Short Abstract

This workshop explores embodied improvisation as a mode of collaborative future-making, cultivating creativity, relationality, and openness to possibility. It aligns with the conference theme by grounding collaboration in the body, as a medium for enacting and sensing into desired futures.

Description

Can we lean into uncertainty- together? How can we remain grounded, connected, and open within emerging (interdisciplinary) collaborations? And how might we reimagine our role as knowledge-makers in creating and leading others into emerging possibilities?

STS has long emphasized that knowing is not a purely rational or disembodied process, but one enacted through affect, gesture, spatial and material affordances, and tacit knowledge. This Making & Doing session responds to recent calls for an “embodied turn” in STS by offering tools for integrating embodied practices into knowledge production and collaborative/interdisciplinary knowledge-making processes (Smolka & Fisher, 2024; Harris, 2023; Smolka et al., 2020; Dumit & O’Connor, 2018), by suggesting embodied improvisation tasks to strengthen and explore the skills and resources we need to navigate emerging projects and collaborations.

Our workshop proposes a shift from reactivity to response-ability, and from adaptivity to con-forming: instead of coping, by adapting and reacting to complex and challenging presents, we suggest responding by cultivating the abilities to ground, interactively discover vibrant futures, and move through them, together. We do this through embodied improvisation as a mode of creative participatory inquiry, shifting between guided exercises and shared reflection. We ask you to: open into your embodied and inter-related experience; reflect on, and commit to interesting ideas; ask for others’ commitment, and stay open and curious to agreements and disagreements. As you explore, we hope you can be surprised, and allow the experience or the other to move you into unexpected directions.

This session contributes to the STS community and its research by experimenting with alternative modes of knowledge-making and sharing that integrate movement, affect, and reflexivity. It aligns with the EASST 2026 conference theme of exploring new forms of collaboration and resistance. Together, participants will co-inquire into the potential of integrating embodied know-how into research, as a key and pioneering collaborative-creative practice. Prior movement experience is not required.