Notes on Contributors
Devon Bailey
is a Global Excellence and Stature Assistant Lecturer, as well as a PhD candidate at the University of Johannesburg’s Philosophy department. The focus of her research is identity formation and self-knowledge particularly as it pertains to the black South African female dancer. Devon holds a nihss Doctoral Scholarship and is a winner of the Young Scholars Award for essays in Aesthetics. Some of her other research interests include the philosophy of performance art and aesthetics (especially dance), feminist theory, neurophenomenology, and African Philosophy.
Catherine F. Botha
Catherine is professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. Her research is focused mainly on the philosophy of art, most especially the philosophy of dance. Her interest lies also in the phenomenological tradition and its precursors in the continental tradition (most especially the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger), and this is often the lens through which she approaches her writing in aesthetics. She is currently the co-secretary of the South African Centre for Phenomenology, and is also a registered ballet teacher of the Royal Academy of Dance. She offers tuition in classical ballet to UJ students at the UJ Art Academy.
Rainy Demerson
is a contemporary dance artist and scholar invested in anticolonial intersectional feminism and radical art making. Her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies examined the Indigenous techniques of Black women in South African contemporary dance as projects of decolonial subject-formation. After teaching Dance and Yoga to youth in underserved public schools for several years, she went on to teach at Lindenwood University, El Paso Community College, Crafton Hills College, Scripps College, California Polytechnic University Pomona, and California State University San Marcos. She is currently a Lecturer in Dance at University of the West Indies Cave Hill.
Sarah DiMaggio
Sarah DiMaggio is a PhD student in philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She received her undergraduate training at Lebanon Valley College. Her research focuses broadly on environmental philosophy, ranging from eco-phenomenology and animal ethics to ecofeminism and environmental justice.
Leonard Harris
A leading figure in African-American and liberatory thought, Harris’ writings on honour, insurrectionist ethics, tradition, as well as his work on Alain Locke have established him as an outstanding scholar in critical philosophy. His timely and urgent responses to structural racism and structural violence mark him out as a daring cultural commentator and a skillful theoretician. Harris is professor at Purdue University’s Department of Philosophy as well as a visiting scholar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He is winner of the Herbert Schneider Award “for distinguished contributions to the understanding of American Philosophy,” 2018 as well as winner of the College of Liberal Arts Discovery Excellence Award.
Elvis Imafidon
is Lecturer in the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (soas), University of London, London. He specialises in comparative African philosophy and continental philosophy with specific interests in African ontology, African ethics, African epistemology, African philosophy of disability, philosophy and public health and alterity studies. He is author of African Philosophy and the Otherness of Albinism: White Skin, Black Race (Routledge 2019) and editor of Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference (Springer 2020).
jackï job
is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Dance, Theatre & Performance Studies. Her predominantly independent performance career has been eclectic, including solo performances, choreographing classical operas, directing theatre works, as well as hosting television shows in South Africa. job lived in Japan from 2003–2011. During this time, she developed the application of Butoh principles to her performance methodologies and produced several inter-disciplinary artistic collaborations. Her research interrogates liminality from a corporeal perspective and how it can contribute to the meaning of personhood and transformation in South Africa.
Monika Lilleike
In her experimental performance work, Monika Lilleike concentrates on a multi-faceted interplay between voice and stylized body movement. Her work is based on fusing elements drawn from classical Chinese, Japanese and Hawaiian performing arts and concepts related to European avant-garde such as Dadaism, Body Art, Minimalism. Alongside developing her own solo performances, she has worked as a vocalist and performer in collaboration with musicians, dancers, video and fine artists participating in several experimental projects geared towards the development of contemporary music-theatre, music-performances and site-specific performance art.
Holly Longair
is a PhD student in Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She received her ba in Philosophy from Queen’s University, and completed her ma in Philosophy at Carleton University with a thesis titled A Relationship Focused Approach to Epistemic Injustice in Global Development Theory and Practice. She specializes in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and social epistemology, and her current research focuses on relational theories of egalitarian justice.
Lliane Loots
lectures in Drama and Performance Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She completed her PhD in 2018 looking at contemporary dance histories on the African continent. As an artist/scholar her research is framed within an ethnographic and autoethnographic paradigm with a focus on narrative as methodology. Loots founded flatfoot dance company as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. As the artistic director for flatfoot, she has won numerous choreographic awards and commissions and has travelled extensively in Europe, America and the African continent with her dance work.
Sara Matchett
is the Director of the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies (ctdps) at the University of Cape Town. She is also an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®. Her teaching focuses on practical and theoretical courses that include, voice, acting, performance-making, applied theatre, and performance analysis. Her research explores the body as a site for generating images for performance making and specifically focuses on investigating the relationship between breath and emotion, and breath and image, to make performance that is inspired by a biography of the body. Her particular interests are in embodied practices that focus on pre-sencing, co-sensing, co-llaborating and co-generating as a way of transforming ego-systems to eco-systems. She is the co-founder and Artistic Director of The Mothertongue Project women’s arts collective.
Takunda Matose
is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He also has a master’s degree in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the intersection between social and political philosophy and bioethics. His publications include work on biobanking, carceral justice, and public health ethics.
Matthias Pauwels
is a cultural and political philosopher based in South Africa. He works in the post-Marxian and post-Lacanian tradition of radical philosophy. His doctoral thesis offered an examination of the relation between aesthetics and politics in the work of contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière. His current post-doctoral research focuses on the entanglements of aesthetics and politics in contemporary, post/neocolonial South Africa, and has been published in many academic journals. Important, early publications by Pauwels include the co-authored monograph Too Active to Act: Cultural Activism after the End of History (2010) and two edited volumes: Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Over-Identification (2007) and Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City (2007).
Gerard M. Samuel
is Associate Professor: University of Cape Town, Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, Convener: Post Graduate studies in Dance, Editor: South African Dance Journal and Chair of Confluences international dance conference. During the Apartheid era he performed with the napac Ballet Company and The Playhouse Dance Company in Durban. He held senior management posts for The Playhouse Company, until 2006. His notable choreographies include Prabhati and The Man I Love. He received the Durban Theatre Awards in 2006 for The Sound of Music. Gerard produced Place of Grace, a dance film in 2011. He is an advocate of disability arts in South Africa and in Copenhagen. His PhD thesis – Dancing the Other in South Africa – is from uct, in 2016. It was announced that Gerard’s “thesis makes a highly significant intervention in Dance and Performance Studies in terms of its original argument about how the category of ‘age’ is used [as] part of ‘othering’ process … coining the term ‘body-space’ as a theoretical tool to observe bodies and dancing as states of becoming”.
Paul C. Taylor
is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He received his undergraduate training at Morehouse College and his graduate training at the Kennedy School of Government and at Rutgers University. His research focuses primarily on aesthetics, social and political theory, American philosophy, race theory, and Africana philosophy. His books include On Obama and Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, which received the 2017 monograph prize from the American Society for Aesthetics.