Players sessions are based on published academic research, conversations with content experts and campus partners, interviews with members of the U-M community, and our lived experiences navigating higher education. By putting both familiar and unfamiliar dynamics on display through theatre, the Players illuminate different aspects of academic life and prompt serious thought on experiences of marginalization in higher education. 

We use performance to: 

• Facilitate shared dialogue. By viewing the same performance, participants can come to a more nuanced understanding regarding a social problem (like racism) or set of dynamics (like bias in a tenure review). They can then participate in a facilitated discussion across individuals that may not have been possible otherwise.
• Illustrate interactions between social identities and systemic inequities. In the vast majority of our sessions, we use theatrical case studies to illustrate specific examples of how social identities (like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and systemic inequities (like racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.) interact to create different, specific challenges for individuals in academic environments. 
• Honor specificity and challenges related to marginalization. By centering the experiences of individuals who are institutionally marginalized in higher education, we eliminate two common, opposing dynamics that typically occur in sessions without theatre: 1) the desire to speak abstractly about what is going on in regard to racism, sexism, etc. and 2) the necessity of specific facilitators and/or participants sharing a recognizable story that will illustrate a problem but jeopardize anonymity and further burden the sharer. By showing these experiences onstage, we honor the challenges many members of our community face on a daily basis. We also make more visible the labor required of individuals who are forced to navigate these challenges.
• Consider multiple perspectives. In many of our sketches, we use theatre to present multiple perspectives on complex issues. This allows audience members a variety of pathways into the performance/topic. It also helps us to quickly map the contours of the social problem under consideration by allowing us to demonstrate the various actors/actions that allow for the perpetuation of inequity.
• Promote social change. Across all of our sessions, we use theatre to tell stories in modalities that more affectively, creatively, and memorably present research, academic ideas, and/or individual experiences. In that way, we hope to increase the stickiness of an idea for participants and promote the likelihood of social change.