Contact info

For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies by email moninder_lalli@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

Research process

Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process, or in other words how to find materials for your essay.

Selected encyclopedias and handbooks

Use encyclopedias, dictionaries and handbooks to obtain definitions and overviews of a topic and also to identify key authors

• International encyclopedia of dance - Nearly 2,000 articles on all aspects of dance
• Oxford Dictionary of Dance - Covers all aspects of the diverse dance world
• Oxford Handbook of dance and ethnicity
• Routledge companion to dance studies

Find journal articles

Databases let you easily to search for articles from within scholarly journals for a discipline.

• How to find journal articles tutorial.
• What is a scholarly (or peer-reviewed) journal?

If the full-text of the article is not available within the database then use the "Get@SFU" link to find it or to initiate an inter-library loan request.

• Women's Studies International -- Start with this database and then search other databases.
• Anthropology Plus - Key database for Anthropological journal articles.

Find books in the Library

Library Catalogue search guide

Search the SFU Library Catalogue: Advanced keyword

For the searches below, you can further limit the search results by "Subject" or "Resource type" (such as "books)

• embodied knowledge
• embod* AND danc*
• (body OR embod*) AND method* AND (ethnograph* OR ethnol*)
• (body OR embod*) AND method* AND (ethnograph* OR ethnol*) AND (dance OR dancing)
• embod* AND method* AND (ethnograph* OR ethnol*)
• anthropolog* AND danc*
• ritual performance
• "dance anthropology"
• (body OR embod*) AND (dance OR dancing) AND gender
• dance AND (cultur* OR memory OR ritual OR social identity) AND (anthropolog* OR ethno*)

You can also search for names of people: 

• Gertrude Kurath,
• Joann Keali’inohomoku,
• Katherine Dunham

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Look at the titles in the "results list" and for those books that look relevant, click on their subject headings.

Selected books

• Body, movement, and culture: Kinesthetic and visual symbolism in a Philippine community [print]
• Body & soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer [print]
• Caribbean and Atlantic diaspora dance: Igniting citizenship [print]
• Choreography As Embodied Critical Inquiry: Embodied Cognition and Creative Movement
• Collaborative intimacies in music and dance : anthropologies of sound and movement
• Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality
• Dance in the field : theory, methods and issues in dance ethnography [print]
• Dancing across the page : narrative and embodied ways of knowing [print]
• Dancing cultures : globalization, tourism and identity in the anthropology of dance
• Dancing Indigenous Worlds : Choreographies of Relation
• Dancing spirit, love, and war: Performing the translocal realities of contemporary Fiji
• Dancing with the Virgin: Body and faith in the fiesta of Tortugas [print]
• Fields in motion: ethnography in the worlds of dance
• Glocal Bodies: Dancers in Exile and Politics of Place: A Critical Study of Contemporary Iranian Dance
• Learning capoeira : lessons in cunning from an Afro-Brazilian art [print]
• Performing queer latinidad : dance, sexuality, politics
• Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity Through Martial Arts
• Queer Dance
• Qigong fever: Body, science, and utopia in China [print]
• Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy
• Sharing the dance: Contact improvisation and American culture [print]
• Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor [print]
• What a body can do : technique as knowledge, practice as research [print]
• When the body becomes all eyes : paradigms, discourses and practices of power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian martial art [print]
• Wrestler's body : identity and ideology in North India [print]

Selected subject headings to find books

These selected Library of Congress Subject Headings will  assist you with finding books on research methods.  
Use the Browse Search option in the SFU Library Catalogue, then select "Subject" browse from the drop-down menu.

• Anthropology -- Research
• Dance
• Dance -- Anthropological aspects
• Ethnology -- Methodology
• Feminism and dance
• Participant observation
• Participant research

Library guides

• Library Research Skills [interactive tutorial]
• What is plagiarism? [guide]
• Evaluating sources
• Referencing and citation management software For help, please contact us at citation-managers@sfu.ca
• Tutorials
• Student Learning Commons & Writing help

Writing help

See the Student Learning Commons for expert and friendly help with academic writing, learning, and study strategies.