Arriving, becoming and arriving again

The chapter is co-authored by the two women editors of the anthology entitled Research and Practice that Brings Us Home. The Creative Body as Catalyst. In this introductory chapter, the authors identify as academic migrants and from this position, create a matrix around a theme of arrival; that is their arrival into each others’ lives, their simultaneous arrival into professional transitions and the birthing of an anthology of writings that brings into focus the nuances embedded in embodied knowledge. The chapter weaves deftly through a landscape that changes the topography of academia, challenging hierarchies of power, sowing seeds of intersectionality and reaping the harvest of eco-feminist practices. The two authors describe their initial meeting and the collaboration that ensued, as a background to the emergence of the anthology, within a particular socio-political context. The writing follows themes of arrival as it manifests in the collective voice of the book, foregrounding the way in which creativity and corporeality can bring us into new ways of languaging the world.

The authors articulate how the arts provide expressive means of communication to process trauma, crises and loss and the chapter is committed to the way in which movement traverses boundaries, borders and cultural differences and has the capacity to hold shared values of our humanity within the broader ecology of the world.