AMHERST — Five female performing artists of color — all Five College alumnae — are returning to the Pioneer Valley on Thursday and Friday for a series of events exploring the intersection of social justice and the theater.

The women will be talking about their work and experiences to students on Five College campuses and will take part in two events at Amherst College’s Kirby Theater: a showcase of their work at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, and a panel discussion titled “Theater in These Times” at 5 p.m. on Friday. Both events are free and open to the public.

“The faculty chairs of our five campus theater departments meet regularly, and they felt that — given what is going on in the country, what has been going on college campuses — this would be a really good time to explore issues of race through the lens of theater,” Five Colleges spokesman Kevin Kennedy said.

“These times demand that we try to think of ways to address and explore some of the issues that are going on, with new ways of looking at it, ways that give voice to diverse people and face all these inequities that are so transparent,” Wendy Woodson, Amherst College’s theater and dance chairwoman, said. “All these women are working in that way.”

One of those women is Lisa Biggs, a 1993 graduate of Amherst College who is now a theater and performance studies professor at Michigan State University. Part of what she will be discussing is her most recent play, AFTER/LIFE, which tells the stories of women and girls during the 1967 Detroit rebellion and for which she was awarded a grant from the Knight Foundation.

“I think certainly the type of work I like to do is designed to do many of the things that AFTER/LIFE did — tell undertold stories from marginalized communities that are at the eye of some of these discriminatory public policies,” she said, referring to the discrimination and police killings of blacks in Detroit that sparked the 1967 unrest.

Theater, she said, can’t by itself address structural racism and inequities, but it does allow people to see their stories reflected on stage, and can perhaps give them the determination to address those problems in the world.

“And people kind of need this food for their souls,” she said.

Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.