Dr Paola Esposito
Departmental Lecturer
I am a sensory anthropologist whose research engages with visual, multimodal, performance-based, and critical medical anthropology, as well as ontological approaches and collaborations with artists and makers.
My research interests include the lived body and body-mind relations; learning, enskillment and transformation; aesthetic and therapeutic practices; somatic movement and butoh dance; images and imagination; spirit mediumship and divination; globalisation and transnationalism.
Contact
My work lies at the intersection of visual and medical anthropology, examining configurations of the lived body across artistic, therapeutic and medical domains.
My doctoral and postdoctoral research centred on long-term, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with practitioners of butoh, a Japanese-transnational dance and somatic movement genre, analysing how its reported formlessness and indeterminacy are negotiated in practice. This research has resulted in multiple peer-reviewed publications, including collaborations with dancers, theatre-makers, musicians, and digital artists (see Publications). My current research engages with notions of bodily knowing, imagining, and transformation, and mobilises graphic, audio-visual and performance methods and approaches, contributing to multimodal anthropology.
Since 2016, I have been based at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA). I began as an Early-Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology (2016–2017), then served as a Departmental Lecturer in Medical Anthropology (2017–2024), and most recently as a Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology (VMMA) (2024–2025). I continue to teach full-time on the MSc/MPhil programme in VMMA, with a particular focus on visual, sensory, and multimodal approaches in anthropology.
I have supervised MSc, MPhil, and undergraduate dissertations, and regularly teach sensory and multimodal research methods to MPhil and doctoral students from a variety of backgrounds, including anthropology, education, geography, primary health care, and social policy.
From 2016 to 2023, I promoted visual medical anthropology as a subfield of medical anthropology through the Green Templeton College Medical Anthropology Film & Discussion Group. Since 2022, I have co-led the Anthropology-Art Collective at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME), fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and the arts.
Books
Esposito P. (forthcoming research monograph). Mimesis and metamorphosis in butoh dance: towards an ‘anthropology with art’ for healing. London: Routledge.
Journal articles and book chapters
Esposito, P. (2025) ‘Reimagining the body-with-chronic pain through an “anthropology with butoh dance”: from bodily hylomorphism to somatic morphogenesis’. In Gatt, C. and Loovers, P. (eds) Beyond Perception: Multidisciplinary Correspondences with the Work of Tim Ingold. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 261-277.
Esposito, P. and Taylor-Green, B. (In press). ‘Multi-Modal Toolkit: Activating Imagination and Insight in Anthropological Education’. In Ingold T. and Gatt C. (eds) Anthropology as Education. ASA Anthropology Educates conference monograph.
Esposito, P., and Dziala, D. (2021). Becoming a Caterpillar: A Multimodal Perspective on Metamorphosis in Butoh Dance. Journal of Embodied Research, 4(1), 4 (25:04). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.18
Esposito, P. (2021). Multimodal Biosocialities, pp. 41-51. In Hsu, E., Esposito, P., Sheppard, P., Ulijaszek S. (eds), Lessons learnt from a Pandemic: COVID-19 in Perspective. Special Issue, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford-online, New Series, 13 (1): 1-75.
Esposito, P. and Kasai, T. (2017). Butoh Dance and Noguchi Taiso: Performance and Healing. In Karkou V. and Lycouris S. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Esposito, P. (2017). Body: A Choreographic Journey into Salvador Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus. In Harkness, R. (eds) An Unfinished Compendium of Materials. Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen.
Esposito P. (2016). Thread: Somatic Lives of a Thing. M/C Journal of Media and Communication-online. Vol. 19 (1).
Esposito P. (2015). Stepping In and Out of the Picture: A Drawing-based Reflection on Walking Threads. The Unfamiliar: An Anthropological Journal. Vol. 5 (1–2), pp. 95-101.
Esposito, P. and Loovers, JPL (2015). Introducing the Walking Threads Project. The Unfamiliar: An Anthropological Journal. Vol 5 (1-2), pp. 79-83.
Special Issues
2021, Hsu, E., Esposito, P, Sheppard, P. and Ulijaszek, S. (eds), Lessons learnt from a Pandemic: COVID-19 in Perspective. Special Issue, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford-online, New Series, 13 (1): 1-75.
2017, Hsu, E. and Esposito, P. (eds), Anthropology Matters, Especially in Times of Crisis, Special Issue, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford-online, New Series, 9 (2): 192-272. (82 pp.) ISSN: 2040-1876.
