Eco Soma

"Petra Kuppers breathes us through connections between embodiment and the earth, weaving queer studies and disability studies into self-guided explorations. Her imagistic text evokes dancing—the pull of gravity and the shifting perspectives of bodies in flow. She moves, she writes, we respond to her autobiographical narratives of environmental spaces and social places."—Anita Gonzalez, Georgetown University (cofounder of Georgetown University’s Racial Justice Institute)

"There is absolutely nothing like Eco Soma in any field. Petra Kuppers provides a much-needed model for what interdisciplinary arts-based research can be, and her work is always put into the context of the lived reality of minoritized communities. She shows us how to write about bodies as she does—unflinchingly, while maintaining respect and dignity."—Carrie Sandahl, director, Program on Disability Art, Culture, and Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago

"Petra Kuppers’s grounded and reflective investigation encourages generative dialogue within and beyond disability performance studies. Sharing many vivid examples drawn from diverse community scales and sites, her eco soma method both illuminates and prompts creative reimaginings of relations between self, land, other humans, and more-than-humans. Answering the urgent call for multidisciplinary work to address climate catastrophe, she reveals the profound power of art-based methods to engage the body, forge connection, and enact change."—Kirsty Johnston, University of British Columbia (located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people)

 

"Kuppers's spectral disability approach makes this book an ideal companion for revising older canons and theories, through embodied encounters with activist community performance... The labour of reading this layered and performative text generates new research trajectories through realms of sense, affect, and relation."—Research in Drama Education

"Kuppers animates the concepts of disability culture with unexplored ways of witnessing performances through uncertain being and identifying. The fundamental questions Kuppers gently invites the readers to explore about their own encounters and identifications with the human, nonhuman and fantastic worlds are especially important for a world grappling with the continued realities of a global pandemic, of reassessing one’s place and purpose, privileges and uncertainties."—Synapsis

"Engaging with the intersection of the self and the environment in the wide array of well-chosen performances it analyses, Petra Kuppers’s Eco Soma substantially invites a rethinking of material enmeshments embodied in the self that is marked by various agencies—be they geographical, historical, or cultural."—Ecocene

"Relevant and grounding."—Wordgathering

"The text models a form of inquiry, inviting the reader to take a journey through the author’s collection of embodied performance witnessing and become aware of how one encounters the world through the discovery of involved witnessing."—Synapsis Journal

"Eco Soma reads like a historical recipe for imagined futures, one that invites you to add a pinch of your favorite spice to make it smell of home and taste like possibility."—Research in Arts and Education

"Kuppers’s book puts forward appropriate ways for diverse bodyminds to access the spaciousness as well as the peacefulness of being with nature, subsequently offering revolutionary ways of thinking about complex embodiment and issues of belonging and accessibility in cultural work."—Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies

"Petra Kuppers moves in a refreshing worldscape of academic writing. In the introduction to Eco Soma, I am invited into her private space, her own study, her nest on the ground. From here, she takes me by the hand and guides me through stories and reflections from her personal and artistic life and practice as an academic, mover, facilitator and performance witness."—Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices