Library

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conference paper / 1983

The Zande Pumbo: Social Change and Structural Change

This early study of the Zande Pumbo establishes one of Sellers-Young's most durable scholarly habits: reading dance as an event in which social structure becomes visible. The Pumbo is treated not as an isolated set of steps, but as a funeral ecology made from kinship labor, food preparation, music, gendered participation, authority, mourning, and spatial organization. By comparing accounts from the 1920s, mid-century reports,...

Congress on Research in Dance Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, November

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introductory essay / Undated

Introduction to Somatics

This introductory essay offers visitors a doorway into somatics as a way of understanding the body from lived experience rather than from external appearance alone. It frames somatic practice as disciplined attention to breath, sensation, movement, image, and awareness. The body is treated as intelligent, historical, and trainable, not as a mechanical instrument moved by a separate mind. The essay matters within the archive b...

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introductory essay / Undated

Introduction to Sustainability

This introductory essay frames sustainability as more than environmental management. In Sellers-Young's archive, sustainability includes culture, memory, community, land, artistic process, and embodied relation. The essay prepares visitors to see why artists matter to ecological thought: they change how people perceive place, time, interdependence, loss, and care. The work connects her later sustainability writing to the rest...

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autobiographical document / Undated

My Life and Living

This memoir is a major personal archive for understanding the formation of Sellers-Young's scholarly and artistic life. It traces family lineage, immigration, Protestant discipline, poverty, labor, trauma, education, motherhood, travel, dance, teaching, aging, and reflection. Its value is not simply biographical. The memoir shows how a life becomes embodied through inherited values, place, work, fear, longing, and creative pr...

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poems / Undated

Saffi Poems

These poems distill recurring ideas from Barbara Sellers-Young’s scholarship into lyrical form. Across autobiographical, theoretical, and ethnographic pieces, they argue that knowledge is not primarily abstract or disembodied. It emerges through breath, sensation, repetition, environment, ritual, dance, and relational presence. The body is treated not as a vehicle for expressing prior thought, but as a site where perception...

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biography / Undated

Sellers-Young Bio

This biographical document presents Sellers-Young as an interdisciplinary scholar, performer, educator, and institutional leader whose career joins dance, theatre, performance studies, somatics, intercultural research, and global movement practices. It emphasizes the range of her training and field experience, including work across Sudan, Egypt, Japan, China, Nepal, England, Australia, and North America. The biography is usef...

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resume / Undated

Sellers-Young Resume

The resume documents the scale and continuity of Sellers-Young's career across scholarship, teaching, leadership, creative practice, and public engagement. It records major appointments at York University and UC Davis, administrative roles, international visiting positions, publications, performances, grants, lectures, and service. As an archive object, it gives structural evidence for the breadth that individual works reveal...

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