Shay Welch

Spelman College, Philosophy, Faculty Member

Williams College, Philosophy, Fellow

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Shay Welch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Spelman College. She is currently the Scholar-in-Residence for the city of Atlanta's public art project; the project is titled "Public Performance Art as Resistance to Epistemic Injustice". Recently, she was the 2020-2021 Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation Distinguished Research/Creative Scholar. She was Chair of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. She is a board member for the Emotions Matter national non-profit organization. Her current book is Choreography as Embodied Critical Inquiry: Embodied Cognition and Creative Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Her recent book is The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing with Native American Epistemology (Palgrave-Macmillan 2019). Her previous books are Existential Eroticism: A Feminist Ethics Approach to Women’s Oppression Perpetuating Choices (Lexington Books 2015) and A Theory of Freedom: Feminism and the Social Contract (Palgrave-Macmillan 2012). She teaches courses on freedom, embodied knowledge, embodied cognition, dance, systemic oppression, ethics, sex, feminism, and Native American Philosophy. Her professional goals are to support and mentor young women of color in Philosophy and to aid the discipline in recruiting and retaining more underrepresented young philosophers. She is especially interested in supporting first generation students and students with cognitive and affective disorders.

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Choreography as Embodied Critical Inquiry

In this book, I expand on the thinking-in-movement framework that has its roots in the work of Ma... more In this book, I expand on the thinking-in-movement framework that has its roots in the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and extends and develops within contemporary embodied cognition theory. The framework from which I am working holds that the movement expressed and articulated in dance articulates and communicates thoughts and ideas. My ultimate aim here is to offer a theoretical framework for how critical inquiry can be embodied; and to present one somatic-based dance methodology for creating choreography that demonstrates how this can work. The empirical method I proffer is a movement tool that can be done in its own right for its own sake, engaged in to help one think deeper or differently about a non-movement-based project, or engaged in to help the mover/dancer figure out how to better choreograph a narrative work. More specifically, I explore and analyze the role of embodied cognition and embodied metaphors in mining the body for questions one has about the world and themselves.

My primary purpose is the philosophical purpose. That is, this book is primarily a philosophical venture that is accompanied by a movement methodology as an example for how this philosophical framework operates. My philosophical purpose motivates the creation of this method is to reveal how to utilize movement to explore our embodied practices of knowing. I argue that it is our creative embodied movements that give us the ability to cognitively and critically engage in critical analysis about the world. I aim to provide an analysis—one that blends phenomenology of dance and a “naturalized” phenomenology of embodied cognition and mind—of what it means to develop, articulate, and express questions that reside in one’s cognitive unconscious (or subconscious or nonconscious) to oneself—and to others—through the moving and dancing body. Overall, I hold that through the reading, rather than interpreting, of embodied metaphors, dance can be a clear language available to us. And, more interestingly, it can be a reflective way of accessing the “how”s and “why”s that we have about the world and our place in it.

I focus on how the phenomenology of dance fits within a specifically enactivist camp of the embodied cognition field that posits the mind to be fully and radically embodied. More specifically, I look to various components of enactivist models to clarify how the various parts of an embodied critical inquiry are enactivist. Enactivism is important to a theory of embodied critical inquiry because it can help us better understand how to purposefully engage the body and its knowledges to stimulate meaning-making and meaning-discovery. While dancing is recognized as a mode of artist narrative, there is little research on the specifics of how and what this entails theoretically. My primary aim here is to provide some of those details for an embodied critical inquiry. But, on the other hand, some may wonder why an account of an embodied critical inquiry would be of any interest to enactivists. A theory of an embodied critical inquiry is of interest to enactivists because it adds more material content for their empirical research. While cognitive scientists and neuropsychologists have been exploring brain processes through the use of dance, few have done so with a version of dancing that function in the realm of higher cognitive functions that cannot be explained linguistically. My hope would be that enactivists could use this mode of dancing to explore some of the more abstract cognitive functions that still remain somewhat vague within the literature.

Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing with Native American Philosophy

In this book I flesh out, from an analytic philosophical perspective, a Native American epistemol... more In this book I flesh out, from an analytic philosophical perspective, a Native American epistemology, specifically in terms of its being a performative knowledge system. Generally speaking, a knowledge system must contain four characteristics: a theory of knowledge that accounts for what counts as knowledge, tells us how we know, constrains how knowledge is or may be accrued, directs how it is learned or taught, and explains how new things can come to be considered forms of knowledge. To give substance to the notion of Native epistemology as a performative knowledge system in a way that satisfies these criteria and, more specifically, to provide contextual depth and richness to this analysis, I argue that and demonstrate how the phenomenology of dance choreographing and dance performance exemplifies both the definition of Truth and meaning-making within Native American epistemology. Given that within Native American communities dance is regarded not only as an integral cultural conduit but also as “a doorway to a powerful wisdom” (Longboat 1997, 8), I argue that and substantiate how it is that dance and dancing can both create and communicate knowledge. That dance—as a form of oral, narrative storytelling—has the power to communicate knowledge of individual and collective beliefs and histories is not of much controversy from the perspective of dance theory and Native Studies. Narrative is the heart and soul of both knowledge and ethical relations in the Native tradition, particularly because narrative is born through an oral tradition, which relies on the sharing of individual experiences for knowledge construction; it helps individuals apprehend and deal with the complexity of the world by providing a storied picture through which to see particular instantiations of more general occurrences (Deloria 1999, 67; McPherson and Rabb 2011, 110). And dance is a form of embodied narrative storytelling. My work with respect to this claim is to provide further analytic clarity on how this happens, which conditions are required for it to succeed, and how dance can satisfy the relational and ethical facets of Native epistemology. The more convoluted task for me, however, is to give traction to the idea that dance creates and effects knowledge by eliciting unique embodied metaphor cognates in the body to reify through the body ideas and stories that may be ineffable. This line of argument may bear additional fruit for Native Philosophy and Native/Indigenous Studies; such explications can be explored to apprehend how contemporary dance performance can interpellate and fuse collective embodied knowledges that survive against a context of a besieged oral traditions and endangered languages.

Existential Eroticism: A Feminist Approach to Women’s Oppression-Perpetuating Choices

Here I fill at least one gap that exists in the space between lived oppression and theoretical an... more Here I fill at least one gap that exists in the space between lived oppression and theoretical analysis. I focus specifically on feminist analyses of women’s oppression perpetuating choices to draw out how such biases in theorizing can undermine liberation. In this book I traverse the interstices of the dupe/victim dichotomy as it relates to women’s choices and experiences. To do so I provide a thorough analysis of how feminists invested in liberation ought to regard women and their choice’s that perpetuate oppression—focusing specifically on Western women in sex work and abusive relationships to guide my analysis. I restrict my analysis to women’s oppression qua beauty and sexuality, which I term existential eroticism. I argue that this is the one form of oppression that all women experience and must navigate differently according to their race and class designations. I parse out the differing forms and degrees of restriction, explicitly distinguishing between individual and systemic modes, to better understand the rationality that women must use to endure this incessant experience. In doing so, I articulate a notion of desperate rationality that emerges from the experience of coercion vis-à-vis trauma that applies in limited cases but is nonetheless necessary to feminist analyses. I analyze this experience from the perspective of the existentially erotic woman because most feminist philosophers bear race and class privilege that has precluded them from such experiences, which limits their ability to accurately account for how and why women make perpetuating choices, and which results in biased analyses of attribution or withholding of moral responsibility for those choices. By taking on and accounting for the perspective of marginalized women in contradistinction to the proper lady or feminist ideal, and demonstrating the hyper-rationality some women exercise to strategically navigate oppression and abuse, I provide two distinct accounts of moral responsibility that apply discretely to the individuated act and the complicit act that inheres within a single choice. Such an analysis will affect mainstream feminist analyses of moral responsibility for complicit women because none have separated the phenomenon of the individual’s act from the inadvertent phenomenon of complicity. Pace most feminists, I argue that women can be responsible for complicity in collective action problems and demonstrate how moral responsibility works differently when separating out complicity for the purpose of moral evaluation.

Subsequently, I also attend to questions of blame and forgiveness. This proves imperative to the discussion of rationality and responsibility because blame and the need for forgiveness often underlies the biased analyses and, moreover, preclude the possibility of solidarity that oppressed persons need and desire to overcome oppression. I advocate for a relationship-centered account of blame for complicit women and argue that feminists also have much to be forgiven for given that their analyses are written more from a perspective of exoticization than understanding. Consequently, I develop an analysis of intra-group forgiveness that I believe can begin to restore the bonds between women and overcome resentment that precludes the kind of understanding needed to address the harms of complicity and its ability to perpetuate oppression. Overall, this project utilizes feminist ethics, broadly construed as feminist philosophy concerned with the ethical commitment to eliminate oppression, to scrutinize how women regard and judge one another and to offer a more representative account of restriction, rationality, and responsibility to begin the healing process between diverse and divergent women.

Shay Welch

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