Research futures – PGRs and the research pathway, emerging fields.
Chair and Panellists
Chair: Victoria Thoms
Before doctoral study in the United Kingdom, Victoria trained in ballet, contemporary dance, and choreography in Canada as part of her Undergraduate and Master’s Degree. She is author of the award winning (CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014) Martha Graham: Gender and the haunting of a dance pioneer (2013). Her new research projects work with trauma studies to understand theatre dance as a form of bearing witness. She has published in Dance Research Journal, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Research in Dance Education, Women: a Cultural Review, Modernism/Modernity Print+, Dance Chronicle and Cena (Portuguese). From 2015 to 2021 Thoms was “PGR champion” for the Centre of Dance Research (CDaRE) and under her management the Centre achieved one of the highest satisfaction rates in the University (2017 PRES). Thoms has recently taken on the role of one of the two Site Directors at Coventry University for the Midland4Cities Doctoral Training Programme. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary book series Dance in Dialogue published with Bloomsbury and the Society for Dance Research.
Tia-Monique Uzor
Tia-Monique Tia-Monique is a dance scholar and practitioner who is interested in themes of identity, popular culture, resistance, and feminism within African and African Diasporic dance. Her research critically engages Africanist dance as a vehicle for creating and interrogating African and African Diasporic worlds through interdisciplinary approaches and embodied research. Her AHRC and Midlands4cities funded PhD was concerned with identity formation within the choreographed movement of British Caribbean Diasporic artists. Tia-Monique has both presented and taught her work internationally and has published within collections in the fields of dance, geography and Black feminism. She is currently an AHRC dance history postdoctoral research assistant for Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a Research fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences for Creative Approaches to Race and In/Security in the Caribbean and the UK at the University of Birmingham. Tia-Monique sits on the Academic Advisory Committee for Dance of the African Diaspora (DAD) at One Dance UK and outside of the academy she writes, choreographs and dances in various contexts. Twitter:@tia-moniqueuzor
Paul Hughes
Paul is an artist, researcher, and dramaturg living in Nottingham UK, and currently undertaking a Techne-funded PhD with the University of Roehampton and Sadler’s Wells Theatre. This project explores artist-institutional relations, particularly where artists take on curatorial roles. His current research interests include: demons, ghosts, contracts, lanyards, ink blots, butt plugs, wildflowers, wounds and wreaths. The majority of his work is undertaken in collaboration with Rohanne Udall, under the name Chatting Tanum. They make performances, exhibitions, curatorial and pedagogical projects, prints, video, texts, sculpture, and more. They try to work with what they don’t fully understand; and they try to have fun. Website: www.chattingtanum.info
Phd blog: https://paulhughes.substack.com/
Email: p.hughespaul@gmail.com
Vipavinee Artpradid
Vip is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University (UK). Her PhD research was titled ‘Dance, disability, and the pluralistic audience: A phenomenographic engagement’ and has an MA in Anthropology of Media from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, UK). Her research interests include applied educational and social research, audience engagement studies, anthropology of dance and movement, and media, cultural and sociological theory.
Vida Midgelow
Vida is Professor of Dance and Choreographic Practices at Middlesex University where she leads the doctoral provision for the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries. As an artist-scholar she works on practice-as-research methodologies, improvisation and movement articulation processes and has published widely in these areas. Her practice includes work in somatically informed improvisation, performative lecture formats and installation/experiential performance practices/video works. She is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance and is principal researcher for the Artistic Doctorates in Europe project www.artisticdoctorates.com (Erasmus+ funded). She co-devised the Creative Articulations Process (CAP) and selected public works include BreathBone (NottDance19 and InDialogue Festivals) and Practice-as-Research (Bloombury). With Prof Jane Bacon, Midgelow founded and co-edited the hybrid peer-reviewed journal, Choreographic Practices (2010-2020), co-directs the Choreographic Lab www.choreographiclab.co.uk and is currently an associate research artist at i4C4/ Dance4.
Kat Hawkins
Kat is a queercrip PhD researcher, looking at the role of an understudy in inclusive dance. They are using their practice, primarily dance and film, to interrogate what barriers non-normative dance artists face in contemporary dance settings and how this reveals and plays out systemic issues of oppression. They have a particular interest in how disability justice can be used as a framework in dance settings.
Mira Gokul
Mira Balchandran Gokul is a Bharatanatyam practitioner and has just started a PhD programme with CDaRe in Coventry University. Her research investigates Bharatanatyam as a Knowledge System: an exploration from the dancer’s perspective.