ABSTRACT

Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics.

With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, including practice-based research in the arts, especially in performance and dance studies, critical theory, ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledges, material feminist critique, quantum field theory, and new phenomenologies. Practice pages are shorter chapters that provide readers a chance to engage creatively with the ideas presented across the collection. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that brings together work in performance as research, phenomenology, and dance/movement; this is one of its significant contributions to the area of ecosomatics.

The book will be of interest to anyone curious about matters of embodiment, ecology, and the environment, especially artists and students of dance, performance, and somatic movement education who want to learn about ecosomatics and environmental activists who want to learn more about integrating creativity, the arts, and movement into their work.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

Locating Geographies of Us

part I|119 pages

Enworlding, Rewilding, Decentering, Transing/Pluraling, Performing, Attending to, Dancing

chapter 1|19 pages

A Critical Ecosomatics

Cultivating Awareness and Imagination

chapter 4|29 pages

Material/Material

Thousandfold Somas and Poetry of Emergence

chapter 6|23 pages

Shaky Islands and Rising Seas

Dancing Entanglements in the Global South

part II|81 pages

Horse, Lion, Queer Animal, Skin

chapter 7|21 pages

Crittercal Somaticity

Rewilding Our Horse Senses

chapter 8|25 pages

Moving with Cats

chapter 9|19 pages

Embodying Islands

Ecosomatics and the Transnational Queer

part III|45 pages

Tree, River, Carbon, Stone

chapter 11|6 pages

Practicing with Trees

chapter 12|17 pages

Fearless Belonging and River-Me

chapter 14|10 pages

Feel the Carbon under Your Footprint

Indigenous Approaches to Grounding

part IV|89 pages

Place, Plasma, Pluriverse, Potato

chapter 15|15 pages

My Place Is a Chiasmatic Dance

chapter 16|8 pages

Cosmic Plasma Echoing in (Our) Place

chapter 17|20 pages

Languaging Body by Field

Ecoproprioception

chapter 18|8 pages

Outdoor Dances

Meditations on Loss in the Finger Lakes and Beyond

chapter 19|17 pages

Awe and Empathy