Abstract

This doctoral research explores the question: in which ways can Open Floor help unfold embodied peaces? It engages Open Floor to investigate how new and different embodiedpossibilities for being, becoming, knowing, and relating canpotentially (re)manifest within a current world. In this sense, the author has conducted in-depth, qualitative, and narrative interviews with seven long-term Open Floor practitioners (teachers) through a relational interview approach, movingthrough a multifaceted dance and movement conversation that focuses upon lived dance and movement experiences, narrative processes of meaning-making, as well as transformative encounters with embodied peaces both on and off the dance floor. Ultimately, the research arrives at a core understanding of Open Floor as a practice that can help unfold embodied peace potentials due to how it can help individuals and collectives continuously affirm, engage, and (re)unfold the ever-emerging dance of embodied wholeness that both they **and others are – as well as constantly also are becoming in different manners anew.

Bio

Hanne Tjersland is a Norwegian Open Floor teacher, peace researcher and peace educator who just recently completed her doctoral studies within International Studies in Peace, Conflict and Development at the University Jaume I in Castellón de la Plana, Spain. She lives in Hurdal Ecovillage about one hour outside of Oslo, Norway, and is passionate about finding new life-affirming ways to help unfold more peaceful relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with the larger surroundings that we are all part of. Her doctoral research has in this sense focused upon this topic of her heart and her soul: how can an embodied practice such as Open Floor help manifest more peaceful possibilities for relating both with ourselves and with our multifaceted and interconnected surroundings.

From a more personal perspective

Conducting this doctoral research has been one of the most challenging and hard but also most rewarding and enriching processes that I have ever engaged so far in my life. It has in many ways not been a ‘traditional’ research for academia -neither in terms of the topic that I have chosen nor in terms of the approach to researching it that I have applied – and yet, it has been a research that I truly believe it has been important to engage both for peace research as well as for Open Floor and the larger embodiment field. I hope that it can contribute to bringing the two fields a bit closer together – realizing that research needs embodied experience and embodied engagement, and that embodied engagement also needs the ongoing and enriching deepening that can happen through research and mental reflection.