Browsing by Author "Vinesett, Ava LaVonne"

Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between is a creative process-based interdisciplinaryinstallation and paper that conceptualizes storytelling as a practice of embodied memory recollection. This work focuses on viewing storytelling and land acknowledgement as necessary tools in the navigation of cyclical temporalities in the present, or what I have termed the In Between. Through the employment of ethnography, dance-based somatic practice Lettering, and oral interviews, I posit that first-person narratives work to combat the violence(s) of erasure and racial ventriloquism that occur when archiving Black life. By using a methodology of care, this project considers what is possible if Black history and thus, Black quotidian stories are treated and shared with care.

There is not enough space in this document to capture all that you have done in support of this work.

My Moving New Futures workshop uses improvisatory movement to help social justice practitioners—organizers, activists, civil rights lawyers, and others—imagine new possibilities for a just society. The workshop grew out of my own backgrounds in dance and social justice work. It has two major philosophical underpinnings: (1) the radical imagination necessary for prison-industrial complex abolition and (2) the growing body of scholarship showing that our entire bodies, not just our brains, produce thought. Facilitating the workshop for two separate groups of social justice practitioners, I recorded discussion portions and used a survey to gather data. Discussions and survey responses affirmed my hope that movement would be a source of new knowledge and imagination for social justice practitioners. After these two iterations, I performed a public lecture-demonstration in which I discussed the development of the workshop and results. In a co-creative process with practitioners, I will continue developing the workshop as a tool for their work.