Meet Joanna

With time and practice, I saw that somatics, movement, trauma-informed yoga and breath are not only about personal healing but also solidarity and collective action. I’m passionate about walking alongside other folks to address the wounds of loss and disconnection held in our bodies caused by racism and other systems of oppression, and by acting collectively to challenge their wider manifestations in society.

Hello, I’m Joanna, I’m a white cisgender woman with roots in Central Eastern Europe. I bring to my work my lived experience of white privilege and oppression as an immigrant and someone who identifies as neurodivergent.

My background is in the sociology of race and racism, trauma-informed yoga and somatics. I’ve done my PhD on ethnic relations at the University of Barcelona, and worked for many years in the field of ethnicity, race and migration at the intersection of academia and third sector.

Just before founding ‘Move Rooted’, I was responsible for the University of Cambridge’s successful application for the Race Equality Charter (REC) Bronze recognition (2019), and I led the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Race and Ethnicity Unit. I currently support other Higher Education institutions applying for the REC as Advance HE Associate.

Coming from an academic background that values the cognitive ways of knowing and having a lived experience of trauma, for a long time my body-mind relationship has been fragile. My way into recovering that connection was through somatics- and trauma-informed movement and yoga, as well as through nurturing the feeling of interconnectedness with human and more-than-human world.