Conference Agenda

This workshop opens with embodied stillness, attending to breath, gravity, and the sensory interface of skin and environment. From this initial attunement, participants are invited to consider how the body is always entangled within material, social, and environmental relations. The session examines movement in common as a site for cultivating relational awareness, sensitivity, and generosity between human and more-than-human presences. In the context of escalating global crises, it positions movement as a means of engaging with the urgencies of our time, offering embodied, dialogic strategies for fostering care and cooperation across difference.

Context and Rationale:

Movement-based research can actively and collaboratively engage people in shaping more liveable futures. Through embodied behaviours and tacit negotiations its relational and participatory nature is uniquely positioned to work across difference, language, and culture. This work choreographs connections between bodies by attending to relationships with the spaces and socio-cultural contexts around them, developing awareness of bodily borders and boundaries and collaborative working practices between humans and the material world that present opportunities to behave ‘otherwise’ (Akomolafe 2022).

Guided by new materialist (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013) and post-qualitative approaches (Manning, 2016; St. Pierre, 2011), the workshop treats movement as an emergent, co-constituted process rather than a representation of fixed ideas. Bodies are not discrete, self-contained entities but dynamic nodes in a web of relations, constantly intra-acting with more-than-human presences that co-shape our experience.

Research Questions:

• What do we know through the body that cannot be accessed otherwise?

• How are tacit negotiations initiated and sustained across collective movement?

• How might embodied attunement offer tools for education, mediation, and civic dialogue?

• What can movement reveal about our shared vulnerability and interdependency with human and other-than-human worlds?

These provocations connect with the conference’s call to harness the strengths, synergies, and transformative practices that emerge in spaces of interconnectedness, shared vulnerability, and hope.

Workshop Structure:

The 90-minute session will unfold in two movements:

1. Inside – attuning and negotiating

We will work through relational movement scores that explore proximity, distance, shared rhythm, and collective decision-making. Participants will attend to micro-gestures—weight shifts, hesitations, accelerations—developing embodied awareness of the tacit negotiations that underpin collective life.

2. Outside – mapping relations in and out of place

The practice will spill into the streets of Athens, where participants will undertake embodied mapping—a mobile, sensory documentation of the city’s space-time mattering. We will notice how material surfaces, and temporal flows invite or disrupt movement. Using paper and pencil, participants will record textures and traces of relation. These experiential maps will then act as a blueprint score for a final group improvisation when we return inside.

Theoretical and Methodological Contribution:

The workshop aligns with the conference’s commitment to multimodal, experiential, and embodied ways of knowing. Rather than seeking closure or definitive answers, the workshop generates conditions for polyphonic dialogue and embodied sense-making, aligning with the conference’s aim to foster transformational change, rehearsing embodied ways of being and doing that gesture towards more inclusive and equitable futures in the present (Machado De Oliveira, V. (2021). The session contributes to a growing movement within qualitative research that embraces embodied, arts-based, and relational practices as vital tools for shaping the futures we will inhabit together.

Towards the end of the session, participants will be invited to submit their notes, drawings and documentary evidence to form an experimental embodied writing collective to valorise the session outcomes. We will explore experimental approaches to communicating and representing our lived experiences encountered in situ through digital AI. Exploring how to then respond to this virtual iteration in the material world we will consider where this speculative fabulation (Truman 2018) might take us as we engage in an iterative process in which live and virtual embodied experiences inform one another in an exponential loop.

References:

Akomolafe, B. (2018, June 18). The otherwise: What must we protect? Bayo Akomolafe Blog. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/the-otherwise

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity.

Machado De Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.

Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.

St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post-qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (4th ed., pp. 611–625). SAGE.

Truman, Sarah (2018) SF! Haraway’s Situated Feminisms and Speculative Fabulations in English Class, Studies in Philosophy and Education, no. 38, 31–42.