Conference Program

Mainstream approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in organizations often rely on formal training and cognitive learning models that struggle to address the complexity of marginalization and inequality. Recent scholarship highlights the limitations of traditional diversity management programs, which tend to produce limited behavioral change and may even generate resistance (Dobbin & Kalev, 2022). In response, researchers have increasingly explored experiential and arts-based pedagogies as alternative ways to foster reflexive learning about diversity and inclusion (Springborg & Ladkin, 2018; Meltzer, 2022). Building on this perspective, this paper investigates how dance-based learning methodologies can enable participants to reflect critically on inclusion, marginalization, and diversity.

The study examines nine workshops organized across three editions of an Italian dance festival dedicated to artistic experimentation and education between 2023 and 2025. Workshops were led by professional choreographers and combined movement-based inquiry, embodied reflection, and dialogical exchange. The research adopts an affective ethnographic methodology (Gherardi, 2017; Holck & Villeseche, 2023), allowing the researchers to capture the socio-material and emotional dynamics emerging during the workshops. Data collection included participant observation, audiovisual field notes from recordings of workshops and informal interactions, and semi-structured interviews with participants and choreographers. This approach enables the study to explore how embodied practices, emotions, and relational encounters shape learning processes related to inclusion.

The findings identify a three-stage process through which dance-based methodologies foster reflective learning about diversity. First, workshops create what we conceptualize as authenticity grounding, a mode of interaction that prioritizes direct human engagement, simplicity of communication, and shared vulnerability. Choreographers organize learning prompts through embodied metaphors, inclusive imagery, and the deliberate staging of tensions or contradictions within artistic practices. These socio-material cues activate a second layer of mechanisms based on affective responses. Participants report experiences of alertness, empathy, and attunement, which together foster emotional engagement and relational awareness. Affective responses enable learners to access personal memories, confront discomfort, and develop new sensibilities toward difference.

These affective dynamics subsequently trigger generative connections, cognitive processes that allow participants to reinterpret social categories, question normative assumptions, and read relational dynamics within collective settings. Through contrasts, embodied observation, and shared reflection, participants engage with themes such as gender, race, power relations, and exclusion in ways that differ from conventional diversity training. Ultimately, these mechanisms produce a reconceptualization of inclusion as a continuous learning process, rather than a static competence or organizational policy. Participants learn to recognize power relations embedded in everyday interactions and to legitimize individual biographies as sources of knowledge about marginalization and belonging.

By unpacking the mechanisms through which dance-based pedagogies activate reflective learning about diversity, this research contributes to debates on arts-based education and inclusive learning. It demonstrates how embodied practices can challenge the limitations of traditional DEI training by creating spaces where emotional, relational, and cognitive dimensions of learning intersect. In doing so, the study advances our understanding of how arts-based methods can support more critical, participatory, and socially responsive forms of education aimed at addressing inequality and fostering democratic learning environments.