Putting the work of Henri Lefebvre, William James, and John Dewey in conversation with dance theorists, Derek P. McCormack reflects on how bodies both move in and generate affective spaces.

In Refrains for Moving Bodies, Derek P. McCormack explores the kinds of experiments with experience that can take place in the affective spaces generated when bodies move. Drawing out new connections between thinkers including Henri Lefebvre, William James, John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, McCormack argues for a critically affirmative experimentalism responsive to the opportunities such spaces provide for rethinking and remaking maps of experience. Foregrounding the rhythmic and atmospheric qualities of these spaces, he demonstrates the particular value of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "refrain" for thinking and diagramming affect, bodies, and space-times together in creative ways, putting this concept to work to animate empirical encounters with practices and technologies as varied as dance therapy, choreography, radio sports commentary, and music video. What emerges are geographies of experimental participation that perform and disclose inventive ways of thinking within the myriad spaces where the affective capacities of bodies are modulated through moving.

"The book ends as it started, in a happy muddle of geography’s interactions with other disciplines, allowing for a string of example/experiences as a coda and refrain of earlier chapters, this time tying together choreography and GPS." - Itineration

"McCormack’s adroit reworkings ought to signal new points of attachment, new senses of the possible and the compatible. In all these ways, however modest, Refrains for Moving Bodies is textually and practically a book of openings, and it should be read as such." - Social & Cultural Geography

"“Refrains for Moving Bodies is a thought-provoking conceptual and empirical engagement with the relationship between bodies and space.... [It] provides an enlivened approach to doing geography through movement and thus has enormous potential to make a significant impact on scholarship on bodies, performance and practice.”" - Cultural Geographies

"“McCormack undertakes a rigorous analysis of the potential of experimentation in space and affect, revealing Debord’s briefly articulated vision to be a rich area of research with implications for dance and performance studies, affect studies, urban studies, and geography, as well as their theoretical and practical intersections.”" - Dance Research Journal

"The ability to weave between lengthy theoretical considerations and vivid recollections of relationally specific, embodied practices make this book a welcome contribution to existing literature in affect theory, cultural geography and theories of embodiment." - Theatre Research International