MARÍA REGINA FIRMINO-CASTILLO, Ph.D. (Firmino)
Assistant Professor

As a scholar and artist, I am interested in bodies and their inextricable entanglements as sites of ontological production, destruction, and transformation. My doctoral training is in anthropology, but with a focus on transdisciplinarity, an epistemological approach that interrogates the taken-for-granted premises of disciplinary paradigms. I apply transdisciplinarity to the fields I work in—mainly (but not only) dance and performance studies—to disrupt artificial compartmentalizations of knowledge that contribute to untenable social configurations. My scholarly work unfolds in synergy with my artistic practice; therefore, I engage in performance and other media as avenues of onto-epistemic inquiry and change. 

Focusing on Guatemala and Southern México within a global network, I attend to ontologies (or practices of being) and how they are corpo-realized (or made “real”) by and through bodies in relation to each other and environments, especially in the contexts of genocidal coloniality and its contestations. To this end, I deploy the tools of ethnography, dance and performance studies, and other disciplines, but through modes that are transdisciplinary and trans-ontological, prioritizing the theoretical insights of research and artistic collaborators. This approach has resulted in Uma’l Iq’: Tiempo y Espacio Maya Ixil, a book I co-authored with a collective of Ixil-Maya knowledge holders, as well as several other publications and artistic collaborations dedicated to regenerating relational ontologies targeted for destruction during the longue durée of colonial violence in the region. These include articles, performances, and other media produced with Ixil artist Tohil Fidel Brito and Kaqchikel dancer and musician Daniel Guarcax, as well as dialogical essays written in relation to Be’ena’Za’a (Zapotec) artist and anthropologist Lukas Avendaño’s transnational performance projects. This collection of works center Mayan and Be’ena’Za’a ontologies and embodied practices while critically analyzing how necropolitical social configurations are produced through an ongoing colonial violence that is simultaneously physical and ontological. In another branch of investigation, I engage in auto-critique to reflexively consider the unintended afterlives of my early work in the field of dance studies and the paradoxical outcomes of my involvement in a recent performance collaboration. (For a bibliography of publications and artistic works, please visit this site.)

These interrelated areas of research and practice inform my current book project. Tentatively titled Catastrophic Corpo-Realities, the book argues that genocidal and ontological annihilation constitute a violent form of worldmaking, one that is becoming increasingly normalized in the 21st century and which perpetuates the concatenation of catastrophes that have become status-quo in the current epoch. Catastrophic Corpo-Realities contributes to the critical understanding of this complex phenomenon by investigating the roles that the body, including the dancing body, has had in this worldmaking-through-annihilation. At the same time, the book traces and speculatively invokes the body’s capacity to alchemically transmute, and perhaps disrupt, the autopoietic corpo-realization of catastrophe as status-quo. 

As a faculty member in UCR’s Department of Dance, I teach undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that are designed to meet the needs of scholars and/or artists. I mentor students in both the MFA in Experimental Choreography and the PhD in Critical Dance Studies programs, and I serve on the doctoral committees of students in anthropology, Hispanic studies, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines at UCR and outside institutions. Additionally, I advise students pursuing the graduate Designated Emphasis in Corporeality and Embodiment Studies. 

I have received support for my doctoral studies from the National Science Foundation, and my research at UCR has been funded by the University of California Regents Fellowship, the Mellon Humanities Quarterly Fellowship at UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.