Written by Sonya Pritzker and the Living Justice Project Collaborators
Reviewed by Steph McIsaac, PhD
Senior Writing Consultant, CUNY Graduate Center
Living Toward Justice is an archive of aliveness. From ordinary practices and dream-like reflections to transformative longings and wild imaginations of a more just world, the book’s contributors share verbatim reflections on the embodied ways they live toward social justice in their everyday lives.
Living Toward Justice emerged from the Living Justice Project, a 2022 global ethnographic initiative coordinated by Sonya Pritzker, an anthropologist and somatic practitioner. The collaborative project brought together more than fifty practitioners working at the intersections of embodiment, healing, and social justice (all of whom are named as co-authors). Pritzker and the collective worked collaboratively to produce an archive of collective memory: a curated collection of reflections, observations, images, practices, dreams, poetry, and inquiries. Rather than writing a how-to guide offering new solutions or a study demonstrating the outcomes of embodied social justice approaches, Pritzker frames the book as a shared time capsule of individual practitioner entries on the embodied ways they were living toward justice at a specific historical juncture.
For practitioners of embodied social justice (ESJ), individual and collective transformation are intertwined. Addressing contemporary social inequalities—racism, economic inequality, patriarchy, ableism, xenophobia, to name only a few—requires transforming structural inequities while also attending to how those systems take shape in everyday bodies, relationships, and patterned responses. For example, certain ESJ approaches might understand nervous system responses of activation or freeze not only as personal trauma, but also as the embodied imprint of structural oppression, shaped by histories of racism, colonialism, gendered violence, and economic inequality. In this sense, embodiment becomes a site where social injustice is both reproduced and potentially transformed.
To read Steph’s complete review, please click here
