Dance and the Seeking of Justice — A Presentation and Discussion with Scholar Toni Shapiro-Phim

WEDNESDAY • AUGUST 10, 2022
5:00pm – Mission Memorial Auditorium
Free and open to the public

In situations (or in the aftermath) of mass violence, cultural disruption, and/or other kinds of oppression, dance forms, and the practice of dancing itself, can take on special meaning. In this presentation, we will explore how communities and individuals — in Chile, Japan, Cambodia, and elsewhere — have imagined and created ways to constructively transform dynamics of power, and confronting and countering injustice and rights violations through dance and other modes of expression that carry deep cultural resonance.

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Toni Shapiro-Phim is Co-Director of Brandeis University’s Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts, and Associate Professor of Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation. A cultural anthropologist (PhD Cornell University), her research, writing, teaching, and her community work in refugee camps in Southeast Asia and in urban settings in the U.S., focus on the cultural context of the arts in discrete regions of the world, particularly in relation to violence, genocide, migration and refugees, conflict transformation, and gender concerns. She is a specialist in Cambodia, and in dance more broadly. Co-editor of Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, she has contributed to Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice; Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence: Imagination, Empathy, and Resilience; Annihilation Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide; and The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement, and Neuroscience, among many other publications. Her film, Because of the War, was awarded and American Folklore Society prize for “superior work on women’s traditional, vernacular, or local culture.”