Abstract
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the area of research considering questions of belonging via the bodily knowledge of dance is small but growing, offering fertile ground for further contributions. Drawing on scholarship from dance studies and human geography, in what follows I consider insights and observations around belonging that arose during a dance-based research project investigating imaginaries of place held by Pākehā women. A synergy between the insights I share is how they pertained to haptic encounters or encounters of touch. I discuss how these haptic encounters moved participants towards greater awareness of their settler-colonial subjectivities in relation to place and offered routes for being in, with, and around place in more consciously sensed and sensitive ways. Through my discussion, I highlight insights and observations that arose via the sensory dimensions of danced movement. In relation to exploration of Pākehā subjectivities, it is my hope that the encounters shared in this article illustrate how sensory experiences, impressions and associations arising from engagement in danced movement have the capacity to unsettle settler-colonial ways of being and knowing.
@ The University of Waikato