Dr. Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University where she studies audiences and spectatorship. Her studies have considered the impact of social media on notions of identity, performance, and community in digital spectatorship; the function and ethics of audience labour in immersive and participatory theatre; and the qualitative methodologies appropriate to engaging in theatre audience research in both in-person and digital realms. Her research questions include:

• What do audiences perceive as more or less real in theatre? How is realness produced in the act of performance?
  
• How do audience members impact other audience members’ experiences of the same event? What do audience members believe to be their role in performance? 
  
• How do digitized and streamed performances impact the theatre-going experience? How does digital spectatorship trouble questions of liveness, presence, communities and performance?
  

She is also a co-founder and director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (CSAR), an organization focused on furthering the field of audience studies by connecting researchers across Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere. Kelsey is co-editor of the Routledge Theatre & Performance Series in Audience Research and has a book forthcoming with McGill-Queen's Press called Real-ish: Audiences, Feeling, and the Production of Realness in Contemporary Performance. 

---

Links

 www.kelseyjacobson.ca
https://www.routledge.com/Audience-Research/book-series/SAR
www.centreforspectatorship.com
https://theconversation.com/profiles/kelsey-jacobson-1129949/articles
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?hl=en&user=7Ksm-YoAAAAJ