Spiritual Herstories

'This is an important publication for advancing research in dance and reinforcing the scholarly lens, giving voice to the body, mind, and soul as partners in exploration. The preface, “Dancing Incantations” by Celeste Snowber, beautifully sets up the reader’s adventure: “Be prepared to let this anthology sit with you for a long time. Each chapter stands alone in its beauty, depth and breadth of knowledge; it is truly a transdisciplinary conversation, which draws you back over and over again to nourish your whole being” (ix).'

-- Adrienne M. Wilson, Journal of Dance Education

'[The] many facets of this transdisciplinary and intersectional collection are also marked by a great variety of perspectives and backgrounds of the authors, which allows this volume to become a celebration of diversity and interdisciplinarity. As such, Spiritual Herstories offers a kaleidoscope of experiences that shed light on embodied understandings and sensuous research whilst illuminating both academic insights and ‘bodysights’.

This book speaks to calls for writing differently and the writing of narratives centred around the body to explore the ‘bodiliness’ and emotions of academic work and writing (Essén and Värlander, 2012). This type of writing renders embodied research a feminist project in its explorations against the grain of masculine hegemonic practices in academic scholarship (Boncori and Smith, 2019). [...] These contributions, pollinated by photographs and changes to the text in terms of form, register and tone, are joyful and inspiring, even when addressing marginalisation and limits imposed by patriarchal structures. The reader is ‘moved’ both through an intellectual dance across interdisciplinary perspectives, and via narratives that value affect, embodiment and personal herstories. The narratives, experiments and explorations presented in the chapters are an invitation to seek embodiment and spirituality away from distinctions between psyche and soma, in an attempt to free creativity, knowledge and the sense from unnecessary inhibitions. More importantly, this edited book advocates the importance of daring to step away from traditional ‘scientific’ research in pursue of scholarship that highlights the value and centrality of affect, intuition, embodiment and spirituality in the processes of research development and knowledge creation.'

-- Ilaria Boncori, Journal of Management, Spirituality & Reli