We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Fuad Elhage. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Fuad below.

Alright, Fuad thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

It all started when I went to college, back home in Venezuela.

Growing up in Venezuela in a Lebanese household, and going to a French school (in Caracas, Venezuela), I did not fully experience the Venezuelan culture.

When I got to college in Caracas Venezuela, I not only spoke Spanish with French accent (I still do but less), but I also did not know how to dance. How could I socially survive, how could I fit in if I could not dance in our end of the semester parties?

I survived. I learned how to dance with the help of skillful dancing friends. After I graduated college (computer science engineering), I started taking formal dance classes and workshops, and I have not stopped dancing and teaching dance since.

After I earned my MBA, I created a business plan to provide the following service:: teach dance as a vehicle for cultural immersion for internationals working for embassies. (The seed of my doctoral dissertation which title is “dance as a vehicle for prejudice reduction and second language acquisition, was planted)., The American embassy was our first customer. My dance partner and I were successful since we were bimodal polyglots. Bimodal because we spoke the language of words but also the language of dance. to communicate with each other. Polyglot because we spoke (French Spanish and English) and also knew how to dance (and how to teach dance) Salsa, Merengue and Tango.

When I came to the US, twenty four years ago for job opportunities, I went to UGA for my second master degree (in Internet Technology in the Terry College of Business), After graduating, I could not find a job. It was the dot com crisis in 2001. I had to reinvent myself. I went back to school and got another master and PhD in Language and Literacy Education.

In my journey, I discovered how I used languages and dance to keep myself connected to all my different cultural affiliations (Venezuelan, French and Lebanese). Consequently, In my doctoral dissertation, I created a cultural unit on dance for 6 and 8 graders to experience and learn about the different dances in Latin-America so that I could help my Latino students feel proud and connected to their culture, and at the same time, have my white, black, and Latino students feel connected with each other. thank to the common goal toward which they had to work together: the performance/presentation: for the school 5 de mayo celebration..

In other words, I wanted to examine dance as a vehicle for prejudice reduction and second language acquisition in multicultural learning contexts,. I created a dance program each spring for four years as a cultural component of the Spanish class for 6th and 8th graders at a southeastern middle school in the U.S. The goal was to facilitate interactions among students of different backgrounds and positively influence the students’ attitudes toward Spanish language and culture, ultimately reducing prejudice

The combination of 1) the power of stage and 2) the power of music and dance and 3) the power of touch through dance. created the circumstance to temporarily challenged the social norms of prejudice or lack of connections between these three groups.

Since I graduated in 2010, inspired by my doctoral dissertation, I teach (my signature course), “Diversity through Dance in different formats, from a 3 hour workshop for the Office of Institutional Diversity at UGA, to a Summer seminar for the UGA College of education to, more recently, a one semester long course at the UGA Romance Languages Department. Here is my website: https://diversitythroughdance.franklinresearch.uga.edu/

Fuad, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I promote diversity and inclusion and equity through Dance through my UGA tango club and my free bi-annual community event “Milonga Tropical” and my workshops (and courses) in “diversity through dance”

The most important think that I have created is a diverse community of dancers of all levels through:

1) my UGA Tango club open to the UGA and Athens community since 2006
https://www.facebook.com/groups/athenstangueros/

2) Milonga Tropical, a free event. I coordinate and co-organize with my tango dance partner, Stephanie Lynn, twice a year in town (Athens) thanks to grants.. Milonga Tropical is an artistically created performance dance and musical event celebrating the culture, language, music, dance and people of Latin America.. For more information https://diversitythroughdance.franklinresearch.uga.edu/milonga-tropical-1

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Reinventing my career. My journey transitioning from computer science engineering and business to Language and literacy Education and dance..

After more than 2 years into my PhD program, w)hen I was about to present/take my comps, which is a crucial step to become a PhD candidate, my committee chair got another job at another university. She sent me an e-mail saying I should pursue my PhD in Spanish (socio linguistics) at the Romance Languages Department because she did not see a future of professorship in the College of Education for me.. Most probably because she felt I was not ready to take my comps and she was not willing to handle such a burden from afar. The Irony is that my chair committee was the founder of a program/project funded by the U.S. Department of Education, designed to bring bilingual community members into the teaching profession..

It was devastating not only because that meant starting all over, again, but also the funding would dry up soon, ,But most devastating was the message “I am not good enough”

However, thanks to a my friend and mentor, Bernadette Musetti, I was able to get a new chair and graduate from the College of Education. And, ironically, I was also hired afterwards by the college as a lecturer for a year.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal or mission is to build a diverse connected community through the exploration of

1) Kynestetic Empathy – the idea that synchronous movement improves group cohesion. “If we move in sync we feel in sync”., And through movement/dance because movement is our raison d’etre. The brain evolved no to think or feel but to control movement.

2) the sensory faculty that shapes our social connections. “If, as Aristotle asserted, all living animals possessed the sense of touch, the hand was the bodily instrument that distinguishes the human from the animal, just as the faculty of reason differentiated men from beast.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://diversitythroughdance.franklinresearch.uga.edu/
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/athenstangueros
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/athenstangueros/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fuad-elhage-64ab387b/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@athenstangueros
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@athenstangueros