Spiritual Herstories

This is a collection of works by internationally recognized women leading the field of dance research and spirituality across the globe. Building on current soulful research scholarship in the discipline, these authors offer extensive and detailed research into spirituality, dance, gender, religion, and somatics. Written by women dance scholars in higher education, this evocative and illuminating work highlights a growing discourse on gendered leadership in dance research. Spiritual Herstories provides new pathways and innovative research methods that respond to the educational needs of women emerging in male-centric socio-historic research traditions.

'This is an important publication for advancing research in dance and reinforcing the scholarly lens, giving voice to the body, mind, and soul as partners in exploration. The preface, “Dancing Incantations” by Celeste Snowber, beautifully sets up the reader’s adventure: “Be prepared to let this anthology sit with you for a long time. Each chapter stands alone in its beauty, depth and breadth of knowledge; it is truly a transdisciplinary conversation, which draws you back over and over again to nourish your whole being” (ix).'

-- Adrienne M. Wilson, Journal of Dance Education

'[The] many facets of this transdisciplinary and intersectional collection are also marked by a great variety of perspectives and backgrounds of the authors, which allows this volume to become a celebration of diversity and interdisciplinarity. As such, Spiritual Herstories offers a kaleidoscope of experiences that shed light on embodied understandings and sensuous research whilst illuminating both academic insights and ‘bodysights’.

This book speaks to calls for writing differently and the writing of narratives centred around the body to explore the ‘bodiliness’ and emotions of academic work and writing (Essén and Värlander, 2012). This type of writing renders embodied research a feminist project in its explorations against the grain of masculine hegemonic practices in academic scholarship (Boncori and Smith, 2019). [...] These contributions, pollinated by photographs and changes to the text in terms of form, register and tone, are joyful and inspiring, even when addressing marginalisation and limits imposed by patriarchal structures. The reader is ‘moved’ both through an intellectual dance across interdisciplinary perspectives, and via narratives that value affect, embodiment and personal herstories. The narratives, experiments and explorations presented in the chapters are an invitation to seek embodiment and spirituality away from distinctions between psyche and soma, in an attempt to free creativity, knowledge and the sense from unnecessary inhibitions. More importantly, this edited book advocates the importance of daring to step away from traditional ‘scientific’ research in pursue of scholarship that highlights the value and centrality of affect, intuition, embodiment and spirituality in the processes of research development and knowledge creation.'

-- Ilaria Boncori, Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion

Amanda Williamson is visiting honorary professor of somatic movement dance education at Coventry University in the UK. She is founding editor of The Journal of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, a peer-reviewed journal, coeditor of Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives, both also published by Intellect.

Barbara Sellers-Young is a senior scholar and professor emerita at York University in Toronto, where she was dean of the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design. She is the author of many books, including The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity and Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity. She is currently editor-in-residence at Dance Chronicle.

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