We're delighted to announce that Sheffield Hallam Acting & Performance lecturer Dani Abulhawa has published a new book with Routledge entitled Skateboarding and Feminity: Gender, Space-making and Expressive Movement.
Skateboarding and Femininity explores and highlights the value of femininity both within skateboarding and wider culture. This book examines skateboarding's relationship to gender politics through a consideration of the personal politics connected to individual skateboarders, the social-spatial arenas in which skateboarding takes place, and by understanding the performance of tricks and symbolic movements as part of gender-based power dynamics
Dani Abulhawa anaylses the discursive frameworks connected to skateboarding philanthropic projects and how these operate through gendered tropes. Through the author's work with skateboarding charity SkatePal, this book offers an alternative way of recognising the value of skateboarding philanthropy projects, proposing a move toward a more open and explorative somatic practice perspective.
The first two chapters of the book examines women's historic and current involvement in skateboarding and the relationship of skateboarders to critical frameworks on feminism. There are two further chapters: one that explores the social and spatial frameworks that contribute to people's ability to succeed and progress in skateboarding, and one that examines skateboarding development projects through a dance and somatic practice lens.
The book is available through Waterstones https://www.waterstones.com/book/skateboarding-and-femininity/dani-abulhawa/9780367507145
Dani Abulhawa is a senior lecturer in performance at Sheffield Hallam University and an ambassador for skateboarding charity SkatePal. She co-founded Accumulations: a network for experimental and site-based movement, dance, and performance artists, and she is an organiser of the academic strand of Pushing Boarders – the first international skateboarding conference. Much of her work is inspired by her history of involvement with skateboarding. A persistent strand of her practice reflects on her Palestinian heritage, through explorations of the cultural and social aspects of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Dani has published articles and book chapters on spatial politics and power dynamics, artist interruptions of space, and the creative-research process. She has produced commissioned artworks, including Free Time in the City (audio work, Migration Matters festival, 2019), The Slide(short film, Helena Kennedy Centre for Human Rights, 2018), and Looking After Freedom, (residency and series of works created in Cape Town, funded by the British Council, 2017).
Find out more about Dani's work at: https://www.daniabulhawa.com
Image:'Sereen & Lydia'by Ben Bravenec
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