Thinking Will

Priya Jay and Will Daddario think through the connections of grief, race, gender, oppression, and joy.

Christen Rinaldi and Will talk about the fusion of clinical mental health counseling and Reiki.

Ash Canty of Sovereign Spirit Death Care talks with will about his/their calling as a Death Walker, the bigness of the One, and the beauty of all the things we can barely understand.

Will thinks with Dr. Jonah Mixon-Webster about poetry, language, anger, fiction, blackness, and a entire universe of ideas.

A thinking sessions for all the scholars out there. Will talks with theatre historiographer Pannill Camp about the intellectual underpinnings of his current book project.A thinking sessions for all the scholars out there. Will talks with theatre historiographer Pannill Camp about the intellectual underpinnings of his current book project.

Nico Swenson, aka Miss Texas 1988, thinks with Will about “individuals.” They aren’t close-off, autonomous beings. So what are they? What are the political implications of a multiple individuality? How does the queering of gender(ed) pronouns relate to this topic? Listen in to hear us think through these questions and more!

An amazing linking-together of scholarly texts, close-readings of The Sopranos, and visions of a Chicago-based work of street theatre that centers the day-to-day experience of Palestinian Americans. Will thinks here with activist and artist Gloria Imseih Petrelli.

How can we get to a place where we feel sadness each time another person is hurt (regardless of that person’s race, class, or cultural background)? Listen to Will think through this question together with actor Gregory Hicks.

Aligned with the international organization Performance Philosophy, Will helps explain the upcoming conference’s key theme: Problems. A problem is not something to be solved. Rather, it is something like the generative matrix that continues to inform all scholarly thought and/or artistic expression.

How do we make space to engage in meaningful conversation with people with whom we don’t agree? What is the role of listening in these kinds of conversation? What even is listening?

Thinking while walking my infant son, I enter the wide terrain of “Art and Trauma” headed toward the notion of “damage-centered research” articulated by Eve Tuck in her open letter of 2009. Why would we doubt that artists can express traumatic experiences without reifying the damage caused through such experiences? It turns out that this is the important question.

How do plants perform? Why do people talk about this? How else might we think of what plants do? Why should we care what plants do and how they live?

A convergence of Will’s grief work and theatre scholarship. Why don’t we attend to death onstage with the same sensitivity as we attend to the death of a loved one?

The first episode of Thinking Will presents an opportunity to address the resurgence of conspiracy theories in the U.S.. Will arrives at the possibility that those who believe such theories are addicted to the process of forgetting, which is the very process underwriting racism in the United States.