Conference Agenda

This presentation draws on feminist new materialist educational research and stems from the authors’ long-term engagements in developing creative praxis for addressing gender and power in peer cultures with pre-teen children. The authors discuss a two-day creative workshop for children engaging these themes with diverse arts-based activities, focusing particularly on the making of digital-embodied animations that brought children to explore movements, gestures and postures in articulating their hopes, desires, and demands related to gender and power. By providing three glimpses into the making of the animations and the possibilities and trouble of inviting bodies along, the paper discusses digital-embodied praxis as an affirmative and generative way of exploring gendered childhoods and to amplify children’s visions for more capacious gender relations.

This presentation starts with the speculation that the body is more assemblage than form, where children move as molecules of the community, each gesture carrying the transductive potentiality of the whole. Working with a choreographer and two visual-sound artists, we explore how movement bodies difference and diversity, with an implicit focus on the relational ontologies of gender. Drawing on a six-month engagement with 48 children (aged 9–11) in two South Wales primary schools, we trace how, as the virtual meets the actual, the body becomes more-than-one (Manning 2013), and how gestures, voices, and images recompose a collective body as they unfold across the relational milieus of classrooms, halls, and a community theatre. Movement, we suggest, becomes philosophy in action, each movement a proto-political citizen of a community to come, where every body matters.

This diffractive account of events is drawn from field notes from over one hundred hours of posthuman ethnography focusing on neurodiversity in nursery and reception classrooms in a school in north England. While attuning to patterns of activity inspired by Erin Manning, Gail Boldt and Daniel Stern’s Forms of Vitality, my attention was drawn to Eden, aged 4, who is non-speaking. They spent considerable time repeatedly walking backwards slowly down a grassy incline. They appeared to be carefully sensing the forces of gravity and steepness that go through the leg, foot, torso and eyes; in complex experiments with the multiple counteracting forces required to constantly adjust balance to stay upright. By thinking with the physiology of walking, I elaborate Eden’s unique bodymind (Murris, et al. 2016, p. 7) form of expression as a relational and productive example of what more a body can do (Goodley et al., 2016; Lenz Taguchi et al., 2016)’ inviting other ways to organise schools. 

This presentation explores what movement-oriented knowledges (Nail, 2024) make possible for generating well-becomings as an immanent mode of quiet activism (Helne, 2021; Pottinger, 2017). I entangle with two questions: What can a body do when held In the not-knot of post-(not post)Covid? How might ontologically art-ful praxis help generate modes of well-becoming? Moving theoretically with posthuman, feminist materialist and post-qualitative approaches, and with the methodological aesthetic of image-text riffs (Taylor & Fairchild, 2025), I outline a theory-praxis re/compos(t)ing that reframes well-being via relational, curious and creative practice-ings for situated knowledge-ings and becoming-otherwise (Haraway, 1988; Taylor, 2021) to contest the individualized, corporatized, institutional bureaucratization of well-being.

In this presentation, I introduce ‘Bog Somatics’, an experimental movement and somatic practice developed over the past two and a half years. I situate this practice within Irish dance education and peatland preservation, proposing that creative engagement with landscape offers critical insights in our late-capitalist, climate-change context. In Ireland, bogs and peat are deeply tied to national identity, family life, and industry, while also central to contemporary climate debates. Drawing on the materiality of peat, partially decomposed plant matter formed in waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions. I explore how bog ecologies shape embodied practice and reimagine the interrelations of body, land, and history.