Moving New Futures: Embodied Movement for a Just Society

Abstract

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.