What Moves Us: Dance and Neuroscience Implications for Conflict Approaches

Despite its worldwide use in grassroots conflict approaches, dance, and the body more generally, remain largely unaddressed within conflict theory and conventional practice. We argue that the body is an essential focus of conflict theory and a ready resource for conflict practice by exploring the implications of compelling discoveries within the field of neuroscience. Examining the embodied dimensions of cognition, emotion, and memory, the physical roots of empathy, and the relationship of right- and left-brain processes to conflict, we outline neuroscientific underpinnings of dance-based approaches to conflict and the range of creative tools that arises from its use.

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