[3] From 2001 to 2004, Cox served as a director of a Detroit homeless shelter for young women called Alternatives for Girls, where she did her fieldwork while completing her PhD in anthropology at the University of Michigan.
[4] As part of her work, Cox used dance, poetry, and music to reach out to young women and offer creative outlets of expression.
[5] In 2005, Cox created the BlackLight Project for the residents of the shelter who wanted to expand their creative experimentation with music and dance to communicate their personal experiences.
[4] During the BlackLight Project which received the Kellogg Foundation grant, Cox helped shelter residence to write down, communicate, and connect their personal stories.
[5][6] Cox touts her experience directing the shelter and the BlackLight Project as inspiration for her book, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015) that won several awards including the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and a 2016 Victor TurnerBook Prize in Ethnographic Writing.
[3] In addition to her work as an anthropologist, Cox is also a dancer and choreographer who once performed and toured with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DHT).
[5][7] She dedicated both her PhD dissertation and book Shapeshifters to her sister, Jennifer, whose life was infused with the stories of the young women she encountered at the Detroit shelter.
When Cox was given the option to graduate yearly in 1992 because of her extra college credits, she opted instead to study for a semester at the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH), the first black ballet company.
Marginalized Black Girls and the Performance of Respectability, an ethnography that outlined and examined the narratives of the young women she encountered during her fieldwork at the Detroit shelter.
[13] Aimee Cox is a fellow for the Black Atlantic Ecologies project at Columbia's Center for the Study of Social Difference.
The project considers how Black experiences with peril, punishment, and premature death can provide a rubric for futurity in environmental collapse.
[15] Cox was a faculty fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, holding an interactive ritual performance there.
Based on her work in a homeless shelter, Cox explores how young Black women move around the social conditions that restrict them, a process called shapeshifting.