Embodied Futures

Reflections from a Residency on Togetherness, Movement, and Presence.

Participants from the Pedagogies of Togetherness residency moving together during one of multiple Embodied Futures prototypes led by Julienne DeVita and Lourdes Rodríguez. Moulins, France, April 2025.

I practice and teach futures thinking professionally, and am often humbled by my own inability to comprehend difficult change as it’s happening. I foresaw much of what’s now emerging in 2025, but still found myself frozen by it here in Washington, DC. This paralysis is not new, and I know I’m not alone in it. I see similar patterns in the people around me, especially young people, who are navigating ecoanxiety, grief, and overwhelm while trying to comprehend a world in constant change.

The endless calls to "take-action" can become overwhelming and unintentionally immobilizing. I’ve felt that weight myself, and furthermore, the difficulty to admit it gnaws at me while I write. And this confession has spurred a question that I have arrived at before: are we dedicating enough time to process change before we jump to fixing it? I’ve come to believe that some of the paralysis that shows up in the design or strategizing phase is actually a signal. A cue to ground ourselves more deeply in the present before imagining what comes next.

This residency was an experiment in doing just that. From January through April 2025, I participated in Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness, hosted by Studio Atelierista via the Erasmus+ grant. It was a truly special experience that I have trouble synthesizing in words, but I'll do my best. The videos and photos in this article articulate the essence of the experience in was that words cannot.

The Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness residency brought together ~35 practitioners from 10+ countries to explore awareness-based, embodied practices in education. We began our journey in Paris during January of 2025, where we arrived with questions, curiosities, and unfamiliar faces. After a three day retreat we returned to our own communities to build and test prototypes. In April, we gathered again in Moulins, two hours south of Paris, to further test our research and prototypes.

I partnered with Lourdes Rodriguez from Teach the Future to explore a central question: how might embodiment shape the way we think about, and with, the future? I invited Lourdes and Teach the Future to join me in this residency because I wanted to develop futures methods that could be more accessible to intergenerational audiences. Many of the current tools we use in futures literacy are strategic, linear, and have centered adults as the primary users. Lourdes and I grounded our primary inquiry for the residency in movement, togetherness, and presence. What emerged from our work is a practice that we are calling embodied futuring.

Embodied futuring, as we’re defining it, is a process of sensing into possible futures by rooting awareness in the present moment. It is distinct from colleagues in the futures field exploring somatic or experiential futures, in that this practice requires a specific attunement to transtemporality. This means letting go of the idea that the past, present, and future are fragmented and separate. Instead, we use the body to explore how time (and change) might move in nonlinear ways. This became one of the core tensions we sat with throughout the residency: how to embrace the collapse of temporal binaries.

We worked with Social Presencing Theater (SPT) as a primary method to explore this tension. Developed from the principles of Theory U, SPT is movement-based practice that uses stillness, spatial awareness, and the body as a sensing instrument to perceive what is emerging beneath the surface of a system. It offers a way of tuning into collective dynamics, not through analysis, but through brining awareness to the present. Grounding our inquiry in SPT helped us bring futures work from abstraction into felt experience.

It’s incredible how moving the body, even slightly, can loosen the tight grip that the mind often has over imagination. I found the effect even more profound when practiced in a group setting. See videos linked throughout this article documenting the the various embodied futures prototypes we tested within our group of intergenerational movement experts and educators. For sake of this article, I have omitted explaining these exercises, as they are currently being refined and iterated based on the feedback received during this session. We plan to distribute them publicly and open-source once they are ready. After engaging in the embodied futures prototypes, participants surfaced two key tensions: 1) time (past, present, and future) and 2) togetherness (individual and collective). The prototype is being revised to more directly address these tensions, adding moments that highlight temporal orientation and the relationship between self and group. Overall, this feedback pointed us to a deeper, underlying realization: attuning to presence, especially through shared movement, can unlock a form of collective imagination that is largely underutilized in traditional futures practices.

Overlays of participants from the residency practicing the stuck exercise.

We see embodied futuring as a complement to both strategic foresight and design futures. Foresight offers analysis and mapping. Design offers materialization and provocation. But embodiment brings us back to presence. It breaks down the abstract notion of action into something grounded and lived, helping us remember that "taking action" starts with sensing into the here and now.

Our questions kept evolving throughout the residency. And many remain unanswered:

• How do futures show up in the body?

• How might examining the body in the present unlock deep insight about the future?

• How might we create spaces to process the futures we are facing, rather than simply reacting to them?

• What kinds of collective practices help us hold complexity without shutting down?

• What might hope look like as a practice of attention?

One of our key learnings was about adapting these practices across generations. Much of the existing futures discourse relies on cognitive and abstract reasoning. But what happens when you introduce creative expression such as movement, sound, painting, or collage? These creative and multisensory tools open up new ways of comprehending futures, especially for youth. We also noticed how important language is. Shifting from terms like "scenario" and "forecast" to words such as "dream" and "imagine" can provide more accessibility conversations about the future.

Distilling our learnings is still a work in progress, but this much is clear: embodiment is not an accessory to futures practices. It is a foundational element. It slows us down. Helps us stay with the trouble. And reveals how futures are always moving through us, even before we take time to notice.

Lourdes and I are now continuing this work by building a collection of embodied futures methods for use by schools, communities, and intergenerational groups. Our goal is to support others in crafting futures from the inside out, through presence, connection, and movement. 

If you're interested in the work or want to further contribute, let's get in touch.

A deep note of gratitude to the facilitators of the residency for shaping this experience with care and intent: Marina Seghetti, Ricardo Dutra, Arawana Hayashi, Ann Sophie Pastel D., Agathe Peltereau-Villeneuve, Candice Marro.

And to my fellow participants who made unforgettable memories: Ingvild Øverland, David Behar Perahia, Flo Weit, Amruta Bahulekar, Susan George, Pascal Kolbe, Sylvia Martins, Ninni Sødahl, Silvia Sant Funk, Marc Santolini, Triin Norkõiv, Stanislav Dobak, Anna Broms, Annina, Barabas Szigeti, Bence Huszerl, Cathia Ziebel, Chiara Mignani, Kate Kemp-Griffin, Louise Massacrier, Mathilde, Matleena Kohonen, Mia Bouyemy, Nicola Fornaciari, Sara, Sofia Keto-Tokoi, Valentina Cassarà, Virginia Boroni, and anyone I may have missed.