Research
Interested in the complexity of the corporeal, Dr. Shantel Ehrenberg's work spans a number of disciplines, though all principally centred around the topic of kinaesthesia: phenomenology, ethnography, cognitive science, feminist philosophy. Her investigations engage with works from people such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Elizabeth Grosz, Gail Weiss, Xavier le Roy, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Suzanne Lacy, Sondra Fraleigh, Jaana Parviainen, Susan Foster, Cynthia Novack, Deirdre Sklar, Kaja Silverman, Frida Kahlo, Sarah Ahmed. She is interested in knowledge from the perspective of the mover and context, and how meaning is made out of complex lived experiences in relation to the body. This interest includes investigating the relationship between kinaesthetic and visually self-reflective experiences in dance and other practices/contexts.
Shantel's inquiries grew principally when she began to rigorously question, during her MFA, dancers' engagements with mirror self-reflections in training, more specifically investigating how contemporary dancers' described kinaesthetic experiences with mirror self-images are constructed in the context of Western theatre dance training (Ehrenberg, 2010, 2005). These inquiries led her to work with Professor Patrick Haggard and Dr. Beatrice Calvo-Merino, at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, on the topic of expert ballet dancer self-recognition, i.e. ballet dancers' kinaesthetic and visual expertise related to highly codified and specialised movement expertise (Ehrenberg, 2006; Calvo-Merino, Ehrenberg, Leung, & Haggard, 2010). Shantel returned to rich description and ethnographic research for her PhD at the University of Manchester. For more detail about her PhD research please click here. Concurrent to the PhD, Shantel worked on Watching Dance, a high profile AHRC-funded project on the topic of kinaesthetic empathy. Information on this project can be found here.
Shantel's inquiries grew principally when she began to rigorously question, during her MFA, dancers' engagements with mirror self-reflections in training, more specifically investigating how contemporary dancers' described kinaesthetic experiences with mirror self-images are constructed in the context of Western theatre dance training (Ehrenberg, 2010, 2005). These inquiries led her to work with Professor Patrick Haggard and Dr. Beatrice Calvo-Merino, at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, on the topic of expert ballet dancer self-recognition, i.e. ballet dancers' kinaesthetic and visual expertise related to highly codified and specialised movement expertise (Ehrenberg, 2006; Calvo-Merino, Ehrenberg, Leung, & Haggard, 2010). Shantel returned to rich description and ethnographic research for her PhD at the University of Manchester. For more detail about her PhD research please click here. Concurrent to the PhD, Shantel worked on Watching Dance, a high profile AHRC-funded project on the topic of kinaesthetic empathy. Information on this project can be found here.