Workshops
Workshops are where I blend my interests in pedagogy, creative self-reflection, and the body as a site for social investigation. I am a trained Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, and believe drama games and participatory theatre can bring about deeper self-knowledge, collective wellbeing, and political awakening.
Scroll down to see some recent examples of my workshops and collaborations.
Tarot x Theatre of the Oppressed
The Process
To design a Tarot meets Theatre of the Oppressed workshop, I wanted to trust the Tarot. I began my study of Tarot in 2021, and began reading in 2022. Here, I used a Celtic Cross spread to explore what central tensions were structuring my desire to deliver the workshop, and what ideas and feelings I should watch out for during the design process.
For those familiar with the deck, you can spot the reversed King of Swords in the central ‘current situation’ position, covered by the Death card. In the near future position, the Three of Cups. These were all clear signals that this workshop would help me process my frustrated relationship with the normative knowledge patterns that overcode academia, and result in new friendships and opportunities for emotional solidarity.
Tarot x Theatre of the Oppressed is a workshop that explores how to make a body-based Tarot deck through Image Theatre. First, participants are taught how to use their bodies to make statues that can be interpreted as archetypal images. Then, in groups of three, they produce a Past-Present-Future three-card reading for an imaginary querent. Those not presenting will then interpret the ‘cards’, and try to make sense of what each frozen statue images is telling them. The above photos show an example of one such Past-Present-Future ‘spread’.
To facilitate this workshop, I first synthesised the traditional 78-card Rider-Waite-Smith Deck (Philosopher’s Tarot edition) into 78 abstract one-word concept cards. I then gave three of these cards to each group for them to use as a base from which to create their body-statue tarot images. This process avoids the potential for extant images of the tarot to over-inform the statues participants produce spontaneously in the moment.
The workshop was first delivered at Goldsmiths’s Tarot Cultures conference in London, June 12-13 2026.
Karel’s Last Tape (2025)
In July 2025 two colleagues wrote a novella in collaboration with Chat GPT. The novella, Lost Predictions, centres on a Karel, a jaded scholar who attends a conference on academic publishing in the era of AI. In October 2025, I was invited to produce a creative response to their novella that would be performed at an anthropology conference in Berlin, the EASA 4th Colleex Workshop on unsettling the anthropological syllabus.
In response, I wrote a pastiche of the Samuel Beckett play, Krapp’s Last Tape. In my place, Karel decides to use AI to help him review his academic career; instead of listening to recordings of his younger self (as Krapp does), Karel accidentally gets AI to speak out his back catalogue in the voice of his ex-wife.
The play is also what I am calling an ‘an autobiographical warning’, a piece of art in which the writer imagines a potential possible future for themselves that they do not want to occur. I wrote and performed the play as autoethnographic reflection on entrepreneurial subjectivity, masculinity, and emotional alienation in academic life. The script has been published by Public Anthropologist, and you can watch a recording of the performance by clicking the button below.
Virtue Ventures (2025)
In May 2025, I became one of five anthropologists selected to take part in the University of Manchester’s Tiny Human Dramas initiative, organised by Meghan Rose Donnelly and Alexandra D'Onofrio.
The initiative is based on the 24-hour-plays phenomenon, where a writer, director, and a group of actors are tasked with devising, producing and performing a play all within 24 hours. In this case, the anthropologist took the place of the writer and shared certain key elements of their ethnographic research with a group of professional actors. The actors and the anthropologist then worked together to develop a performance that articulated key themes, questions, and findings from the research.
I was paired with Hayley ???, ??? ???, and ??? ???, and we created the show Virtue Ventures. The bulk of my ethnographic research focuses on Delhi, Indian education entrepreneurs, and their quest to improve education provision to marginalised children through start-up style social entreprises. Considering the actors lack of familiarity with India, and (as a group of white British people) our collective discomfort representing Indian people on stage, we found a way to communicate the key theme of competitive self-selling through a more absurdist lens.
You can watch a recording of the play here, and read a copy of the script here.
Thicc Description (2024)
In November 2024 I was invited to perform at the Centre for Creative Ethnography, Queen’s University Belfast, as part of the book launch for A Collection of Creative Anthropologies (2024).
Devised in collaboration with colleague Priyanka Borpujari, Thicc Description is a farce on the performativity of PhD and postdoc competitiveness. In the play, two early-career scholars sit opposite each other, endlessly recommending ‘important’ academic books for the other to read. Each book has a fake name riffing on classic texts and concepts from the discipline of anthropology. ‘Thicc Description, Homo-queer-archicus, Decolonising Decoloniality, and A Thousand Chateaus’ are just a few examples. The play comes to a head as the two scholars pile up the books between then, obscuring their ability to see each other, and indicating their increasing alienation from human contact the deeper they fall into their ‘research’.
The play is autoethnographic in as much as it reflects my own experiences of alienation within an increasingly competitive, individuated university research culture.