20 Years of Radialsystem: UNEXPECTED LESSON 3 – Beyond Academia? How Dance Re-writes Research

As part of the series “UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Knowledges of Body and Sound,” Sandra Noeth and Mariama Diagne—both professors in the field of dance and performance studies at German universities—examine how dance, as a practice, art form, and field of discourse, has shaped an academic research discipline over time.

They present “Rethinking Dance in Academia” as part of “20 Years of Radialsystem.”

What does it mean to study dance in institutional settings—universities, art schools, theaters, or museums—whose foundations lie in imperial and centralist structures of knowledge? What concepts, expectations, and scholarly frameworks shape access to this field? Which practices have been brought to the forefront or pushed into the background? And how has this changed today? Embodied practices, non-academic perspectives, collective forms of learning, and artistic methods are gaining importance, making new forms of knowledge visible and thereby becoming academic capital.