Racing After Technology: Asian American Digital Choreographies and Embodied Research in an Anti-Black World

Guest Editor: Al Evangelista, Oberlin College

The Journal of Embodied Research (JER) invites videographic submissions (3-20 minutes in length) for a special issue on how racism, digital technologies, and Asian Americanness are lived, felt, and contested through dance and embodied research.

JER is the first peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal dedicated to the dissemination of embodied knowledge through video. It pioneers the scholarly video article as a form that rethinks the relationship between textuality, audiovisuality, and embodiment. This special issue builds on that commitment by asking how bodies in motion—onstage, onscreen, online, and in everyday life—make perceptible the racial choreographies through which model minority logics and anti-Blackness are maintained and undone.

In recent years, work across critical race studies, Asian American studies, and science and technology studies has highlighted three interconnected lines of scholarship:

● Digital systems and software design—from voting infrastructures to credit scoring, policing, and recommendation engines—are built on legal, economic, and social histories that have sorted people by race, class, gender, and citizenship. These digital systems do not start from a blank slate; they inherit and often intensify older patterns of racial hierarchy.

● Asian Americans have repeatedly been positioned in ways that are neither simply “included” nor “excluded.” Despite known histories of immigration exclusion policies and deportation practices, their sociopolitical status has often been used as evidence that racial barriers have been overcome—while anti-Black structures remain intact. Appeals to a generic category of “minorities” can mask the fact that intra- and intergroup experiences very different degrees of advantage, exposure to violence, and proximity to power.

● Embodied and dance scholarship has argued that knowing is not only cognitive but also somatic: thinking, perceiving, and remembering are all forms of moving. Training, improvisation, gesture, and sensation are forms of inquiry in their own right. Dance, in this view, is not just an art that expresses ideas; it is a way of generating knowledge about the world.

Possible areas of inquiry

We welcome videographic work that addresses, for example:

● Dance and performance responding to anti-Asian violence, anti-Black state violence, and racial terror, tracing uneven distributions of vulnerability, risk, and protection in protests, vigils, and mutual aid.

● Projects that treat walking, improvisation, somatic scores, and choreographic processes as methods for studying race, technology, and anti-Blackness, and that explore how screen-based practices reshape what and how we know.

● Embodied pedagogies and collective choreographic projects that teach about race and technology and imagine anti-racist, abolitionist uses of digital tools and platforms.

● Choreographic strategies for dancing with, against, or around algorithmic pressures.

● The ways prompts like “I agree,” “Install now,” “Allow access,” and “Go live” become automatically accepted and works that trouble disproportionate digital consent and exposure.

This list is not exhaustive; the call encourages a wide range of inquiry and expression. We encourage submissions from scholar-artists, independent and community-based practitioners, and collectives. We especially welcome contributions that center Black, Asian American, Indigenous, disabled, queer and trans, and marginalized perspectives.

By November 15, 2026 please submit:

● A written abstract of up to 250 words, and

● A 1–2 minute video abstract (unlisted or password-protected links are fine),

Submissions should include:

1) Working title.
2) Central research question(s).
3) Description of embodied practice(s) and/or site/community.
4) Description of the technological and racial context (for example, specific platforms, institutions, infrastructures, and racial formations).
5) Proposed format and approximate duration (video article or short video essay).
6) Links to previous relevant work.

Please also include:

● 3–5 keywords.

● Short bios for all contributors (maximum 150 words each).

Send proposals as a single PDF or DOCX (plus a video link, if applicable) to Al Evangelista (aevangel@oberlin.edu) with the subject: “[Abstract Proposal] Racing After Technology” by November 15, 2026. Acceptance notifications will be sent by January 31, 2027. For those selected, full video articles — for peer review — will be expected by April 30, 2027.

Back to News List