MENACASEA Research Workshop Series

The Research Workshop Series is an initiative that brings together the MENACASEA community to discuss critical theoretical frameworks and their relevance to the study of dance, music, and performance. It is an opportunity to learn together and challenge each other, recognizing the need for more community spaces to dissect works of theory and experiment with applications to ongoing research in the MENACASEA region. Three workshops are scheduled each year (Winter, Spring, and Fall).

Spring 2026

Upcoming Program: Study Session on Judith Butler

In this session we will focus on the work of American philosopher Judith Butler. Butler’s work drinks from the thought of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault among other relevant thinkers and her thought has been considered one of the most influential philosophical contribution of our times. Her writings have been regarded as a major voice of Third Wave Feminism, reflecting on the deconstruction of biological sex, gender theory, the politics of the performative, feminism and queer theory, among other issues. Butler's ideas have influenced the work of Diana Taylor, whose writings have been discussed in these Research Workshop Series, and the writings of Barbara Sellers-Young.

Butler’s main works are well-known and easily accessible within academic milieus, her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies that Matter: On the Discourse Limits of Sex (1993) and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) have been published in paperback and its reading is advisable for this session. The discussion on Butler’s ideas will start with the reading of the text Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (1988), debating the applicability of Butler’s thought for the research of MENACASEA’s topics.

Other suggested readings are:

Sellers-Young, B. (2016) Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity London: Palgrave Macmillan
Salih, S. (2002) Judith Butler London and New York: Routledge

This is a virtual session scheduled for Sunday, May 3, at 11 am PST. If you wish to participate, please register HERE.

Stay Tuned: The Fall research workshop (September 2026) will address the works of Gilles Deleuze!

Past Programs:

Winter 2026

Study Session on Pierre Bourdieu – January 11, 2026 at 11am PST

For our winter 2026 session, we will situate the study of dance alongside French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu – marking 24 years since his death in January 2002.

In this session, we aim to contextualize Pierre Bourdieu's social theory from the point of view of postcolonial sociology, debating the historical moment in which Bourdieu began his career as a sociologist. This moment is defined by the emergence of new independent modern countries, with new political regimes and hopes that, oftentimes, reproduced long-lasting forms of discrimination. Bourdieu helps to understand how dance, music, and performing arts – as social practices – are embedded in given logics of power, and how these social and artistic expressions contribute to sustaining, reproducing and eventually mirroring these dynamics of power. Thus, to understand Bourdieu’s relational sociology provides a useful thinking tool for scholars and researchers of MENACASEA music and dances.

This is a virtual session scheduled for Sunday, January 11, at 11 am PST. If you wish to participate, please register here.

Suggested readings:

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Available to preview on Google Books
Go, Julian. “Decolonizing Bourdieu: Colonial and Postcolonial Theory in Pierre Bourdieu’s Early Work.” Sociological Theory 31, no. 1 (2013): 49–74. Available on: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Julian-Go/publication/258190385_Decolonizing_Bourdieu_Colonial_and_Postcolonial_Theory_in_Pierre_Bourdieu's_Early_Work/links/5f61495da6fdcc1164159509/Decolonizing-Bourdieu-Colonial-and-Postcolonial-Theory-in-Pierre-Bourdieus-Early-Work.pdf
Grenfell, Michael, ed. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. 2nd ed. Oxfordshire, England; Routledge, 2014. Available as EBSCO eBook

Fall 2025

Study Session on Michel Foucault – September 14, 2025

In our fall 2025 session, we dedicated our research workshop to the widely influential French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault.

In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault analyzes state power and the performativity of delinquency. A study of the prison and incarceration, this work can be powerfully applied to a variety of other contexts wherein structures of power and knowledge implicate the body. The training of the dancing body – in state-supported ensembles, in national arts academies, in screen dance – is one significant arena where Foucault’s framework is especially poignant. This research workshop is intended to explore these applications in dance studies from within the unique cultural contexts of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, where colonialism (past and present) remains a specter in state power, representation, and disciplinarity. In doing so, we interrogate notions of the nation state, the idealized form, the preservation of tradition, and of autonomy.

Spring 2025

Study Session on Diana Taylor – May 4, 2025

In our inaugural research workshop study session, we gathered to discuss the theoretical contributions of Diana Taylor to the field of dance scholarship and the relevance of her work for the MENACASEA research area (Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia).

Diana Taylor’s work has been a reference for postcolonial and de-colonial research for the past twenty-five years. By organizing this study on her main texts, i.e. The Archive and the Repertoire (Taylor, 2003) or “Performance and/as History” (Taylor, 2006), we aim to introduce a debate toward Taylor’s contribution applied to the MENACASEA research area. We wish to encourage a scholarly debate toward her ideas on performance, among other issues, as well as a critical approach to her work.