Body-Centered Activism

Catalog description

Body-Centered Activism challenges students to engage their body as an instrument of exploration, self-awareness, and meaning making towards socio-cultural understanding, and social action. The course is based on the premise that "Discrimination, social inequality, and injustice are manifestations of our inability to make peace with the body, our own and others" (Taylor, 2018, p. 137). Individually and in community, students will acknowledge the embodied impact of intersecting identities, track their ancestral migration origins and the lived experience of trauma in displacement, and investigate the historical and institutional oppression of White Supremacy. The sympathetic nervous system's survival response-fight/flight/or freeze-and how that contributes to racial sorting, stigmatization, the invention of Whiteness with the fear of difference will be examined. Its counterpart-settling the body-and the capacity to shift perceptions will be practiced. Activism moves from the intrapersonal into the embodied realms of family, culture, and society, culminating with a proposal for Body-Centered Activism. As such, the body as a psychologically relevant phenomenon of power, privilege, and oppression is at the forefront of this inquiry.