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Abstract Performance Studies in Communication (PSC) is a vibrant, vital subfield of the communication discipline that suffers from an urgent illegibility problem due to a long-time lack of an explicit theoretical connection between the field and broader communication theories and practices. This article addresses PSC’s illegibility problem by extending Robert Craig’s (1999) metamodel to articulate an Aesthetic Tradition of communication theory. To ground the Aesthetic Tradition and demonstrate PSC’s unique approach to it, this article offers a systematic reframing the Performance Studies Paradigm (Pelias & VanOosting, 1987) through a constitutive lens. The article concludes by demonstrating the utility of an aesthetic analytic across various communication subfields, including public speaking, Interpersonal and Family Communication (IFC), organizational communication, and arts-based research. Ultimately, this articulation secures PSC’s theoretical home while enriching the broader discipline’s capacity to understand how communication makes worlds.
Ethan Hunter (Thu,) studied this question.