A Dance Around Racism: When Everyone Around You is White. Panel on “Choreographies.” 4S 2020 New Orleans.

What is the choreography of crisis? This dance can be radical and feminist like Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic or jess pretty’s dream[e]scapes or  I laugh to myself thinking that it can also be and often is something like Taylor Swift’s supposed inclusivity anthem Me!, a very different kind of dance serving a very different kind of purpose and supporting a very narrative. What would it mean to conduct research as an ethnographer as a queer postmodern dancer in the vein of Yvonne Rainier?  “No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic.” This link was once briefly but powerfully explored by Adele Clarke and this appeal echoes much of the work of anarchist or prefigurative technology and human-computer interaction by thinkers like mariam asad. What are the different scores we could place on ourselves to move through our fields with antiracism at the core? What would a prefigurative score even mean? What are the scores our participants follow to perform antiracist work? How do they work to change the homogeneity of their fields?