Living Justice Project Time Capsule
The Living Justice Project (LJP) is a collaborative, ethnographic project addressing the central question: What does it look, sound, and feel like to live (towards) justice in everyday life?
Collaborators
LJP is comprised of 54 participant-collaborators and two coordinators/researchers (or 56 total collaborators)
LJP collaborators are practitioners, students, and/or teachers of embodied social justice (ESJ),with most working as artists, facilitators, organizers, restorative justice practitioners, healers, scientists, social workers, dancers, policy advisors, teachers, meditation guides, and/or care-practitioners, to name just a few.
Collaborator demographics: 19 Black, 9 Latinx and/or Indigenous, 4 Asian/Middle Eastern, and 22 white; 44 cis-gender female, 4 trans and/or nonbinary, and 4 cis-gender male collaborators. Ages ranging from 25 to 72 years.
Methods
01
Living Justice Project is designed as a collaborative, participatory project
It is grounded in research justice
02
LJP embraces the understanding that we are all ethnographers
What the project became and will become is dependent on all of us.
Embodied Social Justice Timeline
Why & When
Gathering momentum in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, as well as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 (among other global, national, and local events), the practices and communities surrounding ESJ began to grow exponentially in the U.S. and internationally between 2020 and the present. ESJ here became increasingly visible as well as accessible via podcasts, social media communities, and a growing genre of remote workshops offered by existing institutions as well as newly formed organizations
Themes
ESJ, very broadly, includes a range of healing modalities, also referred to as “politicized somatics”* (link to somatics def/quotes?): “Somatics can remind us that we are human, connected to a much wider fabric of life. Objectification of others and disconnection from the land and our living environments require us to numb, separate, and dissociate. Sadly, we as a species are fairly good at this. Not feeling ourselves allows us to not feel others. Opening to our own senses, perceiving, and aliveness allows us to develop and remember our empathy and interdependence.”
Visit our Themes page to walk through our Nature Sway.
Becoming more aware of injustice as we move towards justice.
Aspirational politics/politics of the future, grounded in the past.
In relation to temporality, how this project really demonstrates that “ESJ” 2020-2022 constitute(d/s) an emergent field that overlaps with many other fields and practices that y’all were already doing, how it served as an inspiration beyond ”the rooms” of the workshops.
What it means to face oppression within one’s personal and familial and cultural history, depending on social location, the embodied experience of being called in: what it means to become vulnerable, what it means to “act”.
How do we connect across differences in social location in a way that doesn’t erase our differences but appreciates them.