Depths of Possibilities

Recent queerings have led Lavender Grey to challenge what we understand to be knowledge and research. In furthering their pursuits of embodied knowledge, Lav has come to more conscious understanding of the importance of affective, experiential onto-epistemologies. For our Anthro Day 2023 symposium, they have chosen to focus on the depth of possibility in the participant-observation research method of collaborative artistic creation, sharing an example of the relation of metaphor to theory in video poem “TAKE”, developed with a team using ideas and text from feralatlas.org.

Lavender Grey Higley (they/lav) is a senior transfer to UCSC after beginning their education in cultural anthropology and dance at San Diego Mesa College. While in San Diego, lav also danced with Visionary Dance Theatre and Mojalet Dance Collective's Core Group and in multiple International Fringe Festivals. Since coming to Santa Cruz, they have joined the UC history books as a choreographer-cum-director of Random With A Purpose and a producer-cum-director of Queer Fashion Show. Lav’s work centers queer embodiment and communication, especially as an intersection, but they also pursue research into sex, gender, social justice, and the arts more broadly as well as religion, spirituality, and the occult. They find the insights of queer and dance theories—with their understandings of identity, body, internal experience, and external observation—to be infinitely applicable in studies of culture and the human.