Aimee Cox

Aimee Meredith Cox is an American cultural anthropologist, former dancer, and choreographer.

Her research interests include feminism, social justice, and the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She is currently associate professor of anthropology and African American studies and director of undergraduate studies at Yale University. She also serves as professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Cox received her BA in anthropology in 1994 from Vassar College and her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 2006 from University of Michigan. In 2005, Cox created the BlackLight Project for the residents of the shelter who wanted to expand their creative experimentation with music and dance to communicate their personal experiences. Cox touts her experience directing the shelter and the BlackLight Project as inspiration for her book, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015) that won several awards including the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and a 2016 Victor TurnerBook Prize in Ethnographic Writing. After spending four years conducting fieldwork at the homeless shelter, Cox wrote about these experiences in her PhD dissertation "You Can Do Better!" Marginalized Black Girls and the Performance of Respectability, an ethnography that outlined and examined the narratives of the young women she encountered during her fieldwork at the Detroit shelter. She volunteered at Alternatives for Girls in Detroit, then became the director of the homeless shelter from 2002 to 2005. She wrote about her time working at the shelter in her book Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. From 2008 to 2011, she worked at Rutgers University, where she continued the BlackLight Project that she started with the girls from AFG.

Awards In 2016, Aimee Cox's book, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, won the Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing. It was also an Honorable mention for the Gloria E. Anzaldúa book Prize. She was also awarded the Malkiel Scholarship by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2018.

Organizations and groups Aimee Cox is a fellow for the Black Atlantic Ecologies project at Columbia's Center for the Study of Social Difference. The project considers how Black experiences with peril, punishment, and premature death can provide a rubric for futurity in environmental collapse. She has also been a part of Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, a collective concerned with highlighting pervasive conditions of racism. The group held an event at the New Museum in 2016. Cox was a faculty fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, holding an interactive ritual performance there.

Written works

Major publications In 2015, Cox published her first book Shapeshifters, an ethnographic study of young Black women in Detroit, aged 15–22. Based on her work in a homeless shelter, Cox explores how young Black women move around the social conditions that restrict them, a process called shapeshifting. She also contributed to the publication Oracular Practice, Crip Bodies and the Poetry of Collaboration, a collaborative piece on oracular practice stemming from involvement in the Tiresias project at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She wrote a book review for the books In Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence and Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City for the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. Last year, she collaborated on a drama review of Fremde Tänze, a performance by Nelisiwe Xaba. As a frequent collaborator on Transforming Anthropology, she published a work titled Can Anthropology Get Free? in 2020. Additionally, she published several editorials during her time as an editor.

Writer's profile Aimee Cox's written work is both an extension of her field of study and her interest in dance. From an anthropological perspective, she studies the intersectionality race, location, class, and gender through the lens of performance. Her work in Detroit has informed much of her written works from Shapeshifters to several minor publications. She also studies performance more closely as well, tying in her own experiences with performance to other performances that she observes. Her work serves to not only tell the stories of Black women but create an academic space to explore the relationship between performance and intersectionality, specifically concerning Black women. Given the ethnographic nature of her work, much of it is a performance itself, one that reshapes the narrative concerning Black women.