Printer-friendly format  Article citation        



     
 

Contributors

David Best, B.A. (Honors), M.A., B.Phil., Ph.D., graduated from Cambridge University. He is Research Professor of Philosophy in the University of Wales; Senior Academic Fellow and Honorary Professor, De Montfort University, Leicester; Visiting Professor, Sibelius Academy of Music, Helsinki; and invited member of the International Association of Leading Academics and Artists in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. He holds various honorary appointments. He acted as consultant for the National Department of Education and Science for England and Wales: Assessment of Performance Unit, with particular reference to the arts. Dr. Best has also acted as a consultant for arts policy for governments in Portugal, Chile, and New Zealand. He has written numerous articles and his books include Expression in the Arts (1974), Philosophy and Human Movement (1978), Feeling and Reason in the Arts (1985), and The Rationality of Feeling (1993), which has been published in Russian, Portuguese, and most recently in Chinese (Taiwan). This book won the prestigious Royal Society of Arts prize as "the most outstanding and original academic book of the year." Dr. Best has a particular academic interest in the philosophy of mind but is best known for his work in philosophy of the arts, education, and especially the arts in education. In 1993, Equity, the actors' union, asked him to write as their spokesman to the Secretary of State for National Heritage (England) and the Secretary of State for Wales in the Campaign for the Defence of Theatre in Education.

Chan Kwok-bun is chair professor of sociology, Hong Kong Baptist University, and founder and director of the Chan Institute of Social Studies (CISS). He earned his doctorate in sociology at York University, Canada. He is the former head of the Department of Sociology and former director of the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is also former president of the Hong Kong Sociological Association (HKSA), former editor of Social Transformations in Chinese Societies (an official HKSA journal), and former head of the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. An expert in family studies, sociology of emotions, economic sociology, medical sociology, and migration, Professor Chan is the author of sixty journal articles, fifty-five book chapters, and forty books. He is currently editor of The International Handbook of Chinese Families (Springer).

Chi-Fang Chao is an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Dance Theory, National University of the Arts, Taipei. She is trained in the fields of Anthropology (M.A, National Taiwan University, 1994) and Dance Studies (Ph.D., University of Surrey, 2001). She conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in southern Okinawa and has a special interest in the relationship between ritual and dancing. She is also a board member of the Foundation of Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe in Taiwan. Her recent publications include "'Dynamic Embodiment': The Transformation and Progression of Cultural Beings through Dancing" (Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 2009). She is now working on the first ethnography about Okinawa to be written in Chinese.

Holly Fairbank, a New York City-based choreographer and dancer, is assistant director at the Lincoln Center Institute where, for the past twenty years, she has coordinated aesthetic-education programs with the Education Divisions at many colleges in the New York area and the NYC Teaching Fellows Program. She has also managed K–12 partnerships at the institute since 1995. Ms. Fairbank received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Dance Education from New York University and has been a dance educator since 1976, heading various dance departments in the NYC area. As a choreographer, dancer, and the artistic director of Holly Fairbank & Dancers (1979–89), she received many grants and commissions from sources including Arts International, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), The Yard, Dance Umbrella of Boston, the New Hampshire State Ballet, and various independent dance companies. She has also choreographed material for television commercials, theater and opera productions. Ms. Fairbank has been guest faculty at the University of Hawaii, Hong Kong Performing Arts Center, and the Guangzhou and Beijing Dance Academies in China. In addition to JASHM, she has written reviews and articles for Dance Magazine, China Daily, and the Equity Studies Research Center at Queens College.

Yukito Kado is a dance critic. Since 1994, he has contributed to several publications, including the Japanese version of Britannica Book of the Year, the Asahi Graph Magazine, Weekly On Stage, Shimbun Journal, and many others.

Beth Marks, RN, Ph.D., is associate director for Research in the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Aging with Developmental Disabilities, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is also president of the National Organization of Nurses with Disabilities and a research assistant professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development, UIC. She directs research programs related to the empowerment and advancement of persons with disabilities through health promotion, health advocacy, and primary health care. She coedited a special issue of Nursing Clinics of North America on health issues for persons with developmental disabilities. She has also produced a feasibility study report to advance nursing education at the Bel-Air Sanatorium and Hospital in Panchgani, Maharashtra, India, through the WHO Collaborating Center (UIC) and a monograph on Primary Health Care in the Americas for the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization. In February 2009, Dr. Marks produced a documentary with Bronwynne Evans, RN, Ph.D., titled Open the Door, Get 'Em a Locker: Educating Nursing Students with Disabilities. She has written two books that will be published in 2010: Health Matters: The Exercise and Nutrition Health-Education Curriculum for People with Developmental Disabilities and Health Matters for People with Developmental Disabilities: Creating a Sustainable Health-Promotion Program.

Minako Nakamura is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences (Department of Performing Arts), Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan. As a guest researcher since 2005, she has taken part in the research project "Kyoto Body Motion Analysis with Motion Capture" at Ritsumeikan University. Her research interests include the dance technique and structure of Balinese (Indonesian) dance, as well as the dance and technology, motion capture, and development of "Laban (Labanotation) XML." She is also interested in the digital archiving of dances.

Shu-Chi Piao completed a doctoral dissertation in education at the National Pingtung University, Taiwan. She is currently studying further at the Graduate Institute of Dance Theory, Taipei National University of the Arts. As a dancer, she performed for five years with Dance Forum and the Grace-Xiao Dance Theatre. Since 1990, she has taught dancing at the Cloud-Gate Dance School, Taipei, where she is also a committee member for curriculum design. Conference papers about her research at the Cloud-Gate School include "An Investigation to Creative Rhythmical Movement of Young Children--the Dance Curriculum" (International Conference on Music Education for Children, 2008) and "Parent-child Co-learning and the Role of the Father (International Conference of Art Education, 2009).

Kohji Shibano is a professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Prior to this, he was a researcher at the Research Institute of Mitsui Knowledge Industry, IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, and Tokyo International University. His current research interests include database management systems, coded character sets, Japanese document processing, e-Learning, and computational/corpus linguistics.


Jasmina Sisirak, MPH, is an associate project director at the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Aging with Developmental Disabilities (RRTCADD) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her research interests include nutrition, health literacy, and health promotion for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She coordinates several health-promotion projects in the RRTCADD. Ms. Sisirak received her B.S. in Dietetics at Southern Illinois University and her MPH at UIC. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at UIC.

Charles Varela is a research associate in the Anthropology Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds an M.A. in psychology and a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and was professor of Sociology and Psychology at Union County College, New Jersey, from 1960 to 1998. His scholarly interests focus on fundamental theoretical problems at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, mediated by the philosophy of science and unified by the issues of human agency, embodiment, and causality. Recent papers in this area published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JTSB) include "Determinism and the Recovery of Human Agency" (1999), "The Impossibility of Which Naturalism?" (2002), and "Biological Structure and Embodied Human Agency: The Problem of Instinctivism" (2003). Papers in JTSB on the problem of dynamic embodiment include "Harré and Merleau Ponty: Beyond the Absent Moving Body in Embodied Social Theory" (1994), "Cartesianism Revisited: The Ghost in the Moving Machine or the Lived Body" (1995), and "The Second Somatic Revolution" (with B. Farnell, 2008). He is also the author of the book Science for Humanism: The Recovery of Human Agency (2009).

Drid Williams has conducted fieldwork in England, the U.S., Australia, and Kenya. She has taught anthropology of the dance and human movement studies in all four countries. Dr. Williams holds a D.Phil in social anthropology from St. Hugh's College, Oxford. Recent articles include "Visual Anthropology and Language," Visual Anthropology (2009); and the entry "Dance" in The New Encyclopedia of Africa (eds. J. Middleton and J. C. Calder, 2007). A book titled Dancing and Ideokinesis is in press at University of Illinois Press. She is the founder and senior editor of JASHM.

 

 
 
 
 

Content in Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement (ISSN 1940-7610) is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
 
 
© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Terms and Conditions of Use.