How to Land: Finding Ground in an Unstable World foregrounds the
importance of embodiment as a means of surviving the disorientation of
our twenty-first century world. Linking somatics and politics, author
Ann Cooper Albright argues that a renewed attention to gravity as both a
metaphoric sensibility and a physical experience can help transform
moments of personal disorientation into an opportunity to reflect on the
important relationship between individual resiliency and communal
responsibility.
Long one of the nation's preeminent thinkers in dance studies, Albright
asks how contemporary bodies are affected by repeated images of falling
bodies, bombed-out buildings, and displaced peoples, as well as
recurring evocations of global economies and governments in discursive
free fall or dissolution. What kind of fear gets lodged in connective
tissue when there is an underlying anxiety that certain aspects of our
world are in danger of falling apart? To answer this question, she draws
on analyses of perception from cognitive studies, tracing the
discussions of meaning, body and language through the work of Sara
Ahmed, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Shaun Gallagher, among others. In addition,
she follows the past decade of debate in contemporary media concerning
the implications of the weightless and two-dimensional social media
exchanges on structures of attention and learning, as well as their
effect on the personal growth and socialization of a generation of young
adults. Each chapter
interweaves discussions of movement actions with their cultural
implications, documenting specific bodily experiences and then tracing
their ideological ripples out through the world.
