“We Run to Tell a Different Story” : Exercising with the Right to Movement Community in a Militarised, Settler-Colonial Context

Abstract

This thesis explores how the embodied everyday experience of living in a militarised, settler-colonial context can be understood through exercise practices, and how the effects of living in such a context may be navigated through exercise. It explores this objective through interviews with six Palestinians who exercise and participate in the Right to Movement community in Bethlehem, to understand their lived, everyday experiences. Using a Feminist Peace Research methodology and applying reflexive thematic analysis to the interview data, this research finds that exercising as an everyday practice gains value beyond the ordinary when carried out in this extraordinary setting. Furthermore, this thesis engages with decolonial feminist ideas to argue why lived, everyday experiences of war and violence matter and proposes ways to challenge and transform the existing Western-dominated systems and structures that sustain violence and suppression.

The analysis concludes that exercising in this setting is a complex, multilayered, powerful practice of agency and control. Their experiences reveal that exercising operates between the everyday and the extraordinary, highlighting its flexibility and how its significance and symbolic value vary according to the socio-political and specific spatio-temporal settings in which it is practised. As the participants insist on preserving and caring for their bodies, as well as displaying Palestinian identity through their exercise practices, it is used as a creative mode of expression and transformation. Despite the occupation, exercising helps them achieve a sense of freedom, altering feelings of worry and anger into joy and empowerment. This demonstrates the powerful role of exercise as a means of taking control of one's body and agency regarding how they encounter the militarised, settler-colonial context they live in. Furthermore, the Right to Movement community utilises exercise to take control of and change the narrative, to tell a different story.

This thesis argues that we need such stories to understand war and violence as corporeal, lived experiences, and that these experiences should be at the centre of how we analyse, discuss, and formulate foreign policy on war and conflicts. However, this fundamental change requires not just a change of approach but a shift in paradigm and a radical change in how we understand our interconnectedness and responsibility toward one another. I argue that decolonial feminist ideas of collective responsibility, ethics of care, and solidarity are needed to make this shift and break the ongoing cycle of violence.