Affect and digital caregiving: challenging the performing arts canon with a ‘dig where you stand’ database

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the affective dimensions of caregiving in relation to materials outside the canon, influenced by Caswell and Cifor’s notion of radical empathy. The article employs the author’s positionality and lived experience, using specific examples to illustrate ‘zones of friction’ where the dominant discourse and its processes of canon formation show themselves, and how radical empathy can expose and destabilize the performing arts canon. The author begins to use these examples, and the feelings they evoke, as a waymarking tool for the application of methodologies such as ‘dig where you stand.’ This data collection methodology, by recording a wider and more inclusive range of participants as of equal value to performing arts work (in this case), brings Caswell and Cifor’s ‘caregiving’ to more stakeholders. The notion of ‘transforming affect into substantial data’ exemplifies the article’s engagement with the canon to articulate the potential for transformation.