In my Rhetoric of Performance class this semester, I assigned students to create, in teams, virtual dramaturgical casebooks (built as websites) for Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul as a way of teaching research, synthesis, and rhetorical and performance analytical skills as well as and writing in various mediums and for specific audiences. As part of their casebooks, they created Google Maps designed to provide audiences with insight into the context and world of the play. One team created the map seen below (click here to access fully interactive version).
This map represents the history of invasions of Afghanistan as well as the resulting ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity.
Another team created a map showing locations of various major productions of Homebody/Kabul, with information about how people in those locales voted in previous presidential elections as well as their level of education in order to make a case that the play speaks most directly to liberal-leaning, highly educated audiences. Yet another team created a map representing the distribution of the more than thirty languages spoken in Afghanistan at large and in Kabul specifically to illustrate the probability of miscommunication contributing to ongoing local, regional, and international conflict that generates the sense of danger in the play.
Tags: Collaboration · GeoEverything · Mapping · PedagogyNo Comments
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