Creating Healing from Crisis through Connection, Embodiment, and Narratives Workshops

We presented a set of two iterative workshops at the 2024 Local to Global Justice Forum and Festival and the 2024 Dimensions of Political Ecology conference hosted by the University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group.

How do our physical movement(s) create and strengthen communities of resistance? How do our embodied interactions affect ourselves, each other, our more-than-human kin and our relationships with place? Through our bodies we sense, know, and share life. This hybrid workshop was a generative space for interactive and movement-based collective inquiry. We aimed to gather diverse practitioners interested in exploratory, playful engagement and radical proprioception. Through this process, we acted to resist the contradictions that form our current crisis contexts.

We situate embodied knowledge in storytelling; narrative work is essential to just cultural transformations amidst crisis. We invite you to draw connections between your research and embodiment work, and reflect on our collective vulnerability and precarity as we create our own resistance movement(s) to nurture stories of hope, abolition, mutual aid, solidarity, and radical care.

Our action to connect resistance advocacy with body-based movements builds a powerful autonomy around devastating colonial realities. By practicing “sentipensar” or “feel/thinking”, we can more profoundly process some of the harm, desperation, and grief accompanying resistance efforts. This further enables collective embracing, containing, and relinquishing in cathartic ways such as dance, drumming, balance, partner acrobatics, or breathing. We hope this deep acknowledgement of plural realities creates space for individual and collective reflection and healing.

Our specific aims were to:

1. Define crisis, how it manifests in your body, how this relates to sense of place. 

2. Understand connections in literature between narrative, movement, place, and resistance. 

3. Participate in group activities using movement to express ourselves and create narrative(s) about our experiences with crisis. 

4. Reflect on the use of embodied practices to understand the literature and applications to future work.

Collaborators: Orlene Carlos, Lulu Castro, Lívia Ribeiro Cruz, Sophie Neems

"Moving Through" Deep Adaptation: An Interactive Installation Considering Futures through EcoGrief

I co-developed an interactive workshop on grief, climate, and post-collapse futures using collaborative collage methods and reflexive prompts for academic audiences at the 4S-EASST conference in Amsterdam in Summer 2024.

How can we seriously contend with the futures that will result from the polycrises we forecast, from climate change, biodiversity loss, global pandemic, and economic collapse? What challenges do we experience as we begin to think through deep adaptation to climate change? How does the task of reimagining a socio-ecological context feel for us as researchers? Despite studying these phenomena in depth, academic disciplines fail to encourage researchers to "deeply adapt" beyond surface-level mitigation efforts (Bendell, 2018; Selwyn, 2021). We aimed to disrupt the vision of future-as-continuation-of-present and push researchers to contemplate how they could adapt their work in the context of alternative futures (Dator, 2019) through an interactive installation. Participants first documented a project they are working on, what motivates their research and their desired outcomes. Next, we introduced a visual collage experience that prompted participants to think through alternative visions of the future if current socio-ecological threats are realized, inviting participants to contribute to our perspectives of what changes the future may bring by contributing to a collaborative collage. Finally, we hoped to delve into what emotions reimagining the future evoked in participant. In particular, we aimed to hold space for participants' feelings of ecological and anticipatory grief (Cunsolo, 2017; Barnett, 2022). We chose to focus on an emotional outcome to problematize dominant research evaluations which elevate productivity. We also aimed to create a collaborative experience through asynchronous collaging to acknowledge the centrality of relationships to imagining change (Finn & Wylie, 2021).

Collaborators: Risa Schnebly, Leah Friedman, Lívia Ribeiro Cruz

From Páramo to Huerta: Water as a site of autonomy and community identity in Bogotá

Participatory photography sometimes yields striking results. Check out some highlighted photos and more details about our photovoice study in Bogotá, Colombia in 2023. I led this research project in collaboration with Arraigo, a trans-locality platform for local people affected by displacement due to risk adjudications, and was supported by the NSF-IRES Resiliencia Urbana en Latinoamerica (RULA) grant.

Our work was displayed in the Museo de la Ciudad Autoconstruída, a branch of the Museum of Bogotá. See photos here of our exhibit. We also presented our initial findings at the 5th Latin American Conference of Political Ecology in December 2024.

Co-investigators: Alejandra López, Maicol Ramírez, Eduardo Vargas

RULA-IRES collaborators:

ARRAIGO / Local Informality and Resilience Laboratories - Local Labs Bogotá

• Ciudad Bolívar Local Lab: Mariela Caro, Maicol Ramírez, Alejandro Jiménez

• San Cristóbal Local Lab: Mariela Celis, Luis E. Morales Ruíz, Alejandra López

• Usme Local Lab: Jose O. Calderón, Carlos Torres, Luz D. García, Yenny Buitrágo

La Salle University - Carlos Agudelo, Carlos Ramirez, Paola Cifuentes, Carlos Sabogal, Environmental Engineering Laboratory

NATURA - Marta Berbés, Elizabeth Cook, Matt Feagan, Nancy Grimm

Urban Informality and Resilient Futures Group /UPC/UnescoSost /Recnet - Duván López

Writing Indigenous Water Stories

I was PI on a USGS 104(b) Small Research Grant that led us to teach AIS 494/598: Writing Indigenous Water Stories. In November 2024, I gave a University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center webinar with one of my undergraduate students Angelina Mann. We share the goals, approaches, and outcomes of the grant activities, for example:

Course Goals/Objectives

• Socioemotional development - developing voice

• Going through whole writing and pre-publishing process

• Bringing together empirical data and story in a publishable opinion piece

Learning Outcomes

By taking this course, students will possess the knowledge and skills to effectively:

• Research, develop, and compose a written opinion piece about a water story using critical analysis and original ideas.

• Understand ways audiences form opinions and how “experts” can influence and sometimes manipulate public opinion.

• Understand how op-eds inform conversation within and among Indigenous communities about water protection, use, management and sovereignty.

• Appreciate the ethical considerations related to writing and publishing opinions pieces including research ethics and data sovereignty.

• Use interdisciplinary community-based research methods.

• Explore Indigenous storytelling related to water in the Southwest and Indigenous communities, histories, and futures. 

“Min-Venditti and Mann explored the cultural and spiritual connections with water of Arizona’s 22 Native Tribes and the sharing of Tribal water stories. Their study included hosting a course on research development and writing support in which students and community members gathered weekly to research, write, and publish opinion pieces (op-eds) in local and Tribal news outlets. This work helps illuminate the stories of members of marginalized communities and the disruption to river systems resulting from urban development.”

Co-PIs: Liliana Caughman, Jerome Clark

Co-instructors: Liliana Caughman, Jerome Clark, Michelle Hale

Water Epistemologies Living Archive: A Repository for Arts, Sustainability, and Water Relations

The Water Epistemologies Living Archive is an interdisciplinary, evolving repository that centers on diverse cultural, ecological, and relational perspectives on water. Engaging researchers across the arts, sciences, and technology studies, the archive will document and share water-related narratives from coastal and island communities, fostering dialogue and innovation about water resilience and sustainability. Supported by ASU and global partners, this project challenges traditional frameworks for water study by integrating storytelling, media, and collaborative research. The archive’s dynamic framework will expand over time, sparking new partnerships. The project contributes to the development of inclusive and culturally resonant solutions to planetary health.

Co-PI: Meredith Hoy

“Be/longing outside the box” Performance

I shared my debut performance at the “Searching for Self, Creating Community” Transborder Queer Performativity Student Showcase in May 2024. This focused on my experience as an intersectional diasporic Korean-American reflecting on my many experiences crossing borders—national, oceanic, disciplinary, and beyond—and contending with lingering effects of adolescent interpersonal trauma. I end with an invitation for the audience to contribute a single word that can inspire healing.

“Embodiment Elsew/here” Workshop

I led a workshop at the Intersections of Civil, Critical, and Creative Communication (I-4C) Collective Performance Retreat in Tempe, Arizona on May 18, 2024. The I-4C Collective mobilizes resources from rhetoric, performance, and critical-cultural studies to explore the intersections of civil, critical, and creative communication.

I presented an interactive workshop primarily based on perception-expression activities, including physical exercises, brief discussion, and prompts. We spent the first segment warming up our breath, our voice, our bodies, and our situatedness within The Empty Space theater. After this, we journaled about how the experience felt and shared key insights. Then we joined in exploring collective movement based on the prompt of what that means in the larger framework of global change, directed at building resilience and healing the multi-layered crises we find ourselves in today. This movement practice is also often understood as movement meditation. We closed out the workshop with a reflection circle.

Envisioning Water Resilient Agricultural Futures in the Colorado Basin: Participatory Exploratory Scenario Planning across 3 basin states

I worked as a researcher with Arizona State University’s Arizona Water Innovation Initiative and two units of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and the Consortium for Scenario Planning, on an Exploratory Scenario Planning for Water Resilient Agriculture Project to help rural areas address uncertain economic, social, and climate trends around water and agriculture.

In the American West, rural farming communities are grappling with the impacts of changes in water availability while attempting to balance a multitude of community and economic needs. Because of agriculture’s economic and cultural importance, the impacts of reduced water supplies in these communities can be far reaching.

In a series of community-based workshops, the project is working in collaboration with local partners in three unique, agricultural regions in Colorado River Basin States:

• Mesa County, Colorado, home of the agriculturally rich Grand Valley and the Grand River, is experiencing population growth and urbanization pressures that threaten the region’s agricultural heritage and critical habitats, stretching over-allocated water supplies.

• Sulphur Springs Valley in Cochise County, Arizona has a deep-rooted farming and ranching heritage, but the region is reliant on groundwater in two basins facing significant declines and communities are confronting challenging decisions around groundwater management and the paths forward.

• The San Juan River Basin in New Mexico supports numerous rural agricultural communities, and Tribal Nations oversee vast land and water resources, but the San Juan River is experiencing the impacts from climate change and drought. Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities are experiencing significant change from climate, energy, and economic transitions.

A video of the first community workshop experience in Grand Junction, Colorado can be viewed here.

DRYLAB2023: Public Water Conservation Challenge

We ran a 30-day Instagram challenge social media campaign about water conservation, using a combination of photos I’ve taken, prompts about science, culture, and history. In the Fall of 2023, the near future of water scarcity is upon us. Rather than an imagined near future, we have our real lives, now, that can be reframed in relation to our water usage. We challenge you to join us for 30 days as we undertake a new challenge.

In the Summer of 2017, 8 ASU students and 2 ASU faculty undertook drylab2023, an art-science experiment in extreme experiential learning. For 30 days, they committed to living in the middle of the Mojave desert on 4 gallons of water a day (the average daily usage in the Phoenix area being 80-100 gallons/day) and to eat a water-wise diet (only fruits, grains and vegetables that could be grown and processed in the desert southwest with very little to no water).

Collaborators: Marco Janssen, Adriene Jenik, Krista Davis, Shalae Flores, Willa Gibbs, Molly Koehn, Valerie Lyons, Cydnei Mallory, Sydney Rood, Dr. Tekola

Conversation with water(s) / “La conversación del agua” Photo Storytelling Installation

I presented photography from my research in Bogotá at the 5th Congress for Latin American Political Ecology in December 2024.

I co-created and curated a photography installation at the conference venue art exhibit, exploring comparative water relationships between Bogotá, Colombia (photovoice project) and Delfim Moreira, Brazil (archival photos). The photos, descriptions, and collage are important forms of visual storytelling, representing the complexity inherent to water issues around the world, and in this case specifically in South America. They highlight the struggles and the joy of these human-water relationships and provoke inquiries about the political and power dynamics behind them.

Collaborator: Lívia Ribeiro Cruz

Humanización de datos/Data Humanization Workshop

I co-led a workshop with two ASU faculty entitled “Humanización de datos / Data Humanization”. This involved coordinating, presenting, facilitating dialogue and in small groups, brainstorming, and co-creating numbers, gestures, statements, and the logistics of an artistic performance. The goal is to share a skill, practice, or form of analysis with participants. With the Data Humanization process, we reaffirm the connection of data to human scale and context to help us create a relationship with concrete data. The process is simple, easy to understand, can be participated in by non-artists, and can be customized to include people of all abilities. Our workshop helped people learn this methodology and provided them with the tools they need to integrate Data Humanization into their own work.

This anti-capitalist / anti-colonial arts workshop was at at the Autonomías en Práctica / Autonomies in Practice gathering in Spring 2023 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México. We also presented this at the ASU School of Sustainability seminar in Fall 2023.

Co-facilitators: Adriene Jenik, Brian Grant, Lívia Ribeiro Cruz, and David Manuel-Navarrete

Emotional knowledge and “feel-thinking”/sentipensar as resistance/Conocimiento afectivo y el sentipensar como resistencia workshops

I co-led two sessions focused on embodied and affective knowledge for resistance inviting scholars, activists, and artists at the 5th Congress for Latin American Political Ecology in December 2024.

How do our ways of thinking, being, feeling and relating with nature create and strengthen communities of resistance? How do our embodied interactions affect ourselves, each other, our more-than-human kin and our relationships with place? Through our bodies we sense, know, and share life. This session promoted a generative space for interactive, expansive, and imagination-based collective inquiry. By practicing “sentipensar”, representing the inseparability between feeling-thinking-and-acting, which characterizes relational ontologies of worlds in relation, and further radical methodologies, we can more profoundly process some of the harm, desperation, and grief accompanying resistance efforts. Affective and embodied ways of knowing, many passed down from ancestral traditions, enable collective embracing, containing, and relinquishing in cathartic ways such as through dance, drumming, balance, partner acrobatics, or breathing.

We situated embodied knowledge as epistemic disobedience: decolonizing knowledge creation and propagation is resistance. We invited contributions to nurture stories of hope, abolition, mutual aid, solidarity, and radical care and that: draw connections between research and embodiment work; employ arts-based, audiovisual, or expressive methods; or reflect a centering of "sentipensar”, Indigenous ways of knowing, and/or further diversities of thought and understanding. This deep acknowledgement of plural realities created space for individual and collective reflection and healing.

Co-facilitator: Lívia Ribeiro Cruz