conference paper / 2009

The Value of Arts in Higher Education

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This presentation version of Sellers-Young's argument for the arts in higher education emphasizes the public and pedagogical stakes of artistic practice. The arts are framed as modes of inquiry that engage body, imagination, intellect, and community. Their value lies not in ornamenting the university but in expanding how knowledge is produced and shared.

The piece connects her administrative leadership with her scholarship. Sellers-Young argues from the perspective of a practitioner-scholar who understands studios, classrooms, and institutions as interconnected environments. Artistic process teaches students to work with ambiguity, embodied evidence, collaboration, and reflective action. In the arc of her career, this presentation helps move her embodied philosophy from actor and dancer training into a larger argument about the university's civic and intellectual responsibilities.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
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.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventInternational Conference on Arts and Society, Venice, Italy, July
Rolepresenter

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Analysis

Understanding this work

Barbara Sellers-Young’s “The Value of Arts in Higher Education,” presented in 2009 at the International Conference on Arts and Society in Venice, belongs to a recognizable moment in academic life: the years in which arts programs were repeatedly called upon to justify themselves in languages not originally their own. The arts were asked to explain whether they served the economy, whether they improved cognition, whether they contributed to innovation, whether they deserved institutional protection in a university increasingly attentive to measurable outcomes and market rationales. Sellers-Young does not refuse that demand. Nor does she capitulate to it. What makes this conference paper characteristic and consequential...

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