Featured CEW Book Talk

Author & Wolverine Alumna Aimee Meredith Cox

“Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship” - A Book Talk with Aimee Meredith Cox

Date: November 5, 2015 – 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: Munger Graduate Residences, 8th Floor, Rm 8110, 540 Thompson St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2414

“Join us for a book talk and signing with U-M graduate, Aimee Meredith Cox, Ph.D. In her book, Shapeshifters,
Dr. Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves.
Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter’s residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women’s experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit’s history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters, Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

Aimee Meredith Cox, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist and tenured professor of African and African AmericanStudies at Fordham University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Education of Women. Her book Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015) is available on Amazon. Dr. Cox is on the editorial board of The Feminist Wire and on the founding editorial board of Public: A Journal of Imagining America. She is also an executive board member of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) and former co-editor of Transforming Anthropology, the peer-reviewed journal of the ABA. In addition, she trained on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and toured extensively as a professional dancer with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II. Aimee was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and 2013-2014 Visiting Professor in New York University’s Anthropology Department.” -Center For The Education Of Women

This event is co-sponsored by U-M Women’s Studies, the Munger Graduate Residences, Women of Color in the Academy Project, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies (DAAS), the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Women’s Studies Department, and the Center for the Education of Women.

Additional funding is provided by CEW’s Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders fund.

This program is free, and open to the public. Register here to attend!