Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Workbook on Liberation, Repair, and More Just Art Worlds
Edited by Jasmine Mahmoud and Jeff M. Poulin
Over the last two decades, and most notably since 2020, the language and practices of racial equity have increasingly become a central lens through which many artists, culture workers, arts administrators, educators, policymakers, and scholars frame their practice. However, throughout this period, those practices have been under attack from government, the private sector, and throughout the social strata. But DEI has always been under attack in the U.S. as myriad theorists and historians have shown. Yet, the arts and cultural sector continues to persevere by employing racial equity tenets within their creative practices, organizational administrations, policy development and implementations, and through their visioning of their futures, of more just arts world.
Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Workbook on Liberation, Repair, and More Just Arts Worlds is an edited volume of new scholarship by arts researchers, administrators, educators, and practitioners about a central facets of racial equity – racial justice, anti-racism, and reparation – in the broad and inclusive arts and cultural sector. As a grounding for the volume, the contributors explore the ten tenets of racial equity: Accessibility, Accountability, Aesthetics + Embodiment, Citation, Coalition, Dreaming, Equity as Equity, Rehearsal, Relationality, and Repair. Presented in four thematic sections, these tenets particularly intertwine with “rehearsing” – the act of iteratively practicing, following scholars including Julius Fleming Jr. and Paige McGinley, who theorize the central role of theatrical and civic rehearsals in the Civil Rights movement, and Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose dialogue frames the important role of rehearsal in dreaming and building more just worlds. In this edited volume, authors present both theoretical and practical explorations and replicable practices across broad themes. As a workbook, this volume guides readers in and beyond the arts sector toward the animation of such rehearsals in their work and life.
Jasmine Mahmoud, the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professor, is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington, with affiliate appointments in Art History and Comparative History of Ideas. Mahmoud’s research engages contemporary performance, critical race studies, public policy, racial capitalism, and critical geography, including relationships between theater and gentrification. An arts journalist and scholar, Mahmoud writes about minoritized artists often excluded from official archives. She has over 50 articles, essays, interviews, and reviews in academic journals, and in arts and community-centered publications including Art Forum, Canadian Art Review, Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies series, Howlround, Hyperallergic, LitHub, The Seattle Times, South Seattle Emerald, and Variable West. She also has curated three visual art exhibitions with attention to Black aesthetics. She is co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2021) with Megan Geigner and Stuart Hecht. She is on the editorial board of the American Journal of Arts Management. She leads UW’s Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster. In 2025, her teaching was recognized by UW's prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award. An arts advocate, Mahmoud founded the Seattle Arts Voter Guide, and currently serves as a Governor appointed Washington State Arts Commissioner.
Jeff M. Poulin is an American creative, educationalist, arts administrator, and social entrepreneur whose work focuses on understanding and cultivating creativity. As an educator, Jeff holds or has held appointments in colleges of the arts, education, and public policy at several universities, including Carnegie Mellon University, American University, and The City College of New York. With almost two decades of experience in the creative, cultural, and education sectors, Jeff leads a suite of organizations that focus on understanding creativity and accelerating the transformation of the people, organizations, and systems that cultivate it. Jeff is a public scholar whose work is published in multiple languages, has been presented at hundreds of conferences across the U.S. and around the globe, and is utilized within regional, national, and international institutions worldwide. Jeff hails from Portland, Maine, USA and has earned degrees in arts management, cultural policy, and education from Oklahoma City University, University College Dublin, and the University of Glasgow.