HARD PLAY: CAPOEIRA AND THE POLITICS OF INEQUALITY IN RIO DE JANEIRO

As an anthropologist and dancer, I am interested in the possibilities that embodied practices open up for empathetic ways of being together, constructing and transmitting knowledge, and creating alternative futures. My research and scholarship move through the African Diaspora, from Brazil to Angola, exploring the ways bodies in movement together can create spaces of radical openness and transformative belonging.  My first book, Capoeira Connections: a Memoir in Motion (UPF 2023), is a multi-sited ethnography that weaves together the local and global histories and flows of this Afro-Brazilian combat game with my own thirty-year trajectory as a practitioner, researcher and instructor.  The book speaks to my interest in expressive culture and popular education in conjunction with race, class and gender.   My current project is an interdisciplinary and mixed-method exploration of social and stage dance in the Angolan diaspora.  My courses often blend seminar and studio to create an experiential and dialogic learning environment that blurs the boundary between theory and praxis and emphasizes collective over individual knowledge acquisition and achievement.  For more on my scholarship, teaching and media, and a link to the open access edition of my book visit: www.katyawesolowski.com