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 ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳’s Shaw Library and was facilitated by award-winning choreographer and independent scholar and activist . The second workshop, titled ‘Crip time, palliative time’, was held at event at Durham University at the invitation and facilitated by Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds. The third workshop, ‘Crip time, deep time’, was held at ’s conference in Salford September 2024 and co-facilitated by Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds and artist and scholar . 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
