Introducing Hedge Funds

This introduction reviews recent research on hedge funds. The Handbook of Hedge Funds comprises 21 chapters from authors around the world. The chapters describe hedge fund industry governance, flows, limited partnership contracts, compensation, fund strategies, performance, activism, effects on investee firms, misconduct, misreporting, fraud, and financial regulation. Further, the chapters highlight differences with other types of intermediaries, such as private equity funds and mutual funds. The chapters feature both US and international analyses. This introductory chapter summarizes papers that appear in the handbook, provide a theoretical framework for research on hedge funds, and highlight research trends on topic.

Theatre and Democracy: Building Democracy in Post-war and Post-democratic Contexts

Theatre and Democracy: Building Democracy in Post-war and Post-democratic Contexts is the outcome of a longstanding collaboration between two centers of applied theatre education and research in South-Africa and Norway, respectively (2017–2022). It presents knowledge, critical conversations and artistic work related to issues of democracy, both historical and contemporary. Within the global framework of our current (post)democracies, thirteen chapters contain stories and analyses from artists and researchers who all study, understand and facilitate theatre as a political-performative medium in dealing with community-specific democratic issues. The reader encounters studies and reports from specific cases of applied theatre, community culture development and performance activism in countries such as South-Africa, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Norway. There is a common interest in theatre as a platform for active citizenry, as well as several attempts to explore theatre as a platform for “political subjectivation” (Rancière).

Activists in Red Capes: Women's Use of The Handmaid's Tale to Fight for Reproductive Justice

This paper examines women’s use of the notable red and white handmaid costume from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at political demonstrations following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Drawing on ten in-depth ethnographic interviews with women who participated in handmaid chapters, my study finds that interviewees began to wear the handmaid costume at political protests because they increasingly saw parallels between the United States and Gilead—the totalitarian society in Atwood’s novel—as a result of the 2016 election. Participants viewed the costume as a feminist symbol that enabled them to increase awareness about women’s issues, particularly related to reproductive justice. Additionally, interviewees saw the anonymity of the costume as a way to represent all women, especially those who were unable to participate in such protests. This study extends existing scholarship on social movements and women’s activism in the United States by exploring women’s reasons for involvement in this new form of protest and their use of dystopian popular culture as the basis of their performance activism.

What Role can Physical Theatre Play in Reimagining Democracy in South Africa?

Mamela Nyamza’s body of work is an act of performance activism that reflects and speaks back to society, making critical commentary on the slippages, gaps and moments of silencing that persist in post-apartheid democratic South Africa. This paper makes use of Mamela Nyamza’s 19-Born-76-Rebels (2014) and Pest Control (2020) as key physical theatre case studies that provide images of recalling and remembering in order to (re)build and (re)imagine democracy in South Africa. The paper, through employing Nyamza’s productions, discusses the ways in which physical theatre engages with the consolidation of democracy through dealing with complex questions about philosophies of identity, representation and expression – that are perceived politically, socially, culturally and economically in South Africa.

The Hospital Scene: Deepening Democracy with Theatre-led Inquiry

This chapter proposes one way of building democracy through theatre. The empirical content is drawn from a workshop conducted in Greece 2019, at a conference dedicated to performance activism worldwide (“Play Perform Learn Grow,” 2019). Performance activism draws upon the human capacity to play, create and perform, the premise being that people – even if their economic, social and/or political interests are in conflict – can create new relationships, new activities and new ways of moving forward together. The aim of the workshop was to allow a creative conversation that would unpack multiple ways of creating understanding from a real-life incident from rural Uganda, in which a pregnant woman was refused help to give birth at a clinic. Theoretically framed within Brechtian thinking and the concept of deep democracy as introduced by Amy and Arnold Mindell (Amy Mindell, 2008), the chapter argues that the theatre-led inquiry contributed to destabilise customised thinking and provide potential for multifaceted thinking and awareness. In this way, the workshop design enabled complex and embodied ways of reflecting, providing an example of how to build and deepen democracy through theatre.