Cultural anthropologist, dancer, and conscious dance facilitator interested in diverse research & artistic adventures on the connections between dance and socio-political and spiritual transformations of the self and of modes of relating.
"Contrasting the politics of self/other in ethnography." Guest talk at the "Ethno/Musicology in Action: Fieldwork and Ethnography" course at the University of Manchester on April 29, 2022.
I graduated with a Ph.D. from the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. I was co-supervised by anthropologist of sound Rupert Cox and ethnomusicologist Caroline Bithell; my examiners were Andrew Irving and Nigel Rapport.
My Ph.D. was about the self-transformations and self-alternations of dancing in modern, secular "spiritual" communities in Europe. I studied and practiced a type of conscious dance called Ecstatic Dance. Through this work, I explored how spiritual but not religious experiences involve the formation of new conceptualizations of selfhood that come about via the embodied, inter-subjective, sensorial, and sensational particularities of dance.
I previously did a 7-month ethnography at the Naqshbandi Sufi Center of Barcelona, Spain, as part of an MA in Anthropology in Ethnography co-supervised by visual and religious anthropologist Roger Canals and anthropologist of Islam Alberto Bargados (2018). In this study, I explored theories about space and approaches to spatial analyses of social practice in relation to sound and sonic behaviors of Islamic ethical subjectivity.
I did a Masters in Science and Technology Studies from Maastricht University in the Netherlands (2012) under the supervision of Bernike Pasveer, through which I learned about material semiotics and Actor-Network Theory. My academic career started with a Bachelor of Science in Public Policy from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA (2009), where I did a discursive analysis of the grammar of institutions from a philosophy of language perspective.
My art education consists of a one-year postgraduate diploma at the University of Barcelona's Art, Globalization, Interculturality research cluster called "ON MEDIATION" (2020-2021). I also did a one-year vocational training in non-fiction and documentary filmmaking in Barcelona. My dance training consists of several dance residencies at a dancing commune in Portugal called Ser Vivo.