Digital Exhibition and Research Creation Showcase - SWISP Lab’s radical residencies: A playwright in residence at studioFive (the home of SWISP) to rewrite Othello to highlight its racialised and gendered politics.

The aim of this playwright-in-residence was to facilitate critical engagement with complex societal issues related to race and gender through creative and affective metho-pedagogies for teaching in a diverse and equitable classroom through querying assumptions about Shakespeare’s universality and ‘colour-blindness.’ This Padlet currere captures and curates the Performances of Othello on Trial with teachers and teacher candidates that dramatise cultural bias around race and gender-based discrimination to explore effective early interventions for critical literacy development. Emphasising the critical importance of primary prevention and attitudinal change, 'Othello on Trial’ targets the continuing salience of culturally mandated excuses for hurting and killing women — she was unfaithful, she disobeyed, she made me do it.