About Aimee Meredith Cox
New York, New York
Aimee Meredith Cox (CBA ’24) is an Anthropologist, writer, movement artist, and critical ethnographer. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at New York University following her appointment as an Associate Professor in the African American Studies and Anthropology departments at Yale. Aimee’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is also the editor of the volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018). Aimee performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. Aimee is also a yogi of many decades. Yoga is integral to her praxis and her overall research and pedagogical commitments. She leads yoga teacher trainings as well as advanced study and continuing education workshops and retreats around the globe. Aimee is currently working on two monographs based on her experiences growing up and living through the intersection of race, gender, and status in Cincinnati, Ohio. The sum of these projects is entitled Living Past Slow Death.
Moving Past Slow Death
“Moving Past Slow Death” is a project that explores the possibilities for imagining new ways of living and being at the intersection of dance, somatic healing, performance, and ethnography. Drawing on her decades long investment in Black Feminist anthropological practices and professional modern dance training, Cox seeks an expansion of performance ethnographic praxis that ultimately begs for a reconsideration of what is defined as “performance” and “ethnography.” During the fellowship period, Cox will invite dancers, choreographers, critical ethnographers, somatic practitioners, and local community organizers to be in dialogue around the question of how nuanced attention on the body in community can enhance quality of livingness across all life forms. A central guiding interrogation will be how embodied methods rooted in dance disrupt social science methodologies and, in turn, how an immersive ethnographic lens reorders what could be categorized as dance. In addition to salons and less formal conversations, Cox will write an article on a revised tradition of performance ethnography and curate a public event (to include performance, discussion, and participant engagement) that further explores the central themes of “Moving Past Slow Death.”
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