Witnessing Loss

Abstract

In this article, the authors describe and inquire into an interdisciplinary, funded, practice-based research project that investigated the experience of loss following the death of someone close. The research took place during 2010-2012 and involved several layers of investigation: facilitating workshops that combined dance movement psychotherapy and writing; creating a screendance; and interviewing participants and each other. Drawing, in particular, on the “new empiricist” theory of Karen Barad and others, and Rosi Braidotti’s call for “bodily materialism,” the authors focus on the material-discursive “entanglement” of the process of witnessing: how witnessing, throughout, within, and between the multiple aspects of a complex and affecting project, enacted a socially and ethically engaged scholarship.