Rituals of Survival: A Queer, Embodied Praxis of Refusal and Reworlding

• In Event: Moving Toward Liberation: Somatic, Decolonial, and Queer Pedagogies in Dance Education

Abstract

Working in a queer, brown, bilingual body, I am repeatedly knocked off center by the genocidal logics of neoliberal, white institutions (Pirtle & Wright, 2021). In response, I enact rituals of survival—embodied, relational, and creative practices that refuse institutional logics that normalize harm. This paper draws on autoethnography, poetry, and dance to share vignettes of healing, disruption, and harm drawn from my experience working in public schools.

Grounded in Black feminist theory (Collins, 1986), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), and pedagogies of refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014), this work mobilizes somatic knowledge as method. I engage my body as archive, site of knowledge production, and mode of resistance—an outsider-within stance (Collins, 1986) that allows for critical insight into the systems that shape educational institutions. Through three movements—Healing, Disruption, and Harm—I explore how dance, poetic inquiry, and narrative become ritual practices that sustain survival while also envisioning liberatory educational futures.

The paper contributes to educational research by: (1) demonstrating how artistic, embodied practices can surface insights inaccessible through traditional textual methods; (2) theorizing refusal as a methodology grounded in lived experience; and (3) modeling research that integrates creativity, criticality, and care. Drawing from personal experience, the paper does not aim to generalize but to offer a situated epistemology that honors the messiness and complexity of being a queer educator of color in the U.S. public school system.

Aligned with AERA’s 2026 theme, this work unforget(s) histories of queer and trans* BIPOC survival and imagines alternative futures through somatic, poetic, and research-based praxis. It invites scholars to expand what counts as legitimate knowledge and who gets to produce it—offering survival itself as both a methodology and a horizon of collective liberation.

Author

• Aleta Brown, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill