Palgrave Macmillan 2021.), and Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with A Romani Elder (McGill-Queens University Press, in press). Staging Strife received both the 2011 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Outstanding Qualitative Book Award and the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Prize. The book explores the challenges of collaboration and activism in performance ethnography by analyzing a politically charged theatre production undertaken with a group of Romani women in Poland.

She co-edited a special issue of Anthropologica (“Performance, Ethnography and Imagination”) and Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies (“Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnography”).

Her work has been published in various academic journals and edited volumes including Text and Performance Quarterly,Anthropologica, Canadian Theatre Review, Social Science & Medicine, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, A Different Kind of Ethnography (edited by Elliott and Culhane, University of Toronto Press), Anthropologies and Futures (edited by Salazar et al, Bloomsbury Press), Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry(edited by Denzin and Giardina, Routledge), and Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom (edited by Frese and Brownell, Palgrave Macmillan). Her article, “quiet Theatre: The Radical Politics of Silence,” was awarded the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) 2019 Richard Plant Prize, granted annually to the best English-language article on a Canadian theatre or performance topic.

She is currently writing a book of autofiction and a play on grief and traumatic loss.

Professor Kazubowski-Houston trained as a theatre director under the renowned Polish theatre and visual artist Józef Szajna. She has worked as a professional theatre director, performer, and playwright in both Canada and Poland. In recognition of her contributions to excellence in teaching within the Department of Theatre, she received the Junior Faculty Teaching Award from York’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design in 2014.