Dancing Carceral Abolition WG (Exploratory Working Group)

Co-Chairs: Imani K. Johnson ([email protected]), Laura McTighe ([email protected]), and Hannah Schwadron ([email protected])

Dancing Carceral Abolition WG is a collective of DSA movement scholar-artists dedicated to dance as a form of direct action, healing, critical inquiry, and abolitionist praxis. We believe in the power of the body to disrupt systemic oppression, challenge the carceral state, act as an interpretive lens, and imagine and enact new worlds. By merging scholarship and practice, we invite members whose multi-format and/ or interdisciplinary work emphasizes movement histories of liberation, facilitates community healing, and fights for futures that are not organized around caging bodies. We gather as a community of practice in support of each other's writings, performances, workshops, and interrogations of prison education pedagogies. The WG offers a communal platform for research development and public activations, as we dance towards freedom, cultivating joy and dismantling harmful systems.

Imani K. Johnson, Exploratory Working Group Co-Chair

Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar, specializing in Africanist aesthetics and diasporic expressive cultures, Hip Hop streetdances, structures of power. Born and raised in Northern California, she received her bachelor’s from UC Berkeley, a master’s from NYU at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and her PhD from the University of Southern California in American Studies & Ethnicity.

Dr. Johnson’s book, Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (OUP 2023) examines the political, cultural, and spiritual nature of Hip Hop dance through a close examination of the ritual practice of cyphering – collaborative and competitive dance circles rooted in an interactive and energetic exchange between practitioners and surrounding witnesses. Using the metaphor of “dark matter” (a physics concept describing non-luminous matter that comprises the majority of the universe), the book addresses histories of exclusion, marginalization, and the invisibilization of Hip Hop’s blackness, which fundamentally shapes the aesthetic sensibilities of breaking culture, and the ways that such aesthetics inform the current circulation of Hip Hop dance transnationally. She has published articles in Dance Research Journal, Alif, Women & Performance, and the Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop. She is also co-editor, alongside Mary Fogarty, of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies, the first collection of peer-reviewed research on Hip Hop streetdances, including work by practitioners, practitioner-scholars, and scholars of dance, music, sociology, and the hard sciences.

She also founded and is the Artistic Director of the Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference Series, cultivating sites for Hip Hop scholars of all kinds to exchange ideas in a knowing community in order to foster the growth of Hip Hop Studies as a field in and beyond the academy.

Hannah Schwadron, Exploratory Working Group Co-Chair

Hannah Schwadron, MFA, PhD is Associate Professor of Dance at Florida State University where she teaches across BFA and MFA programs, and directs the Arts in NYC semester program, which brings students to New York City for sixteen weeks of interlocking coursework, creative research, and school-to-career professional development.  

Her first book The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender and Jewish Joke-work in US Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), won the de la Torre Bueno Award for Best First Book from Dance Studies Association. Her second book, co-edited with Marta E. Savigliano, Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) is the first volume on the subfield of dance humor and includes ten essays, including her own on “Dancing Displa(y)cement” with Berlin-based youth migrant ensemble, Club Al-Hakawati. 

Schwadron’s writing has also been published in Choreographic Practices, The International Journal of Screendance, Shofar, PARtake Journal, Liminalities, AJS Perspectives, Dancer Citizen, and InDance, and included in anthology/volume collections Dance and American Perspectives, Eds. Jen Atkins, Sally Sommer, and Tricia Young (University of Florida Press, 2018), Oxford Handbooks Online in Music, Ed. Alexander Rehding (2017), Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, Eds. Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund and the late Randy Martin (2017), and Oxford Handbook in Jewishness and Dance, Eds. Naomi M. Jackson, Rebecca Pappas, and Toni Shapiro-Phim (2022). Her most recent writing focuses on dance resources for jail/prison abolition through her essay, "Improvising Hope: Dance, Decarceration, and Higher Ed" in Critical University Studies, Ed. Ariel Nereson and Noe Montez (2026).

Laura McTighe, Exploratory Working Group Co-Chair

Laura McTighe is an abolitionist, ethnographer, organizer, and mama, who has dedicated her life to weaving liberatory futures and to building the connections that make them possible. She has been a part of the US and global movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for more than twenty-five years, co-founding multiple projects, including TEACH Outside, Prison Health News, Project UNSHACKLE, and the Tallahassee Bail Fund. Now a leading scholar-activist in the fields of gender studies, religious studies, critical prison studies, and public health, her work centers collaborative knowledge production as both theory and method for analyzing the violences of gendered racial capitalism in our everyday lives, and for dreaming beyond what is to build together the world that must be. Her first book, Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Duke University Press in 2024), was co-authored with the New Orleans-based collective, Women With A Vision (WWAV), and won the 2025 Edie Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. She is also the co-visionary and co-maker of the Born in Flames Living Archive. Currently, she is working on a new project entitled Abolition is Sacred Work, which grows from the call to action and reckoning she traced in this 2021 essay for The Immanent Frame. Laura is raising her daughter along the Chesapeake waterways where she was born and raised. She is a builder of altars and worker of clay, both practices passed down through her maternal lineages.