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

Dr. Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar, specializing in the African diaspora, global popular culture, and Hip Hop. She was born and raised in Northern California, but comes to UC Riverside from her adopted home in Brooklyn New York. She has attended UC Berkeley (BA), New York University (MA), and the University of Southern California (Ph.D.) where she received her doctorate in American Studies & Ethnicity.

Dr. Johnson’s book on the ritual circle in international Hip Hop dance communities is titled Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (Oxford University Press, 2023). This work 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. Using the metaphor of “dark matter” (a physics concept about non-luminous matter comprising the majority of the universe), the book addresses histories of exclusion, marginalization, and invisibilization that fundamentally shape 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.

As the founder, chair, and sole Artistic Director of the Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference Series, Dr. Johnson’s work on Hip Hop extends to cultivating sites for Hip Hop scholars to speak to one another and to a knowing Hip Hop community to foster the growth of Hip Hop Studies as a field that is responsible to communities beyond the academy.

Dr. Johnson is a former Ford Dissertation Fellow (2008-2009), and has held positions as a Postdoctoral Fellow in History at East Tennessee State University, Postdoctoral Fellow in Performance Studies and dramaturg in the Theater Department at NYU. Additionally, she has participated in several noteworthy institutes including the 2014 NEH Summer Institute on Black Aesthetics & African Centered Cultural Expressions, the Mellon Dance Studies Summer Institute, Decolonizing Knowledge & Power Summer School, the Summer School on Black Europe, Experimental Critical Theory, and the Advanced Oral History Summer Institute at UC Berkeley. She was also a 2016-2017 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow.

Hannah Schwadron, Exploratory Working Group Co-Chair

Hannah Schwadron, MFA, Ph.D teaches dance history, cultural politics, improvisation and performance at the undergraduate and graduate level and directs the Arts in NYC semester program, which brings students to New York City for sixteen weeks of interlocking coursework, mentored arts administrative internship, and engagement with arts professionals across the five boroughs. 

Schwadron’s creative and scholarly research focuses on Jewishness, dance, humor and migration studies. Dancing and writing on these themes led to her first book, The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender and Jewish Joke-work in US Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), which 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, 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). 

As part of ongoing theory-practice research, Hannah curates Field Studies (NYC, Oakland, Tallahassee, and Berlin), a creative development lab that allows performer-writers the space to workshop new projects with live audiences and peer review. Creating platforms for creative exchange has been core to Schwadron’s twenty plus years in dance/storytelling/education and is central to the ways her work intersects writing and performance. 

Her collaborative dance film Klasse (2015), made with FSU Associate Professor of Communication Malia Bruker and a cast of middle school students in Hamburg, Germany, continues to be part of Holocaust education and community engagement programming and won the Production Grant from Dance Film Association (NYC), and has been shown at American Dance Festival (Durham and Boone), Antimatter [Media Art] (Victoria, BC), Tiny Dance Film Fest (SF), Israelitische Töchterschule (Hamburg), Third Coast Dance Film Festival (Houston), where it won the Spirit of the Festival award, and ScreenDance Miami, where it won the Audience Choice award.

Outside of school, Schwadron serves as Vice President of Membership and Development of Dance Studies Association (2023-present), and is active board member of Ayoka Afrikan Drum and Dance and the Tallahassee Bail Fund, a grassroots organization that pays bail for people who cannot afford it and assists access to transportation, education, employment, and other needed resources upon release. She offers movement classes at the Leon County Youth Detention Center and is a certified instructor and committed practitioner of yoga.

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.