BodyMinds Study Group aims to create a space to discuss critical texts, practices and ideas using all of our creative selves. As an alternative to the dualism entrenched in Western academia, we believe theory needs to be approached through multiplicity and embodied thinking. This includes somatic exercise, gardening, collage, drawing, writing, and discussion to generate new ways to access and create theory on a personal and collective level. We aim to follow methods that are slow, organic, honest, and outside of conventional measures of success.
BodyMinds Study Group prioritises accessibility and lived experience as QTIBPOC to imagine queer and decolonial ways of being in relation – with each other, and wider human and non-human kin. During each session we read and discuss a text together and relate to it in different, playful ways.
BodyMinds started in 2023 and is led by researchers, artists and writers Shama Khanna, Sonji Shah and Joseph Walsh.
We’re hoping to restart the series in early 2026. Email us bodymindsgroup@proton.me to be added to the mailing list.
Sonji Shah
Sonji Shah is a writer, researcher and facilitator based in London. Their creative writing has been published in Covert/textured (forthcoming), Elemental: Water Anthology (forthcoming), Vector Magazine (forthcoming), Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review (forthcoming), SkinDeep, Where the Leaves Fall, Affect and Colonialism WebLab, BadForm, and Transcodiert. They are the 2025 recipient of the Curtis Brown Creative LGBTQIA+ Breakthrough Award.
Sonji is doing a fully funded PhD in English Literature at the University of Cambridge, focusing on geologic speculative fiction and planetary ethics. As facilitator they have worked in grassroots and institutional contexts, including Misery Medicine co-facilitation, BodyMinds study group, Not to be a Singular Being at Chisenhale Art Place, Global Leadership at UWC Atlantic, Trans Inclusion at Gendered Intelligence, Consent Workshop Coordinator at SOAS, queer utopia at IUSY.
Joseph Walsh is an artist rooted in forging human-nature connections through his work with plants. Using drawing, painting and film to actualise a co-existing with nature. Joseph’s most recent practice has involved herb meditation workshops, observational drawing and painting in nature, and lifelong learning through his upkeep of a plot of land in a community wildlife garden. He has previously delivered Plant Gazing workshops at IMT Gallery and Jamyang Buddhist Centre and is currently studying herbalism.
