1st Edition
Practicing Yoga as Resistance Voices of Color in Search of Freedom
Bringing together a diverse chorus of voices and experiences in the pursuit of collective bodily, emotional, and spiritual liberation, Practicing Yoga as Resistance examines yoga as it is experienced across the Western cultural landscape through an intersectional, feminist lens.
Naming the systems of oppression that permeate our lived experiences, this collection and its contributors shine a light on the ways yoga practice is intertwined with these systems while offering insight into how people challenge and creatively subvert, mitigate, and reframe them through their efforts.
From the disciplines of yoga studies, embodiment studies, women’s and gender studies, performance studies, educational studies, social sciences, and social justice, the self-identified women, queer, BIPOC, and White allies represented in this book present an interdisciplinary tapestry of scholarship that serves to add depth to a growing assemblage of yoga literature for the 21st century.
Part I: Invitations
1. Essential Questions for Inner and Outer Liberation
Cara Hagan
2. Towards a White Spiritual Antiracism
Jardana Peacock
Part II: Yoga, Self, and Community
3. Embodied Radical Healing through the Collective: A Black Lotus Autoethnography
Dominique A. Malebranche
4. Reclaiming Spaces, Reshaping Practices: Yoga for Building Community and Nurturing Families of Color
Amy Argenal and Monisha Bajaj
5. The City of Radical Love: A Philly Story of Oppression, Resistance, and Healing
Sheena Sood and Mari Morales-Williams
6. Body Science of Survivorship: Mapping the Neurological Impacts of Interlocking Systems of Oppression and Co-Designing Equitable Solutions Through Movement and Breath
Morgan Vanderpool
7. Pedagogy of Movement: Yoga in Migrant Projects from a Race and Class Perspective
Firdose Moonda
8. White Hygiene, White Womanhood, and Wellness in the United States
Rumya S. Putcha
9. Incomplete: Impeding the Settler Colonial Project through Yoga for Black Lives
Stephanie D. Hicks
10. Hozho Yoga: Indigenous Movements Illuminating Human and More-Than-Human Interconnections
Tria Blu Wakpa
11. Yoga Asana and the Performance of Gender in American Exercise
Cara Hagan
12. Embodying Liminality through Yoga: An Autoethnography Exploring the Spaces Between
Sanaz Yaghmai
Part III: Yoga in Educational Spaces
13. Yoga, Engaged Pedagogy, and the Process of Becoming: Explorations of a Socially Just Yoga Intervention
Kimberly Nao
14. White Teachers, Brown Yoga: Teacher Candidates Learning Yoga
Erin Adams, Sohyun An, Jillian Ford, and Sanjuana Rodriguez
15. Trials and Transformations: Ruminations of a Community College Yoga Teacher
Shyamala Moorty
16. Situating Girls of Color in K-12 Yoga Research: Reflections and Results from Studying an After School Yoga Program for At-Risk Youth
Michele Tracy Berger
17. Yoga and Arts: Positive Disrupters in the School to Prison Pipeline
Suzana Plaisant McCalley
18. Tending Communities: Yoga as an Integrative, Collaborative, and Transformative Practice
Narin Hassan
Biography
Cara Hagan is an assistant professor and scholar of dance studies at Appalachian State University. Hagan founded and facilitates the Boone, North Carolina-based organization, Small and Mighty Acts (SAMA). She is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of movement, digital space, words, contemplative practice, and community.
