Moving-with stories of deportation: Witnessing as visceral response-ability

Abstract

This article analyses my work for the digital storytelling archive Humanizing Deportation, which documents the human consequences of deportation, as well as the contact improvisation technique I co-developed for moving-with these stories. Moving-with offers a way of disseminating narratives of deportation by authors in Mexico but also reveals how their voices resonate in different body-minds in California. One story in particular, ‘Tireless Warrior’ by , clearly affirms the narrator’s connectedness to networks of care that are limited and fragile, enduring and adaptable and that entangle us all. Moving-with Esther’s story demonstrates how the experience of witnessing can reach beyond the individual self, moving us past passive spectatorship to feel-with an individual narrative as a collective experience that implicates witnesses as viscerally response-able. Moving-with digital stories of deportation can thus become a reciprocally humanizing experience that amplifies both speakers’ and listeners’ capacity to affect and be affected.