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The Center for the Practice of Political Extimacy (formerly the Center for the Practice of Somatic Extimacy) specializes in the integration of political theory and somatic education as everyday praxis, in the service of collaborative disruption of the violent mundanity of raced existence.  It advocates mind-bending co-thinking and deepened, sensory awareness as equally essential for transformative, political engagement.

Political extimacy is a trauma-informed praxis that is theoretical, existential, and experiential.  The focus is the uncontainable work of race and its gender-specifying forms, where the violence inherent to raced existence is understood to supersede every social encounter and thus threaten every liberatory project grounded in everyday, social relationships.  As such, we cannot take the mundanity of race for granted or assume that transformative political action equates to knowing how to ‘co-be’ or ‘co-practice’, interactively, under violent conditions that remain unresolved. Inspired by black feminist inquiries, as well as James Baldwin’s interactive presencing of liberal hypocrisy in raced encounters, political extimacy is a learned praxis that challenges what is routinely unpresenced in interaction as transformative social care and political material.