What holds in the body is not only personal.
My work begins from the premise that structural conditions leave traces in bodies. Migration regimes, welfare bureaucracies, policing systems, austerity: these are not simply abstract forces. They shape posture, breath, sleep, digestion, the capacity to be still or to move. They produce exhaustion, hypervigilance, shame, and rage that get misread as individual pathology when they are, in fact, reasonable responses to unreasonable conditions.
Praxis, for me, is where research and embodied practice meet. I study how institutions inscribe harm, and I work with people and groups to locate that harm in the body and redirect it.
Research-led practice
This approach is grounded in several years of fieldwork and academic research. My doctoral work examined how migration governance in northeast England produces forms of institutional violence that are carried somatically by the people subjected to them. As a research assistant on the UK Home Office’s Safer Parks programme, I looked at how gendered unsafety in public space is experienced bodily, not only as fear but as restriction, avoidance, and the erosion of freedom of movement. At the CUNY Graduate Center, I designed the Undiscipline workshop series, which brought together researchers across disciplines to explore what it means to think with and through the body in academic work.
In 2024, I began a body mapping pilot in Tunis, working with people navigating border bureaucracies to trace how administrative violence is held and expressed physically. That project informs the framework I am developing: a psychosocial index that measures institutional harm as it registers in bodies, without reducing that damage into the clinical and bureaucratic metrics that tend to reproduce it.
This line of inquiry draws on feminist geography, institutional ethnography, postcolonial thought (Glissant, Fanon, Ahmed and many more), and critical work on care and infrastructure → Reading List.
Applied practice
Alongside and emerging from this research, I offer one-on-one and small group sessions that move between conversation, body awareness, breath, movement, and sometimes voice. I draw on my training in somatic trauma therapy and yoga (200hr YTT, 60hr somatic therapy, reiki level III), as well as my own ongoing therapeutic and somatic work.
I work especially well with people navigating displacement, estrangement, institutional harm, or a general sense of exhaustion that comes from feeling out of place. This is not a clinical offering and I am not a therapist; this is an accompaniment. I offer you space to notice what you are carrying and to ask where it belongs.
I offer sessions online and in person when possible. Sessions are available in English and French.
Kahina Meziant 