Dr. Irvin Manuel Gonzalez (he/él/they/elle) is an artivist, scholar, community organizer, and teacher. He received his PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside in 2021 and is an Assistant Professor Department of Dance.
https://opeep.osu.edu/people/gonzalez.1119
How and when did you become involved with OPEEP?
I began conversations with our OPEEP program in February of 2024. I had started teaching dance classes inside Californian prisons back in summer of 2018 and was desiring to connect our department of dance with OSU’s OPEEP program. This Spring 2025, I started teaching my first OPEEP-affiliated course. My research examines connections between Latin American social dance forms and activism, looking at the practices, aesthetics, and techniques in dances like cumbia and quebradita to see how bodies resist through the act of dancing. In partnering with OPEEP, I wanted to share the power of dance and its role in prison abolition work.
What course will you be teaching this semester, and what topics are you excited about covering with your students?
I am teaching Citizen Artist. This interdisciplinary course introduces students to culturally responsive methods for developing arts programming, arts events, and community engaged artistic practices that respond to themes of health, justice, education, and diplomacy. In addition to engaging with theorizations and practices that center decoloniality in arts-integrated processes, we will build choreographies of resistance that can respond to aesthetics, movements, and sensibilities nurtured by students in their collective and individual explorations of what being an artist-citizen means. In doing so, students will learn how to craft and create through dance exercises that help build community and foster new ways of connecting with other bodies in the world to ask: What approaches foster mutually beneficial relationships in the community between residents, artists, and organizations? How do artists enter, engage, and exit community-based projects ethically? What creative practices empower the sharing of under told/untold histories? What methodologies can help facilitate diverse communities in artmaking processes? What values and assumptions do artists champion through community-engaged artmaking? Who gets to participate, and on what/whose terms? Through studio practice, dancing, readings, writings, viewings, and discussions, the class builds facilitation skills and explores dramaturgical approaches to devising performance with communities.
Goals/takeaways you'd like your students to leave class with?
The course focuses on students developing stronger knowledge around the intersections of art and activism, understanding the role of community building and engagement in fostering social change. At the same time, we learn the role of dance, mobility, and migration in protest and prison abolition work. Students learn to analyze and engage dance as a tool of/for resistance.
What is one thing that you wish more people knew about prison abolition and transformative justice?
That, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, prison abolition is at the heart of all our liberations. No matter the discipline, line of work, or situation you are in, you can lend your skills and tools tot he fight. In doing so, we can work collectively together for freer tomorrows.
What do you like to do in your free time?
In my free time I enjoy dancing to cumbias and quebraditas. I also love exploring new food spaces.
Any further comments you'd like to share with readers?
Dance is power. Oftentimes, people render it to a form of entertainment. In reality, it’s at the heart of everything we do. We’re all dancers. We all dance. The sooner we learn to vibe together on the dance floor and understand it as an embodied tool for change, the more proactive we can be in transforming our society.
