Gentle Gestures: critical engagement towards counter hegemony

Gentle Gestures’ is a term, signal, mark, motion, movement of the body, a research subgroup, a conversation that invites inquiry into submerged, fugitive practices of gentle change beyond the now increasingly strained ideas of practices of care. Researching across art, creative practices, pedagogical inquiry, practice-based research, and critical theory, Gentle Gestures aims – through a loosely held collective of people thinking alongside each other – to explore ways knowledge production is embodied, pleasurable, multiple, empowered, navigated, inflicted, and shared. This can take the form of performativity of pedagogy or the performativity with pedagogy: being body / bodily material / body as liminal space / a process of becoming / to push up / to push against / rub against/ rub with. As a wider research theme, it is as much about locating a theoretical framework or practice method as it is about developing embodied propositions as artist-pedagogical value-(un)structures. This special issue is rooted in interests and approaches which seek to offer an expansive container for researchers working in kinship or proximity to it.