Now Available: Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies vol 44

Guest Editors: Emilie Jabouin & Karla Etienne

This issue, titled The Caribbean as a Pole of the African Diaspora, centers Ayiti (Haiti) as a locus for rethinking the entangled genealogies of African and Caribbean rhythms, dances, spiritualities, and identities. Curated by guest editors Emilie Jabouin and Karla Etienne, both Afro-descendant francophone women raised in Haitian households in Canada, the volume explores how dance acts as an embodied archive of belonging, resistance, and interconnection across the Black Atlantic. The editors frame this issue as a dialogue between the Caribbean and Africa—not as a one-directional flow from Africa to the Caribbean, but as a network of ongoing, reciprocal exchanges of rhythm, ritual, and philosophy. The collection draws together artists, scholars, and practitioners whose works trace how African aesthetics, cosmologies, and embodied practices persist, transform, and regenerate through Caribbean dance forms such as yanvalou, limbo, kokobalé, kumina, and in carnival. These dances articulate histories of displacement and liberation while foregrounding the drum, the body, and spirituality as central to life, memory, and revolution. 

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Cover image credit: Myrtle Henry Sodhi (AfroQuill), A Movement Across Time, November 2025

Cover image description: This digital image captures the idea of Ubuntu as expressed through dance and movement. Being through and with others is a movement across time. Steps, twists, folds, and reaches are echoed from the past, expressed in the present, and reverberate into the future. Dance is a way to feel together--through each other. This does not mean we disappear into each other but rather we appear through and with each other.

ACLS DSA Academic Freedom Fellows

The Dance Studies Association’s Standing Committee on Membership and Professional Development (SCoMPD) is thrilled to announce an open call for submissions for DSA Academic Freedom Fellows, funded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), to promote a network of support and visibility for precarious scholars.

Through direct distribution of $1,500 USD microgrants to 5 awarded fellows (in addition to 2027 conference registration waiver), this program aims to resource and platform dance/performance artists, scholars, artist-scholars, and researchers doing justice-oriented work* at the intersection of 1) economic/institutional precarity (e.g., contingent faculty, independent scholars, graduate students without access to other sources of funding) and 2) vulnerable scholarship (e.g., researchers whose work faces content suppression, defunding, and outright censorship in current political regimes whether because of content or geopolitical context). The fellowship year includes regular virtual gatherings, wherein fellows co-faciliate peer-to-peer development of projects, and the opportunity to present at the 2027 DSA conference as a cohort of DSA Academic Freedom Fellows.

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 El Comité de Membresía y Desarrollo Profesional (SCoMPD) de la Dance Studies Association (DSA) se complace en anunciar una convocatoria abierta para las becas «DSA Academic Freedom Fellows» (Becas de Libertad Académica de la DSA), financiadas por la organización American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), con el fin de fomentar una red de apoyo y visibilidad para académicos en situaciones de precariedad.

Mediante la asignación directa de microsubvenciones de 1.500 USD a cinco beneficiarios (además de la exención de la cuota de inscripción para la conferencia de 2027), este programa busca brindar recursos y visibilidad a artistas de danza y performance, académicos, artistas-académicos e investigadores que realizan trabajos orientados a la justicia social* en la intersección de: 1) la precariedad económica o institucional (por ejemplo, profesorado con contratos temporales, investigadores independientes o estudiantes de posgrado sin acceso a otras fuentes de financiación) y 2) la investigación en situación de vulnerabilidad (por ejemplo, investigadores cuyo trabajo se enfrenta a la supresión de contenidos, recortes de financiación o censura directa bajo regímenes políticos actuales, ya sea debido al contenido de la investigación o al contexto geopolítico). El año de la beca incluye reuniones virtuales periódicas, en las que las personas becarias facilitan conjuntamente el desarrollo de proyectos, así como la oportunidad de realizar una presentación en la conferencia de la DSA de 2027 como grupo «Academic Freedom Fellows» de la DSA.

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