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Volume 15, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 1757-1871
  • E-ISSN: 1757-188X

Abstract

This article analyses my work for the digital storytelling archive Humanizing Deportation, which documents the human consequences of deportation, as well as the contact improvisation technique I co-developed for these stories. offers a way of disseminating narratives of deportation by authors in Mexico but also reveals how their voices resonate in different body-minds in California. One story in particular, ‘Tireless Warrior’ by Esther Morales (2017), clearly affirms the narrator’s connectedness to networks of care that are limited and fragile, enduring and adaptable and that entangle us all. Esther’s story demonstrates how the experience of witnessing can reach beyond the individual self, moving us past passive spectatorship to an individual narrative as a collective experience that implicates witnesses as viscerally response-able. digital stories of deportation can thus become a reciprocally humanizing experience that amplifies both speakers’ and listeners’ capacity to affect and be affected.

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2023-12-21
2026-04-12

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/content/journals/10.1386/jdsp_00107_1
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Moving-with stories of deportation: Witnessing as visceral response-ability
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 15, 231 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00107_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jdsp_00107_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jdsp_00107_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): affect; care; contact improvisation; digital storytelling; embodiment; implication; migration; spectatorship

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