Embodied Theory Lab is a platform that brings together disabled and non-disabled artists, academics and activists to think through theoretical concepts and social, political and cultural idea(l)s in ways that make space for embodied, uncodified, tacit and practice-based (as well as classic theoretical) knowledges.
Using crip communities’ lived experiences as a ‘body of knowledge’ (Siebers 2021) and a source of expertise, the project aims to conjure socialities, relationalities and shared temporalities premised on interdependence, response-ability and radical care. This will be achieved through a series of movement- and theory-based workshops facilitated by, and involving, disabled and non-disabled movement practitioners, activists and theorists.
Aims:
- Fostering dialogues and knowledge co-production between activists, artists, academics and the wider disabled community
- Amplifying the voices of the crip communities and foregrounding crip experience as a source of knowledge
- Making space for production, dissemination and legitimisation of non-verbal, non-codified knowledges
- Developing experimental and arts-based pedagogies and research methods that enable both academics and non-academics to “do” (i.e., generate, build, and practice) theory in embodied ways
The first workshop, titled "Care without paternalism", was held in May at LSE’s Shaw Library and was facilitated by award-winning choreographer Annie Hanauer and independent scholar and activist Dr Chrys Papaioannou. The second workshop, titled ‘Crip time, palliative time’, was held at Care Aesthetics & the Moving Bodies event at Durham University at the invitation The Visual & Material Lab and facilitated by Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds. The third workshop, ‘Crip time, deep time’, was held at The Sociological Review’s Undisciplining II conference in Salford September 2024 and co-facilitated by Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds and artist and scholar Dr Dominique Savitri Bonarjee. The workshops varied in length (from 1.5 to 7 hours), format and focus, but all involved moving, reading, thinking and theory-making through the body as well as through language.
If you want to hear about future events, email Jana at Y.M.Reynolds@lse.ac.uk.
Photos from the workshop
