Biography
Daniella Santoro is a PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology at Tulane University. Her dissertation explores the experiences of rehabilitation in the afterlife of gun violence and violently acquired injury in New Orleans, Louisiana. The ethnography focuses on how residents with gun shot induced spinal cord injuries organize around wheelchair specific mobility and vie for social visibility and justice.
Research
As part of my broader dissertation research on gun violence, injury and disability in New Orleans, this research is concerned specifically with the relationship between dance, disability and wheelchair mobility during second line parades. How do spinal cord injured survivors of gun violence in New Orleans relate to second lining and expressive culture traditions after injury? While scholarship has traced the role and evolution of jazz music in second line brass band music, less attention has been paid to the accompanying dance forms as a site of embodied knowledge and power. This research attends to the dynamic of second line dance and performative embodiment as it intersects within wider workings of race, class, able-bodiedness, and visibility. I suggest that critically attending to disability-theoretically and tangibly- offers a new framework for understanding the ways the city both constrains and liberates people’s mobilities, visibility, and local identities.
