Unconscious Curriculum

How have we become complicit in the normalization of sexual violence? When post-secondary education addresses difficult, personal, and even traumatic subject matter, what kind of learning outcome should we expect? Unconscious Curriculum: Rape Culture on Campus was a performance project that tackled the complicated layers of rape culture in an educational context.

In a multimedia performance, student-performers dug deep to discover how rape culture is perpetuated in their classrooms and on their campus. Part of a yearlong project with the working title “Arresting Rape Culture”, the public performance was drawn from the research and creative work developed by students and faculty in three fall 2016 courses in performance, writing, and design. Unconscious Curriculum asked the audience to be witnesses, and even participants, in an exploration of mutual complicity in rape culture, including hidden factors and post-secondary educational practices, that normalize gender-based violence.

Acting as characters not so far removed from their actual lives, the performers strove to articulate ways of experiencing and understanding themselves in relation to others, with the overarching goal to arrest - to see, to apprehend, and to understand - the causes of rape.

Check out our Dramaturgy Hub for more info on the production of Unconscious Curriculum.