We live in an interregnum: human and planetary systems are degrading, ways of life have become untenable, and tangible alternatives remain fragmentary or obscured. This research is positioned within this onto-epistemic climate of known failures, in-betweens, and not-yet knowns. To enhance the granularity with which we can perceive and respond to both the prevailing and nascent circumstances of our era, it is necessary to examine the onto-epistemic conditions and orientations required for being, doing, knowing, and relating otherwise. The research responds to calls for two distinct shifts. Firstly, the restoration of relational ways of worlding through which new territories of existence and unprecedented forms of being communal might come into being. To achieve such a restorying of life, atypical modalities for the awakening of our exiled senses and sensibilities will be required. Two modalities — the body and relationality — are proposed for this onto-epistemic encounter. The research asks how body-led relational learning practices and spaces can be facilitated within communal learning settings as a collective rehearsal of otherwise ways of worlding. How might we learn otherwise about worlding otherwise? Communal learning settings, such as schools or community interest groups, are pluriversal contact zones providing an interface for encountering how knowledges and worldviews are enacted. To address the confluence of themes that comprise this research, a transdisciplinary assembly of theory and practice from Design, Education, and Dance is harnessed, bringing into correspondence intersecting disciplinary orientations, whilst maintaining allowance for partial, contingent, and ambiguous knowing. The enquiry was conducted across two distinct practice-research phases: a prototyping phase (PROTO) and a situated phase (SITU). The primary objective of the PROTO was to experiment with approaches to body-led relational learning. This phase was conducted across five rehearsal events, each bringing together a temporary community of interest in distinct academic learning settings. A collection of body-led techniques from dance and social arts was selected and explored together with these learning communities through iterative processes of rehearsal and dialogue. Two practice-research methods — Iterative Rehearsal and Collaborative Improvisation — and a supplementary dialogue protocol were refined. The primary objective of the SITU phase was to rehearse an embedding of body-led relational learning with school-based learning communities. Experimental practice-spaces were established with two 16-1 school-based learning communities: the African Leadership Academy, South Africa; and Atlantic College (United World Colleges), Wales. Through experimenting with body-led relational learning as contextual praxis, the SITU phase examined its cultivation as both a practice and space of learning — where learning functions as a collective process of onto-epistemic infrastructuring. The thesis proposes and illustrates a body-led relational learning process in experimental operation — as device for research enquiry and as learning practice within communal learning settings. Findings extend complementarities between disciplinary epistemic processes, reveal resonances between the body and relationality as onto-epistemic modalities for learning otherwise, and illustrate new possibilities for collectively perceiving and engaging with the challenges of our era.

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