Lucy El-Sherif is an Assistant Professor in the Global Peace & Social Justice and the Gender & Social Justice programs. Her research is with Palestinian and Arab Muslim Canadian youth who dance Palestinian dabke (Shami folk-dancing). Dabke is by nature decolonial, but on Turtle Island it is practiced and performed on stolen Indigenous land. Her research asks what it means to dance a relationship to one stolen land on another stolen land. How do somatic expression, cultural systems of meaning, representation, and self-representation all converge in dabke? How do these threads shape settler subjectivity and belonging? Ultimately, she examines how racialization and colonization co-constitute each other and how social citizenship is learned and embodied.

Dr. El-Sherif’s work has appeared in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Curriculum Inquiry and the recently published edited volume, Troubling Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian Education; as well as The Conversation Canada.