Course Details

This course provides opportunity for new and advanced students from any discipline or major to experiment with short-term and group performance ethnography exercises that build individual and collective capacity for using the body and rebel creativity as core approaches to independent ethnographic inquiry. Through studio movement practice and the centering of bodily ways of knowing, participants build heightened exposure and awareness of when and how such methods and inquiry might be useful to community understanding, wellness and justice.  Course materials exam and theories of ethnographic practice, afro-futurism, freedom, social change, community histories of strength and continuity from a variety of perspectives within anthropology, performance studies, queer, crip, critical race and cultural studies, global literature and ethics. Participants are challenged to engage a vibrant intellectual toolkit and movement modalities, to identify core values, ideas, questions and approaches most helpful to their own personal, academic and social development and liberation.  With these tools in hand we invite participants to investigate, experience and create movement that matters and transforms in a world on fire.

“The creative act requires not only freedom of expression, but the assumption we will be free tomorrow.”  Salman Rushdie 2015, World Voices Festival