The World Is a Vampire

April 28, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

…you know how the rest of the song goes, right? The title came to me when I was pondering the state of the world and all I could come up with is that everything is horrifying and I don’t know what to do about it. Read more

Multiplicity Decenters Authority

April 4, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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I’ve been thinking recently about how cultural traditions confer authority, and how in two realms – religion and dance – I see multiplicity dispersing authority (this will make sense after I explain it, I promise). Read more

Reflections on Teaching First-Year Writing

March 28, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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Since I’m teaching First Year Seminar this year, I’m teaching academic writing skills through a variety of assignments…but of course, this is making me reflect on when and how I first learned to write. Read more

(The New) The Body Is Not An Apology

March 19, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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As a body scholar and feminist, I hunger for ways to explore and inhabit our bodies that are not bound by shame, and Sonya Renee Taylor’s book delivers exactly that. Read more

Looking Forward to Another Year Teaching

March 14, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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I just received a contract in the last week to stay on at my university, and I’m relieved to have at least that much stability while wondering what the future holds. Read more

Where Gendered and Institutional Care Collide

March 5, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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As with any crisis, the pandemic is revealing various negative things about the social systems we inhabit. One that recently caught my attention is care: gendered care-work, institutions that pretend to care for us, and the omnipresent self-care advice. Read more

What I’ve Been Up to in the Folklore World

February 28, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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A lot of academic work is invisible and goes unrewarded…well, somehow a bunch of rewards just dropped into my lap all at once, so I thought I’d share them here (since my blog varies in its folklore content but that’s kinda my main profession, at least for now!). Read more

If American Belly Dancers Protested Colonialism As Much As Our Dance’s Sexualization…

February 21, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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If you’ve ever chatted with a belly dancer from the U.S., you’ve probably heard some riff on the phrase, “It’s not sexual, it’s sensual.” Americans dancers have done a lot of activist work here…so what might the dance scene look like if we took on colonialism, too? Read more

What Is the Point of Academia If Not the Community?

February 14, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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The pandemic is making us all rethink many things; for me, a major point of reflection is the role of community in university life, and what to do when we are without it. Read more

Important Things for U.S./Western Belly Dancers to Keep in Mind

February 6, 2021 By Jeana Jorgensen

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Discussions about cultural appropriation have always loomed large in belly dance, especially its fusion genres. Here, I detail some important insights from workshops I recently took with North African dancers. Read more