2011-2016: Arts as Knowledge, Global Belly Dance, Gender, Spirituality, and Place

2011-2016: Arts as Knowledge, Global Belly Dance, Gender, Spirituality, and Place

The arts-in-higher-education and community arts writings generalize Sellers-Young’s philosophy beyond dance. Art is defended as embodied inquiry, public thought, and civic practice. Dewey becomes an increasingly visible reference: art is continuous with experience and transforms how people perceive, reflect, and act.

The global belly dance work develops into a mature theory of choreoscapes. Belly dance is treated as a transnational field produced through improvisation, Orientalism, Islamic regulation, diaspora, feminism, tourism, media, and digital circulation. Her account of male dancers revises the assumption that the form is inherently feminine. Gender is shown to be historically produced and re-stageable. Masculinity in raqs sharqi emerges differently in Farrah, Reda, Tito Seif, John Compton, and others, depending on national context, audience, costume, class, and relation to fantasy.

Her work on Edward Said and Tahia Carioca refines the anti-Orientalist project by articulating an Egyptian aesthetic of restraint, inwardness, musicality, and tarab. This counters Western visualist criteria that equate dance value with obvious display.

The autoethnographic and spirituality writings turn inward. Sellers-Young asks how spirituality is formed through movement, memory, place, and embodied metaphor rather than doctrine. The deer trails become a key late-career image for the continuity of somatic selfhood. The body that studies other cultures is already formed by childhood landscape, trauma, labor, and longing.

Continuity: dance changes perception and identity.

Break: the researcher’s own body becomes a primary archive rather than merely a positioned observer.