Kiri Avelar Publishes Two Chapters

Two chapters authored by Assistant Professor Kiri Avelar were published this month: "Plática, Testimonio, y Convivencia: Centering Chicana/Latina Feminist Pedagogies and Research Metho…," co-authored with Franchesca Marisol Cabrera, and "Disrupting and Reimagining the Archives: Interdisciplinary and Chicana/Latina Feminist Intervention…,” co-authored with Michaela Summers, in The Intellect Handbook of Dance Education Research edited by Lynnette Young Overby, Billie Lepczyk, and Jill Green.  See abstracts of the chapters below.

Plática, Testimonio y Convivencia: Centering Chicana/Latina Feminist Pedagogies and Research Methodologies in Dance Education
This chapter aims to provide insight into the enactment of pedagogies and research methodologies that have been culturally nourishing for the authors’ teaching-research practices across dance environments. This provocation counters hegemonic teaching and research methodologies, building on the seminal work of Chicana feminist writers, educators, theorists and scholars to engage the following dance research questions: As dance practitioners and researchers, what can we learn from employing plática, testimonio and convivencia as dance pedagogies and research methodologies? How do these pedagogies and research methodologies validate alternative ways of learning, knowing and being in our dance spaces? How do these pedagogies and research methodologies promote a more equitable approach to dance research and teaching, honoring cultural identities and practices? Through the genealogical tracing of plática, testimonio and convivencia in both the community and within academia, the authors’ shared autoethnographic narratives, and their employment of critical reflexión, the chapter builds an enriched understanding of testimonio, plática and convivencia; a practical application of these pedagogies and research methodologies as an embodied learning experience across dance spaces; and a deeper understanding of the ways that Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies and research methodologies in dance exists/can exist within and for the community.

Disrupting and Reimagining the Archives: Interdisciplinary and Chicana/Latina Feminist Interventions as Decolonial Praxis
The current push in education to re-evaluate dominant historical narratives presents dance educators with the unique challenge of critically engaging historical dance archives through a decolonial lens. Influential Chicana/Latina feminist research practitioners lay the foundation for this type of reflective practice through the intervention of plática as a research methodology. We aim to illustrate how intentionally bringing the embodied practices of plática and dancemaking together forge an interdependent research methodology. As a response to the archives, we offer a decolonial praxis grounded in Chicana/Latina feminist frameworks and our own lived experiences that utilize the embodied practice of plática and dancemaking as an interdisciplinary pedagogical tool and methodological practice for disrupting and reimagining dance histories. Through autoethnographic narratives, we explore what the decolonization of our dance archives could look like across educational settings, investigate our role as educators in forging decolonial approaches to archival work, and provide examples of how plática and dancemaking interdependently prioritize collaboration, self-reflection, embodied knowledge and student agency. We highlight examples of our praxis in action, such as re-envisioned dance history course designs, plática as a collaborative strategy and a variety of creative interdisciplinary responses to the archives. Our argument to center dancemaking and plática as a creative interdisciplinary response to historical archives makes explicit the need for disrupting archival work within the dance discipline and beyond. Further research investigating the relationship between embodied practices, specifically dance, and interdisciplinary CFT frameworks may result in new methods for reimagining historical archives through the body within the field of dance and academia at large.