NSCD Arts Citizenship: Moving & Belonging

I presented my retrospective empirical research on eco-somatic education and the pedagogical conditions that facilitate cultivation of response-ability.

This research examines the role of somatic arts in shaping felt connection and belonging to the natural world; a sense of ecological citizenship involving both rights and duties. Developing a relational praxis of care – what Donna Haraway terms "response-ability" – is crucial for socio-ecological reconciliation. Scholars across disciplines argue that disembodiment through modern hyper fixation on rationality and Western knowledge systems function to disempower individuals, obscure ecological interconnectedness, and block ability to act in countercultural ways that support social and environmental healing. Students of a practice-based minor in Somatic Sustainability, and students of the free-form embodied arts modality Amerta Movement were interviewed about the role of eco-somatic arts in shaping belonging and responsibility relating to human and more-than-human “societies”. Evidence suggests that eco-somatic arts practice can cultivate qualities of response-ability through intervening with ontological mind–body and human–nature dualisms; by re-sensitising artists to interdependence and reciprocity in both intellectual and embodied ways that reinstate subjective agency, collectivist kinship (ecological citizenship), and creativity.