Just chronotopes: Embodiment, social justice, and “the somatopic imagination”

Abstract

Drawing on data collected in a global, collaborative ethnography called The Living Justice Project (LJP), this paper investigates how formulations of social justice situate speakers' bodies in relation to one another as well as in relation to dominant interpretations of the past, felt experiences in the present, and visions for the (possible) future. It specifically investigates the ways in which body-centered or somatopic formulations of social justice afford a creative and often provocative reconfiguration of spatiotemporal scales of difference at the heart of contemporary social justice discourse. Analyses demonstrate how, within a conversation centering the meaning of social justice in relation to embodiment, LJP collaborators (1) rescaled equality as an emergent relational practice enacted within and across bodies in space and time; (2) reconfigured recognition as a continuous and emergent as well as relationally, spatially, and temporally engaged process that disturbs normative distinctions between Self and Other as well as between the past, present, and future; and (3) remapped movement by situating liberation in the possible present as well as the possible future. The analysis responds to calls from interdisciplinary scholars advocating for more diverse and expansive definitions of social justice. It also contributes to the deepening and expansion of chronotope theory in linguistic anthropology and embodiment theory in anthropology generally.