“I’m thrilled to be joining the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths as a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Theatre. This place is steeped in histories of radicalism, and I like the fact that these histories are so present around campus – from its buildings, to murals etched on walls and posters announcing a programme of talks that signal so much about what a place of work and learning should be, or could be. It’s no secret that the road ahead for the arts, Higher Education and social justice is throwing up a number of significant challenges, but what the vibrancy of critical and political thought and action around campus signals to me is, for want of a better word, hope… So in spite of those challenges, it makes me excited about working here – about finding shared points of interest and commitment, but also about exploring spaces for progressive disagreement and debate.

I’m moving to Goldsmiths after 6 years of working at the University of Surrey – firstly as a Lecturer and then as a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies. I learned a lot very quickly there about how institutions “think”, about how priorities are set, change and are reset in response to evolving and precarious material circumstances, and about how institutions tend to view and understand accomplishment and progress. But the most important thing I learned is that what matters “on the ground” has nothing to do with abstraction. What matters are the people you work with on a day-to-day basis: your immediate colleagues at all levels of their career, and students (for me this is a key characteristic of teaching in HE – working with students, not for them).

In terms of what I hope to explore here in the years ahead – well, it’s a few things. I’ve been looking at immersive theatre and performance for over a decade now, and have published a range of articles and a couple of books in this area, all of which draw the political into sharp focus. I plan on pushing some of this work further by focusing on a new set of challenges faced by companies that formed after the 2008 financial crash and the introduction of austerity measures that ensued in the 2010s. However, the next “big project” is looking at the speeding up of the world: at an accelerating pace of life, the intensification of productivity, hyperconsumerism, and the effects of all of these things on health, wellbeing and quality of life. I’m particularly interested in how contemporary theatre makers are reacting by stretching processes of acceleration to points of messy, trashy and anarchic excess – to points of decadence. This focus on decadence, especially, has already been fostering some great working relationships with colleagues over in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and I look forward to finding out where else it might take me in the months and years ahead.”

Dr Adam Alston