peer-reviewed article / 2009

The Value of Arts in Higher Education

Barbara Sellers-Young

Back to Library Read Analysis

Description

This article argues for the arts as a form of knowledge central to higher education. Sellers-Young resists justifying the arts only through entertainment, enrichment, therapy, or economic value. Drawing on experiential and embodied models of learning, she presents artistic practice as a way of investigating perception, ambiguity, relation, identity, and social meaning.

The work broadens her philosophy beyond dance and theatre while preserving its core. Art matters because it trains modes of attention that conventional academic disciplines often underdevelop: sensory awareness, metaphorical thinking, collaborative making, reflective action, and tolerance for uncertainty. For Sellers-Young, the arts do not stand outside research. They generate knowledge through doing, revising, feeling, staging, and reflecting. The article is a key statement of her institutional advocacy for arts education.

Metadata

Typepeer-reviewed article
Year2009
Era 2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy i

2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy

This period broadens and complicates the earlier positions. In belly dance studies, Sellers-Young sharpens the critique of appropriation, commercialization, and the imagined Arab body. She traces belly dance from the Chicago World’s Fair and “Little Egypt” through Arab American nightlife, second-wave feminism, goddess spirituality, and branded spectacle. Enjoyment is not denied, but it is placed inside unequal histories of representation.

In “Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body,” she identifies different pedagogical regimes: optical, somatic, and mediated. Mirror-based training produces self-objectification and visual abstraction; direct somatic apprenticeship produces incorporation into lineage and tradition; screen-based learning produces a more autonomous but more image-mediated learner. This is one of her clearest statements that pedagogy produces kinds of consciousness.

Her work on ethnographic perspective marks a decisive methodological turn. Reflexivity must include not only social identity but sensory structure, neurological pattern, and movement history. She names the genetic/structural, imaginal/social, and performance selves. This framework later becomes central to her somatic autoethnography.

The contemplation and neuroplasticity writings connect performance training to broader academic reform. Contemplative practice is framed as a third way of knowing, complementary to rational analysis and empirical observation. Neuroscience supplies a vocabulary for attention, plasticity, habit, and embodied change, though the underlying practical insight comes from performance and somatics.

Continuity: technique forms subjectivity.

Expansion: the performance studio becomes a model for higher education.

Open era page
AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
JournalThe International Journal of the Arts in Society
ISSN1833-1866
Roleprimary author

Reflect with VABS

IdeaSpace

Themes in this work

Open a theme or use this work as the center of the IdeaMap.

Analysis

Understanding this work

Barbara Sellers-Young’s “The Value of Arts in Higher Education” belongs to a moment when arts advocacy in the university was becoming newly anxious and newly strategic. By 2009, the familiar humanistic defense of the arts as civilizational inheritance or personal enrichment no longer seemed sufficient within institutions increasingly pressed to justify themselves in managerial, economic, and instrumental terms. Yet Sellers-Young does not simply lament that condition, nor does she capitulate to it. What makes the essay intellectually distinctive is the way it takes up that institutional pressure as a conceptual problem: how might one defend the arts in language broad enough to register contemporary demands...

Read More