Vol. 43: Ethics, Risk, and Safety in the Field

Guest Editors: Juan Sebastián Gómez-García and Polina Timina

How can we think, feel, and navigate risks, harm, and safety in the field of dance research? We are pleased to announce an open call for contributors to Volume 43 of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies: “Ethics, Risk, and Safety in the Field.” The issue seeks, on one hand, to explore the embodied and affective experiences of confusion, frustration, and danger often overlooked in the epistemologies and methodologies of researching dance in the field. On the other hand, the issue aims to highlight emergent embodied, community-based and harm-reduction strategies of care and safety that researchers find, create and reflect upon. Such strategies may be found and built on-site or with distance. Our desire is to initiate a vital and urgent conversation about the ethical implications of approaching otherness through corporeal ways of interaction. We hope to be a platform for critical and radical meditations, methodological advancement, and the promotion of self and collective care within dance research.

Many young fieldworkers venture into diverse physical and social spaces, driven by discovery, often overlooking the holistic nature of research as an experience that can have lasting impacts on the researcher’s embodied self. Spaces may be riddled with unequal power distribution, politics of exclusion, and embedded risks. This issue aims to provide a platform for reflection from different ways of thinking about these challenges. Nowadays, researchers, fields, and reflexivities on ethical considerations and risk management are increasingly interconnected. As a result, the potential for mental, physical, reputational, and legal harm transcends previous underestimated assumptions. We’re interested in accounts of, and reflections on experiences in the field that challenged conceptions of integrity and/or on emergent strategies for overcoming them. We welcome submissions that are analytical or interpretative, exploring the lines between discomfort and danger and the emergent paths of looking for the researcher’s well-being as well as the people researched.

We look to include voices from all levels of experience in movement research to converse on how ethical considerations in dance studies are transversal, multi-directional and ongoing. This is one of the first issues young researchers face, one that gains depth as experience and endurance come into play. We suggest contributors investigate and destabilize one-dimensional approaches to fieldwork ethics, risk, and safety across all methods of movement research: choreographic, ethnographic, archival, digital, and notational. How can diverse ways of knowing – such as the corporeal, affective, and emotional, with particular attention to underrepresented voices – inform our understanding of safety and risk in the field of dance research?

We invite researchers of movement to propose a contribution, in an academic or artistic style, that maximizes the journal’s online, open-access platform. We encourage creative ways of conveying ideas and reflections that can be put into multimedia or blog-styled format, for example, visual/video essays, small written essays, poetry, audio recordings, photographs, retrospectives of field notes, online chat conversations, or email exchanges alongside academic-style articles (combinations of these forms in one contribution also accepted/encouraged). 

Potential contributors are asked to submit a 500-word proposal describing the subject of the contribution and the context of the issue/reflection/strategy, and its imagined format or layout (text, pictures, video and/or audio). Additionally, please include a 100- to 200-word contributor profile. It may be helpful to review previous issues of Conversations to envision format possibilities. Proposals should be submitted only through the Google form (link below) by October 1st 2023.

After guest editors announce selected contributors on October 15th, full contributions will be asked to be submitted by November 15th, 2023 and a collaborative editing process will ensue. We expect to publish Volume 43 in the summer of 2024. 

Questions can be submitted to dancesafety.conversations@gmail.com

Link for submissions: https://forms.gle/xC29jNK4Et294avNA

Guest Editor Bios:

Juan Sebastián Gómez-García is a Colombian cultural anthropologist, ethnochoreologist, and dance practitioner, passionate about exploring the intersections of movement, body and ecology. His expertise lays at the crossroads of performing arts, fieldwork research, and collective engagement. His experience navigates the fields of Latin American critical thinking, diasporic studies, heritage studies, and queer theory. He graduated from Universidad Nacional de Colombia with a BA in Anthropology, and he recently received his MA from an Erasmus Mundus program in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage. His main interest focuses on the invention and sustaining of political bodies and community-based spaces that create dissident realities of resistance and care for social equality and bodily transformation. His current research spans queer nightlife in urban contexts, Colombian diasporic dance in London and artistic projects for building ecologies of peace in the Colombian post-war context.

Polina Timina is a researcher and dancer who grew up in Russia, part of a choreographic ensemble specializing in competitive performances, contemporary dance, and Russian folkloric productions. A graduate of Durham University’s Anthropology programme, she studied politics, memory, aesthetics, and experience and has researched embodied practices connected to nationalism, land, and kinship. Recently, she completed her thesis on the corporeality of violence as part of her Master’s in Dance Anthropology. Polina is interested in embodiment of the quotidian, political performance, phenomenology, affect and queer theory. She is currently working on a project on the cultural exchange between the USSR and India in the post-Independence period with her collaborator Anisha Anantpurkar, specifically looking at influences on the formation of Kathak.