Special Issue Call for Papers — Movement Literacy and Community Impact: Exploring Theory and Practice

Posted by Teresa L Heiland on 2025-08-04

How does movement literacy shape lives—yours and those in your community? This special issue invites essays and empirical research that critically explore movement literacy as a personal, pedagogical, and communal practice. We seek work that examines how symbolic, analytic, and notation-based movement systems influence identity, education, communication, creative work, and social contexts. Authors are encouraged to engage theory as they explore the transformative and communicative potential of movement literacy.

Movement literacy, broadly defined, is the embodied and cognitive capacity to read and write movement using symbolic, textual, and analytic systems. In addition to transcribing or documenting movement, it embraces ways of making meaning, theorizing experience, and transforming knowledge across diverse communities and contexts.

Movement literacy involves embodied experience and cognitive practices, including:

Reading, dancing, and writing: interpreting, reflecting, theorizing, exploring
Writing: dialogically acting on and transforming movement

We welcome work that:

· Demonstrates pedagogical, theoretical, or artistic applications of forms of codified movement literacy

· Theorizes the role of notation literacy in shaping embodied experience

· Presents practical research on community engagement through notation

· Investigates historical, cultural, or socio-political aspects of movement notation

· Reflects on interdisciplinary or cross-cultural perspectives

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2026

Questions? Contact Dr. Teresa Heiland at TLHeilan@uncg.edu