Delicate Dance

“Dancing-with” is an anti-colonial methodology that I’ve been developing for a decade. But mostly during my PhD. Dancing-with embraces liveliness and non-rehearsal as practices that redistribute power. The sharing of vulnerability, real-time exploration creates a liminal space that breaks down a “knower” and “non-knower.” Real‑time exploration means challenging hierarchical models such as the Rankean model, where text and written documents are treated as the ultimate form of knowledge. This excludes neurodivergent people from dominant knowledge systems. Or what Paulo Freire would call the banking‑model, where the clerk‑teacher deposits information into a presumed empty student. My method, “dancing‑with”, dismantles the idea that knowledge is an object given to people in its fullest, it assumes the importance of every person in the room, it assumes a delicate dance, an alchemy that in itself is between. Time as fluid rather than linear. History lives with and within us. And potential is in the now. https://substack.com/@emmastarkey/note/c-354230725?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=86k3vq