Dr. Lucy El-Sherif Publishes and Presents Research on Dabke
Dr. Lucy El-Sherif, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education, continues to share her research on dabke, Arab cultural production, and transnational political subject formation across multiple scholarly venues.
October 2025: Meridians Publication & 25th Anniversary Symposium
In October 2025, Dr. El-Sherif published her article, “Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia”: Palestine, Arab Mothering, and the Research Imagination, in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 24(2). In the essay, she asks: "What does it mean to dance a relationship to one stolen land, Palestine, from another stolen land, Haudenosaunee territory on Turtle Island?"
The article was one of 17 pieces selected from the journal’s twenty-five-year archive for presentation at its 25th anniversary symposium at Smith College, "Milestones and Momentum: The Meridians Project at Twenty-Five Symposium." The symposium also featured a live dabke performance by a Dabke dance troupe, Malikat Al Dabke (Queens of Dabke), programmed in relation to her article, followed by a public conversation with the dancers.
A recording of Dr. El-Sherif's panel "Body Politic(s)" can be viewed on YouTube here.
A recording of the dabke performance by Malikat Al Dabke can be viewed on YouTube here.
The article can be accessed here: doi.org/10.1215/15366936-11862647.
February 2026: Invited Talk at the University of Ottawa
On February 23rd, Dr. El-Sherif delivered an invited talk, “Dabke Is Better Than a Thousand Lectures Against Islamophobia,” at the Research Methodologies Lab at the University of Ottawa, hosted by the Laboratory for Engaged Research (LER).
The talk extended the methodological and political concerns of her article while also speaking to her current book project, Dabke on Turtle Island. The book develops an analytic account of dabke across transnational sites, theorizing dance as a practice of survivance, ontological refusal and repair, and relational world-making under conditions of racialization and exile. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with youth, community organizers, and cultural producers, the project challenges binaries between the political and the cultural.
We congratulate Dr. El-Sherif on these significant scholarly contributions to theorizing Arab life and racialization on Turtle Island.
