Event

In this workshop, our bodies are the vehicles for our learning experience. Drawing on our own encounters (directly or indirectly) with punitive and carceral systems, we go inward to meditate on how we have ingested these structures, and sideways to evaluate how they have come to permeate and inform our behaviors towards one another. Caught in an increasingly polarising moment, we ask how can we move beyond the splitting of the mind/body and its expression in our movement struggles and pedagogical practices?
The body is a site that holds immense knowledge and operates similarly to a diapason; when struck, it resonates a precise continuous pitch and emits a particular sonic tone once the high overtones fade out. The knowledge remains in the diapason and is reactivated every time it comes in contact with an object; in the case of carceral systems, it strikes our bodies-diapasons to the point of modifying its shape and our interactions with each other and the world.

Aims:
1. Hold space to identify and name carceral systems and somatic memory
2. Naming punitive, reformist and abolitionist ways of being in the world
3. Name and find resonance in theories allowing us to sense-make beyond carceral systems

Activities:
1- Grounding and meditation exercise
2- What is a carceral system?
3- How does carcerality show up for us? (lists of carceral examples)
BREAK
4- Self and co-regulation 101 + tools
5- Citing somatic theories of carcerality and abolition
BREAK
6- Somatic exercise on reform and abolition
7- Discussion
8- Conclusion