Sharon D. Engbrecht
IICSI Postdoctoral Fellow
Having recently finished their PhD at the University of British Columbia in English Literature, Dr. Sharon D. Engbrecht is the 2025-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI). Their research into narratives of gender and sexuality investigates broader questions of embodiment and queer love. Recently, they have turned their focus to the concept of “dwelling,” a polysemic term that provokes questions of “staying with” or “dwelling on” and embodiment, as in, to dwell in a body. But dwelling’s etymological roots lead us to meanings of “wandering” or “being led astray.” These all become questions for what it means to narrate an inhabitance. Their forthcoming articles include the theorization of “difficulty” in the post-secondary educational context and the “gloriously ugly” in Marian Engel’s No Clouds of Glory (Sarah Bastard’s Notebook).
Dr. Engbrecht’s postdoctoral project is part community engagement, part delving into the theorization of improvisation from the perspective of literary studies, and part facilitating co-creative communal spaces. In working with community groups that are underserved, they seek to rethink the exchange of knowledge that happens between the institute and community. This is part of their research on thinking through improvisation in narratives of identity and what kinds of stories we learn to tell about our selves. These stories, in turn, become the ways in which we dwell in certain identities that are shared with the world. This theoretical work will play out in a creative, collaborative workshop series called “Cacophonie: Improvising (with) Identities.” In collaboration with fellow IICSI researchers, the series asks participants to think about what improvisation means, how we make meaning through it, and how it can be used in acts of identity making.
The creative workshop series captures the underlying premise of Dr. Engbrecht’s postdoctoral project in approaching community engagement, broadly, through an ethics of improvisation. The world can feel as though it is a cacophonie of ideas, sounds, and experiences—discordant and dissonant feelings of being in a world misaligned. But cacophonie can also speak to the attention we can give to feeling otherwise, a way of making sense of the world in new ways, through the actions of improvisation that bring into perspective the moral discord of the world(s) around us. In this way, the project pivots around the following questions as they guide Dr. Engbrecht’s research and facilitation of co-creative communal spaces:
How do we build-off, react to, listen in on, embody, move through, carry in us, and interact with our experiences of identity? How might we improvise with the cacophonie of identities we inhabit? How can we use a principle of cacophonie—at once a discordant and dissonant mixture of sound and the unison of difference and plethora of voice—to imagine the dimensions of improvisation as a social aesthetic, ethical practice, impromptu disruption of expectation, and creative method for change in the now?
