First Advisor
Ryan J Petteway
Date of Award
Spring 6-15-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Public Health Studies: Community Health Promotion and University Honors
Language
English
Subjects
Dance, social-prescription, decolonial public health, spatial justice
Abstract
This thesis argues that dance functions as both an upstream public health intervention and a form of radical spatial resistance; creating healing, agency, and belonging among historically marginalized communities. Drawing on bell hooks’ concept of homeplace, Jasbir Puar’s assemblage theory, Nancy Krieger’s eco-social theory, and Katherine McKittrick’s Black geographies, I position the body as both an ecological and political landscape shaped by histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, displacement, and resilience.
Through this community-based participatory research study, Homeplace, I explore dance as a form of social prescription that centers liberation rather than pathology. Movement is often reduced in public health discourse as solely a means of exercise, emphasizing individualized behavior change; but dance operates as a communal practice through which colonized people celebrate, grieve, resist, and heal together. In this way, dance becomes more than a physical activity; it becomes cultural survival and community well-being.
This project challenges traditional public health and biomedical models that treat bodies as a summation of their symptoms and instead looks at bodies as relational environments, continually shaped by social and structural systems. By examining how bodies and land are similarly warred upon, extracted and violated to the point of reducing health to survival, this thesis argues that dance offers a means of reclaiming both bodily autonomy and spatial belonging. As an embodied practice of joy and resistance, dance transforms environments while refusing the reduction of life to productivity. Ultimately, this work advances dance as a legitimate public health strategy capable of supporting a more just, culturally rooted, and community-centered healthcare praxis.
Recommended Citation
Kannan, Preeya, "(Re)Claiming Homeplace: Dance as Embodied Resistance & Healing for Health & Spatial Justice" (2026). University Honors Theses. Paper 1899.
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