Coalition: An alliance of groups or organizations, often temporary, formed in support of a shared goal. With etymological roots in “coalesce”: “unite, grow together, become one in growth," the formation of coalitions often supports multi-dimensional approaches to collective organizing, as when unions and community organizations work together to combine their perspectives and priorities (see Henaway; Xiang in SDUK09).
Conjure: To make something appear suddenly or unexpectedly as if by ghosts, spirits, or magic. Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde advocates for “collective conjuring” as way of reimagining identity through communal, durational, and participatory actions. Used in anti-oppression practices, collective conjuring offers a method to reimagine relationships to the past, and to reshape the future.
Essential has been used ubiquitously throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Who decides who, or what, is and is not essential? Whose work is valued under these terms? Which goods and services are essential to everyday life? Mostafa Henaway chronicles the precarious work that is largely fulfilled by marginalized workers, whose duties have been at once deemed essential and rendered invisible. For additional insights into who or what is highlighted as “essential” through acts of protest, see Maandeeq Mohamed.
The Anishaabemowin word for sea, Gichigami, translates to “big” (gichi) “liquid” (-gami). As described in The Decolonial Atlas, Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin or “the Five Freshwater Seas” include: Anishinaabewi-gichigami (“Anishinaabe’s Sea,” Lake Superior); Ininwewi-gichigami (“Illinois Sea,” Lake Michigan); Naadowewi-gichigami (“Iroquois’ Sea”), also known as Gichi-aazhoogami-gichigami (“Great Crosswaters Sea,” Lake Huron); Waabishkiigoo-gichigami (“Neutral’s Sea”), also known as Aanikegamaa-gichigami (“Chain of Lakes Sea,” Lake Erie); and Niigaani-Michiganichigami (“Leading Sea”), also known as Gichi-zaaga’igan (“Big Lake,” Lake Ontario). See Tasha Beeds on circumnavigating the shores of the Gichigamiin for water justice.
Fitness: The state or condition of being fit such that one has the capacity to fulfill specific roles or tasks. Physical fitness pertains to one’s health and well-being, particularly the ability to perform sports, occupations, and daily activities. Knowledge systems of the moving body often perpetuate power relations and exclusionary ideas of fitness, rooted in colonial, Eurocentric, patriarchal, and ableist ideologies. For decolonial practices in kinesiology that embrace BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+, disabled and neurodivergent bodies, see Joseph and Kriger.
Guilt: the emotional state of contradiction, compromise, remorse, regret, or shame (for the relation between art, activism, and personal guilt, see Wren. Employed in a legal context to denote intent and culpability, guilt also circulates culturally as a diffuse effect of morality, injustice, and belief (as when legacies of colonialism and slavery manifest as white guilt).
Interruption and disruption are two closely related strategies describing a disturbance or pause to an event, activity, or process. Disruption might be characterized as a spatial intervention such as a strike, blockade, march, or walkout (see Henaway; Mohamed), while interruption can describe communications strategies such as speeches, media releases, boycott or censure campaigns (see Sharp in SDUK05; Walcott in SDUK10).
Margin: An edge, border, boundary, or brink. In everyday use, marginalization defines the processes by which groups are excluded from the majority opinion or viewpoint (see also Hegemony). As Mostafa Henaway writes, marginalized social groups and individuals are disproportionately subject to labour exploitation; they are also under-represented in media and archives (see Afful, Peterson and Gerber). For a perspective on margins in economics, see Cochrane in SDUK06.
Non-maleficence summarizes the oath of medical professionals to “do no harm” when caring for patients. Janelle Joseph and Debra Kriger describe how this historic principle—and beneficence, its corollary—can be better applied in kinesiology practice by questioning the very basis of “benefits” and “harms.” While Joseph and Kriger advocate for further patient autonomy in decision-making, see also Take Care for these principles in contexts of assisted dying (Banerjee and Eastwood) and care work (Ai-jen Poo).
Oral History is a practice of recording and archiving speech for posterity, often employed when histories are at risk of being lost or forgotten, or as a way of strengthening community bonds (see Afful, Peterson, and Gerber). In an academic context, this methodology prioritizes oral speech to preserve the speaker’s intent and identity, and for its ease of use and accessibility. Employed across many cultural practices of storytelling and song, oral histories long predate their formal definition within academic practice.
Permission: Consent or formal authorization to do something. As described in the process of gifting a carved mask from Bracken Hanuse Corlett to Lee Su-Feh, permission is a long-term trust-building process, which is time-delimited and subject to renegotiation. Discourses of permission and consent are gaining increased traction in disciplines premised on client-patient interaction (such as in kinesiology; see Joseph and Kriger). For the refusal of permission through protest blockades, see Mohamed.
Proximity: To be near in distance or time. The state of being proximate suggests physical and temporal closeness and foregrounds connection, such as our corporeal relationships to sound (see Avasilichioaei) or the unique proximity to landscape provoked through automobility (Nicholson). Being in proximity may give something value or status (see Jaworski and Wool in SDUK09; Cuthand in SDUK06), enact solidarities, or encourage transdisciplinary knowledge (see Skinner in SDUK07.1). Collaboration and co-creation often involves working in proximity even when physically apart (see Su-Feh and Hanuse Corlett, and The Neurocultures Collective in SDUK09; see also coalition).
A repository is a container used to store things for the purpose of collection, preservation, or dissemination; may be a physical space for depositing material objects, or a digital location for storing data and open files (see Campbell in SDUK09). Repositories and their collecting scopes and practices differ according to their sites, publics, and mandates, for instance, serving various objectives such as circulating under-represented histories (see Afful, Peterson, and Gerber), managing nuclear waste (see Hird in SDUK02), or conjuring alternative Black futures (see Okunseinde).
Reverberation: the prolonged movement of a sound wave; for instance, when a tuning fork is struck, low resistance in its metal tines and the surrounding air can cause it to reverberate unimpeded for an extended duration. Oana Avasilichioaei details her experiments with reverberation, which explore how sound can be elongated in space and time. As a metaphorically-rich dynamic between an initial action and its ongoing effects, reverberation can also describe connections between historic and current political movements and relations (see Wren; Beeds).
Often defined in engineering as the instrument from which power is distributed in a motor vehicle, transmission is more broadly understood as something that is transferred or shared. The processes and media of transmission vary: information, knowledge, messages, or sound may be delivered through written and oral communication, or speakers and telecommunication networks (see Avasilichioaei; Boetzkes in SDUK01; Chiang in SDUK08). While transmitted speech has the power to incite social change, and to preserve knowledge and communal identities, it also holds the capacity to spread misinformation (see Okunseinde; Hockaday in SDUK08; Dodd, James, Rosella in SDUK10).
Walking: Movement by limbs or wheels; alone as strolling, sauntering, or loafing; in groups as marching or parading. Walking holds deep ties to creative production, thought, and action across many global cultures and territories. Counter to the dominant Western tradition of disembodied thought, scholars whose work takes up walking point out that bodily movement often spurs creativity. Since 2003, Anishinaabe activists have led annual walks throughout the Great Lakes region to underscore the importance of clean water, and the interconnectedness of all beings (see Beeds).