Dr. Maïko Le Lay is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with SLIPPAGE@Duke (2021-22) and the Franklin Humanities Institute. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, practitioner, mentor from France and Japan whose research bridges the fields of performance, education, digital humanities, and African and Asian diasporic studies. Her current research examines the identities and embodied and digital practices of Black and Japanese people globally. Her ethnographies are augmented by social media analysis of influencers and public figures, such as Naomi Osaka. In terms of her academic background, Le Lay received her PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside in 2020. Her doctoral research focused on hip hop education and she developed a curriculum called "embodied hip hop pedagogies," which centers on performance, self-awareness, and hip hop (hi)stories, and the impact of Western institutional spaces and epistemologies on moving bodies. After her doctoral studies, Le Lay completed a postdoctoral scholarship in the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine. Le Lay possesses a MA in Political Sciences from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL, Belgium) and a MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle (France). At Duke, Le Lay also convenes the “Embodied Pedagogies On and Offline” working group. More information about the meetings and workshops can be found here.