Norbert Ross isn't your typical cultural anthropologist. When he's out in the field in places like Mexico, El Salvador, Argentina and Chile, the associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences blends ethnographic research with improvisational theater.
SCIENCE MEETS THE STAGE
At its core, Ross' work today centers on how people learn, process emotions and navigate trauma.
He spent years researching childhood cognitive development-initially as an assistant professor at Northwestern-before coming to Vanderbilt in 2003, where he focused on connecting the dots between cognitive science and anthropology. When his curiosity shifted toward better understanding emotion and trauma, he took on a long-term project examining how violence affects Salvadoran youth in marginalized communities. In El Salvador, Ross' approach to research assumed a new, theatrical shape.
"As part of that project, I started working with theater," Ross said. "It's a storytelling improv theater called Playback Theatre. We play back stories of audience members on stage. I use it a lot in communities to help children and adults explore emotions, and to listen to each other's stories."
Ross' commitment to theater rivals his commitment to anthropology. He is an affiliated trainer and board member at the Centre for Playback Theatre, and he's active in Teatro Espontáneo, a Latin American organization that promotes improv theater across Latin America and the Caribbean.
He brings his stage work to his research through a method he calls enacted ethnography. It has shaped two Fulbright Scholar grants, placing him among the U.S. scholars and professionals selected to research and teach in more than 160 countries.
His first Fulbright took him to El Salvador in 2018, where a year of fieldwork grew into ACTUEMOS!, the youth-focused NGO he still directs. It serves 40 to 60 children daily, and it once supported a theater ensemble that performed across El Salvador, Honduras and Mexican refugee camps.
His second and most recent Fulbright has Ross spending a year in Xalapa, Veracruz, teaching improv theater to all-women collectives who are searching for loved ones among the more than 130,000 people who have disappeared across Mexico. Through enacted ethnography, he hopes to understand the toll on the families left behind.
STORIES THAT CONNECT
Theater puts Ross inside the stories of the people he works alongside in the communities, allowing his research to do more than simply "represent other people's reality."
"I'm in the theater, right in the middle," Ross said. "I'm acting, I'm crying, I'm doing. When I act on stage, I don't become that other person, but I get immersed in what I would feel in this situation. Often ethnographers try to be invisible. I actively participate. The work is based on empathetic understanding of others without pretending to know exactly what it means to be a woman in Mexico looking for a missing person."
Additionally, improv theater gives Ross something a controlled experiment or simple observation can't-the unpredictable embodiment of what people actually feel.
"It's improv acting, so I literally don't know where it's going to end," he said. "It's a better approximation to reality when traditional science is very much like, 'Okay, this is the experiment, this is how we do it and this is the outcome.' We no longer have complete control."
Theater is doing one more thing: building community. Working in refugee camps along the Tijuana border, Ross noticed that out of mutual suspicion, Central American and Mexican migrants had self-segregated by nationality. But as more people took part in the theater workshops, playing back each other's stories began to break down walls.
"People started talking to each other. And more importantly, they started listening to each other," Ross said. "It was like an ephemeral community emerged. It was really beautiful to watch."
TAKING PLACE
Ross wasn't always comfortable "taking place." A self-described introvert, he traces his own rigidity partly to his German academic training-a world, he says, where unless you had a citation and a proof, it wasn't real.
That changed in 2016, when Ross took his first acting class. By 2017, he had discovered Playback Theatre, and what happened next surprised him.
"The first time I truthfully acted on stage, I realized afterwards, 'Wow, this was exhilarating,'" he said. "I was just there. I just let go. I was just present. That was an incredible insight for me."
PRACTICING PRESENCE
Ross brings that same philosophy into the classroom. In his Theatre and Social Change course-which students don't often realize until day one is 95 percent performance-one of the first assignments is deceptively simple: Yell as loud as you can.
"Most couldn't," Ross said. "It was amazing and sad to see. It took a while-like 10 or 15 efforts, and then eventually, on the second or third day, students would yell to the point that some people came from outside like, 'Is everything okay in here?'"
The discomfort is the point. Over the course of the semester, Ross pushes students to sit with the topics he studies when he's in the field-immigration, colonialism, violence-not to assign guilt, but to help them understand implications.
"The classroom has to be a safe space, but it doesn't have to be a comfortable space," he said. "And I think over the semester, students relate to themselves differently. They become bolder-like they belong on stage. That also means they belong in their life, right? They belong in their shoes."
Students agree. In anonymous end-of-semester feedback, students describe learning "much more than theatrical skills." One said the course made them "more comfortable with uncertainty, more attuned to the people around me, and more willing to take creative risks." Another left feeling "more open, more expressive and more confident in my ability to engage with others in meaningful ways." A third said it taught them to "step into someone else's experience with care and let go of the fear that keeps me from showing up fully."
Ross' ultimate goal for his research, his students and his theater work is that people learn to let themselves be affected by each other.
"In 2026, we have people saying empathy is bad," Ross said. "I think part of this work is to do the opposite. We need to bring back empathy, not as a weakness, but to let ourselves be affected rather than ignoring everyone and everything around us."
- Be on the lookout for Ross' soon-to-be published book, The Migrant as Playwright: Playback Theater at the Border Wall, depicting his experience using playback theater in refugee camps in Mexico
- Learn more about the College of Arts and Science
- Learn more about the Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt University
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