About

Shavonne Coleman (she/they) is an applied theatre artist, fabulist, director, playwright, dramaturg, and educator whose work centers community-engaged storytelling. Detroit-born and Detroit-rooted, Shavonne maintains deep artistic and professional ties to the city, continuing to collaborate with youth, professional artists, and institutions while working locally and nationally. As an equity actor, their recent performance work includes the role of Lulu in Between Riverside and Crazy at the Detroit Repertory Theatre. Coleman is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, where their teaching, research, and creative practice span Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA), applied theatre, devised performance, and transformative learning. Their work emphasizes collaborative processes, liberatory pedagogy, and theatre as a tool for social change, particularly with young people and historically marginalized communities. They hold a BA in Theatre from Grand Valley State University and an MFA in Applied Drama/Theatre for the Young from Eastern Michigan University. Shavonne has performed as a storyteller and actor across applied, educational, and professional theatre contexts and has directed numerous youth and community-centered productions, including Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Incredible Jungle Journey of Fenda Maria, and Butt Naked. Previously, they served as Director of Theatre for Dialogue and Assistant Director for Transformative Learning at the University of Texas, where they led interpersonal violence prevention ensembles using Forum Theatre methodologies. Their work has been recognized nationally, including receiving the Ann K. Flagg Multicultural Award from the American Alliance for Theatre & Education (AATE). Shavonne has also directed youth performances internationally. Recent projects include adapting Your Name Is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow for Seattle Children’s Theatre and developing the original superhero play Cause Play as part of the TYA BIPOC Superheroes Project, commissioned by Spinning Dot Theatre and Eastern Michigan University. Cause Play was produced in April 2025. Shavonne’s research and creative practice encompass projects such as Uncovering Hidden and Erased Histories in Theatre for Young Audiences and The Epistemology of ‘Joy and Pain: It’s Like Sunshine and Rain', which examine theatre practice and performance as methodologies for community-centered creation and for challenging and expanding the theatrical canon. Shavonne also maintains an ongoing creative partnership with Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit, where they devise, adapt, write, direct, and coach pre-professional youth theatre, most recently All Hail, a contemporary retelling of Julius Caesar developed in collaboration with Detroit young artists.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Anthropology
• History
• Social Science
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Psychology
• Theology
• Archaeology
• Ancient history
• Religious studies

Selected publications

• Frictional Infrastructures: Navigating the Socio-Spatial Landscape of Second-Hand and Waste Tyres in Mega-City Lagos (Nigeria)

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Health and Wealth in Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity

  2025-09-02

  book-chapterSenior author

  Divine healing practices and more generally a concern with health and well-being in the here-and-now are defining trademarks of contemporary global Pentecostalism, probably even more so than glossolalia. Many Pentecostals across the globe have holistic understandings of health as including victorious living in general, and most conceive of health, wealth, illness and misfortune in terms of spiritual causality. Such attitudes towards health and wealth, combined with the dramatic staging of miraculous healings during services, often contribute to the minority status of Pentecostals vis-à-vis other Christians and have been a source of critical public scrutiny. However, a glance across different contexts of expression shows that Pentecostal understandings of healing in many cases facilitate processes of inculturation. This chapter sheds light on Pentecostal understandings of health, including its relation to wealth, and explores how such understandings are contributing both to the global appeal of Pentecostalism and to controversies surrounding it.

  PublisherDOI

• Making It Count: Pilgrimage and the Enumeration of Publics

  Religions · 2025-01-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  An activity that is widespread but rarely closely examined in studies of pilgrimage is the enumeration of pilgrims (and related visitors) to shrines and their environs. Such “biopolitics of hosting” can play a significant role in mobilising the religious imagination of shrine administrators, especially in contexts of apparently growing secularity. Number can be deployed by professional hosts to represent undifferentiated visiting publics in terms of spiritual possibility. In these terms, precision in statistics is likely to be less useful than figures that can be viewed through a distanced lens of potentiality. These ideas are developed through an examination of the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham, in eastern England.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Anthropological Approaches to Religion and Education

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Anthropology overlaps with numerous disciplines in its study of religion but has some distinguishing features. Like philosophy, it examines how people think and reason, but it is particularly concerned with how styles and idioms of thought may vary according to cultural context. Like theology, it is concerned with talk of gods and spiritual powers, but it does not assume the primacy of any single religious position, and nor does it privilege perspectives derived from religious authorities or texts. Like sociology, it looks for patterns in the organization of institutions, ideas, and hierarchies, but alongside its comparative dimension it emphasizes small-scale, intimate human relations more than some branches of social scientific research. However, anthropology has not always taken the form just described. The chapter outlines this epistemological and methodological distinctiveness, beginning with a very brief history of the discipline and its changing attitudes towards religion before moving to discuss its characteristic and contemporary approaches—and challenges—in teaching about religion.

  PublisherDOI

• Pilgrimage

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-09-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• On the Entanglements of Heritage—Afterword to the Special Issue Sacred Heritage: Religions and Material Culture

  Religions · 2025-02-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A sign of a productive sub-field is that it can develop ramifying links with other areas of research whilst retaining the distinctiveness that first brought it into being [...]

  PublisherDOI

• Pilgrimage in a Globalizing World

  Current History · 2024-10-31 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Whether on the Camino de Santiago or the Hajj, today’s pilgrims tread ancient routes of religious ritual, but their experiences are mediated by modern infrastructures and mentalities.

  PublisherDOI

• Heathfield Down: An Alternative Location for the Battlefield of Hastings, 1066

  International Journal of Military History and Historiography · 2024-05-08

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract The exact location of the Battle of Hastings remains a question of debate. We identify previously unknown 18 th and 19 th -century sources that locate the battle near Old Heathfield in East Sussex, ten miles north-west of Battle Abbey, on land once known as Heathfield Down and ‘Slaughter Common’. We analyse the relevance of the haran apuldran (‘Hoar Apple Tree’) in the ‘D’ text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as an original name for the battlefield and discuss the survival of this name in medieval deeds concerning a nearby place ‘Horeapeltre’. We consider the military and cultural reasons why the battle might have taken place near here and show that the haran apuldran was probably a military assembly point. Heathfield Down was a likely conflict area due to its communication links, topography and strategic location, and Harold being stationed here could explain why he was taken by surprise, according to English sources.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Possessing and being possessed by the past: on the ambivalences of heritage as religious return

  Cultural Studies · 2024-06-30 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper explores the politics of religious patrimony by comparing two cases where the heritagization of religious sites results in feelings of loss and estrangement rather than return and restoration. We show how shrines can function simultaneously as public and civic places of religious assembly but also as material and sensorial expressions of ambivalent forms of belonging and un-belonging – to the past, to a territory, to a religious denomination, to a domestic environment associated with childhood or previous generations. One case is of Greek Cypriots as they travel to a renovated monastery located in territory lost to them in 1974 after the island's division. Encounters with the monastery are inflected by a broader, uncanny feeling of reentering a landscape that is familiar yet also estranged, studded by former childhood homes and villages now inhabited by others. The other case follows the experiences of Roman Catholics as they engage with the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham in the English county of Norfolk. The site now embodies a fractured heritage and pilgrimage space that recalls spiritual, material and cultural loss extending beyond biographical memory into the time of the Protestant Reformation. In both cases, ambiguities of 'possession' are provoked by forms of heritage restoration that embody but also obliterate memory in ways deemed to be deeply problematic by some populations. We argue that possession in these terms has economic and legal associations, referring to ownership of places and things, but it also points to situations where people are filled with an abiding and at times obsessive sense of the continuing urgency of the unsettled past.

  PublisherDOI

• Aesthetics, Architecture, and Ambition

  2024-03-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The designation “megachurch” refers to grandiosity of scale. However, size can be manifested through numerous media, with different material affordances. This chapter explores the complex aesthetics of scale as it emerges not only in buildings, but also in visual, cartographic, and numerical expressions of megachurch practice. Historical and comparative frames are used to assess the distinctiveness of contemporary megachurches across religious landscapes ranging from Northern Europe to East Asia to West Africa. The overall argument is that “scalar ambition” is a feature not merely of megachurch buildings; it is a broader dimension of believers' engagements with each other and with the world at large.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Garbin

  University of York

  11 shared

• Gareth Millington

  University of York

  11 shared

• John Eade

  University of Roehampton

  10 shared

• Sondra L. Hausner

  9 shared

• Bob Simpson

  9 shared

• Marion Bowman

  8 shared

• Ruy Llera Blanes

  Centre for Research in Anthropology

  8 shared

• Evgenia Mesaritou

  University of Toronto

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• Ann K. Flagg Multicultural Award from the American Alliance…