Embodied Practices for Inclusive and Anti-Oppressive Teaching

This virtual workshop led by Anita Chari, Associate Professor of Political Science and Provost's Teaching Fellow, will support attendees to participate in equity and inclusion work based on trauma-informed pedagogies, embodied nervous system practices, and paradigms of embodied social justice. Racism and colonization are not limited to individual attitudes, biases and prejudices. They are structurally anchored in the forms of denial, disembodiment, and historical erasure that permeate most of our institutions–educational, socio-political, and economic. Our bodies are a crucial site for working with this disease of forgetting that we see in our society, because the body is where we hold racialized trauma, both individually and collectively. Embodied practices are key to cultivating anti-racist and anti-oppressive environments and will support participants to work with dynamics of historical and contemporary intersectional oppression at a personal and professional level. This workshop empowers participants with a trauma-informed approach to equity and inclusion as it applies to decolonizing the classroom space in your work as educators and scholars.  

You’ll learn: 

• What is a double bind and what does it have to do with working with intersectional oppression. 
• How to create spaces of accountability for racial injustice within your classroom or department so that BIPOC and those from underrepresented groups (whether that includes yourself, colleagues, or your students) are not left having to hold for the fallout of deconstructing privilege. 
• Practice skills for holding healthy boundaries along with learning new ways of listening and engaging in conversations about race and intersectional oppression. 
• Learn how to perceive your own and others’ window of tolerance for learning and group discussion in the midst of power dynamics.

Contact information: Anita Chari, anitac@uoregon.edu