In recent years, multiple intersecting pandemics have shaped how people move and access urban spaces, forcing a redefinition of borders—not only geographic, but also linguistic, racial, gendered, sexual, emotional, psychological, cultural, and even virtual (Walia, 2021). There exists pressing need to interrogate the very real and imagined borders of movement and exclusion, along with the technologies and practices that sustain them. This paper shares insights from a community-engaged ‘storydoing’ (Rodricks, 2020) research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), that explored the border stories of diasporic South Asians in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) using two different movement arts–– Kalarippayattu and Afro-Caribbean dance. Kalarippayattu, with its emphasis on martial grounding and internal discipline, and Afro-Caribbean dance, with its improvisational rhythm and legacy of collective resistance, offered distinct yet complementary embodied vocabularies for participants to engage personal, interpersonal and intergenerational border stories. Rather than framing movement arts as performance or output, this paper offers embodied cultural practice as an iterative and relational ‘living methodology’ - a way of storydoing (Rodricks, 2020) that is rooted in everyday textures of diasporic humanity. Thus, the body is not only a site of (un)learning, experience, and analysis (Khanmalek & Rhodes, 2020; Pineau, 2002) but also as a living archive for re/membering, re/connecting and re/imagining movement, internal and external, real and imagined. As de/colonial praxis (Bhattacharya, 2009), such embodied methodologies center cultural memory and collective care, which we posit is critical to unsettling dominant discourses of human intelligence.

Authors:
Dirk Rodricks, University of Toronto, Canada
Annalissa Crisostomo, University of Toronto, Canada
David Puvaneyshwaran, University of Toronto, Canada

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Dirk J. Rodricks is an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in Curriculum and Pedagogy with the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

David Puvaneyshwaran (he/him) is a PhD student at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. His research interests include exploring the effects of Theatre of the Oppressed with queer and racialized communities.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-puvan/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Puvaneyshwaran

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