Conference Agenda

This Dream Team explores possibilities posed by writing and movement. It builds on our previous work on academic writing otherwise (Taylor et al., 2025; Taylor & Benozzo, 2023). In considering writing’s movements as a multiplicitous connectivity of physical-affective-sensuous-materialities, we hails new writing imaginaries into becoming through movement. We are interested in writing and movement, writings’ movements, on the moves writing might make, and on how writing moves us.

Theoretically, we are inspired by Deleuze’s question: ‘It is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside all representations; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition ... of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind’ (Deleuze, 1994: 8). We work with this to enact posthumanist feminist materialist praxis that sets bodies, hands, thoughts in motion to imagine and do writing differently and, via this, to devise new ways of doing qualitative research.

We invite Dream Team participants to enact movement in various ways, forms and modes: physically, affectively, sensorially. The smallness of the movement doesn’t matter – it's what the movement does and enables i.e. writings’ disruptivities– that matters.

Writing’s movements are felt in hands and skin, in-on bodies-hearts-minds. Remembering to learn to write as children, our mothers’ hand holding ours and moving our hands to shape letters. Perhaps we recall learning to write as a form of regulation: marching unruly letters into ordered obscure sentences – learning to write in the right way. And the physicality of writing: holding a pen/pencil correctly; writing so much you get a hard bump (a callus) on the middle finger! Alternately, now, using fingers to type may make our hand-writing feel laborious, and the words on the page seem clumsy and not ours. We may also ponder generational styles of writing: cursive/ cursivo/ kaunokirjoitus.

We invite participants to engage in four hot spots (punto nevralgico) and a collective writing activity to explore and co-create the potentialities of writing’s movements, how the many folds of writing’s movements put our bodies in motion; and how micro-movements and micro-sensings traverse and shape us and/as the writing.

Our four hotspots:

Physical movement has become part of many scholars’ research practices, for example via walking methodologies (Springgay & Truman, 2018; Taylor, 2020; Walking as Research Praxis, 2025). Moving is not only a somatic entangled assemblage of human and non-human relational bodies, it also includes “the affective, the political, the institutional, and the biological” (Shildrick, 2015, p. 18). At this hotspot we invite you to write in movement heterotopia (Foucault, 1967), where writing spaces are made from layers of meaning and/or relationships to other places.

Do bodies write their stories with the shadows they cast, as statements of our always relational and always unfolding positionality? How are shadows writing themselves into our bodies? How is the world writing itself onto us, with us, without us through movement and shifting light-object formations? Like ancient monuments built to create symbolic visual effects during astronomical events, this hotspot is an invitation to think/engage/move/write with shadows and light to explore writings happenings in more-than-human ways, as a dance and immanent choreography that calls forth shapes, patterns, contours, colours.

Writing’s body movements. While we write, the legs move, the lungs breathe, the eyes shift between the computer keyboard, the fingertips touch pencils and keys, the organs produce sounds, the heart beats, the blood flows. The head sways. In a calm that is only apparent, the body writes, moves, and makes noise. The body grows tired; the organs grow excited. This hotspot is an invitation to produce thoughts on the body that moves-writes. It is an invitation to imagine what space we can give, in research, to the movements of the flesh.

How do we write without words? What happens when we try to? Is it possible? Or, what else becomes possible? There are forms of writing which don’t rely on words. Boone & Mignolo (1994) discuss how alternative forms of writing were destroyed by colonisation, rendering hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems of writing invisible and ‘primitive’. This hotspot invites participants to refuse the colonial gaze of writing by writing-moving without words, and to make marks/write with images, drawing, paint, and found materials other than pen or pencil.

Alongside the hotspots, participants are invited to a collective writing activity that aims at imagining-inventing an alphabet that is unrecognizable and nonrepresentational. How might we communicate in new ways through new individual-collective marks as they appear, materialize and do things on paper.