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2 books match the query 'Bench, Harmony'

cover of Archival Entanglements

Archival Entanglements

Edited by Puja Batra-Wells and Harmony Bench

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

An impassioned and multidisciplinary argument for engaging with the archive as both vitally generative and ripe for critique and reimagination within the arts and humanities.

Archival Entanglements arrives in the wake of the archival turn in the arts and humanities. What humanists call “the archive” has been challenged, deconstructed, and reinvented, but, as editors Puja Batra-Wells and Harmony Bench show, the conversation about the archive is far from over. In this interdisciplinary collection, contributors from digital humanities, performance studies, labor studies, race and ethnic studies, and more come together to shed new light on how objects, knowledges, environments, bodily practices, and identities are entangled with the archive. Showcasing a range of approaches from traditional essays to artistic engagements, the works in this collection complicate questions of archival memory; raise issues of accessibility, erasure, latency, and surveillance; and ask if we should forge new spaces of remembrance that reach beyond the limits of the archive. Archival Entanglements posits the archive as both a generative site of knowledge production and a constricted force of consolidation around dominant narratives—essentially, as a complex web of theories and practices with which the arts and humanities are fundamentally entangled.

Contributors:
Anurima Banerji, Franco Barchiesi, Puja Batra-Wells, Harmony Bench, Johannah Bird, Leigh Bonds, Iñaki Bonillas, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Eric Gonzaba, Brian Harnetty, Brian Eugenio Herrera, Kelly Kivland, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Mariah E. Marsden, Mimi ?n??ha, Martin Joseph Ponce, Rebecca Schneider, Amy Shuman, Michelle Wibbelsman, Nicole Wood
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cover of Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common

Perpetual Motion

Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common

Harmony Bench

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A new exploration of how digital media assert the relevance of dance in a wired world

How has the Internet changed dance? Dance performances can now be seen anywhere, can be looped endlessly at user whim, and can integrate crowds in unprecedented ways. Dance practices are evolving to explore these new possibilities. In Perpetual Motion, Harmony Bench argues that dance is a vital part of civil society and a means for building participation and community. She looks at how, after 9/11, it became a crucial way of recuperating the common character of public spaces. She explores how crowdsourcing dance contributes to the project of performing a common world, as well as the social relationships forged when we look at dance as a gift in the era of globalization. Throughout, she asks how dance brings people together in digital spaces and what dance’s digital travels might mean for how we experience and express community. 

From original research on dance today to political economies of digital media to the philosophy of dance, Perpetual Motion provides an ambitious, invigorating look at a commonly shared practice.

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