This course introduces graduate students to methodologies of dance studies. In line with current scholarship, the course emphasizes a global perspective, thinking about the practice of dance in a wide spectrum of spaces and places, including the streets of Oakland, California, the milonga dance halls of Argentina, and the temples of India. We will pay attention both to questions of aesthetics and to how political and cultural contexts influence the practice of dance. Students will learn methods of ethnography, history, and practice-as-research as applied to dance; we will also analyze how dance scholars use feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, phenomenology, and performance studies in their work. As a final project, students conduct research on a topic of their choosing and present their results as either a written seminar paper or a performance ethnography.
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