Encountering Social Inequalities through Productive Unsettling

This article draws on a collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet to propose a dancing pedagogy for productive unsettlement. Developed within a sociology of consumption module, we show how art can bridge the sociological and empathic imaginations, encouraging learners to ‘feel themselves away’ from their individual experience and better reflect on the wider social structures that shape it. Ballet, an art form marked by financial, cultural and bodily exclusion, served as a lens through which learners could engage with the experience of being ‘out of place’ in confronting their own vulnerabilities and privileges in relation to structural marketplace inequalities. This fostered a transformative shift we term ‘productive unsettling’, whereby rather than accepting and staying in their place, learners were encouraged to try other places, transform place for themselves and make space for others, finding joy in the process of creating social change.