The head and the heart: Using VR and somatic intelligence to build a tech-just world

Multisensory pathways from imagination to liberated technology.

In an era defined by rapid technological acceleration, the most crucial tool we own might not be a new algorithm or device, but our own imagination. As scholar Ruha Benjamin argues in her Imagination: A Manifesto, that ‘imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation’. How can we build a future centred on tech justice, one that prioritises equity and human thriving, if we cannot first visualise it?

Earlier this year, in May, Catalyst, a UK-based network working on responsible and just uses of digital in social change, hosted its unconference at the ‘Catalyst Transformations’ hybrid event. The essence of the unconference format meant that participants in the space determined the agenda themselves. Each of us participants organically generated the topics, challenges and questions we wanted to explore.

I joined and experienced the open-space unconference format in person in Manchester and reflected on my work supporting the Tech Justice Roadtrip role as both Circle Member and Partner, where I facilitated reflective sessions and also supported decolonial evaluation. Of the sessions I attended, two particularly stood out for me as they demonstrated the vital role of visualisation. This blog reflects on how they presented two distinct yet complementary approaches to imagining a more just world. One session utilised immersive technology, and another harnessed the intelligence of the body. Both help move beyond current paradigms and develop strategies for transformative change.

The virtual reality dreamspace: Visualising ustopia

The first session, guided by Sarah Harris, introduced the group to the virtual reality (VR) dreamspace. The exercise focused on exploring the possibility of dreaming the endpoint; picturing a complete and desired tech-just future in a virtual reality. Sarah demonstrated how VR can be used to design, test, create, and visualise what her vision of a Ustopia would look like and invited us to build our own.

The notion was potent: a VR dreamspace that allows complex thoughts to move beyond ideas, words on paper, or even digital images. It transforms visions into an experienced reality, offering a concrete sense of how they might become embodied. The idea is simple yet powerful: visualise in VR, test its feasibility, and then work backwards to establish a viable strategy to turn the vision into a reality.

This visualisation exercise attempts to define our Ustopia, a term coined by Margaret Atwood and advocated by Dr Ruha Benjamin, which represents the notion of a collective imagination which shapes the future together. A future that acknowledges the interconnectedness of injustices experienced by communities and the understanding of the need to prioritise wellbeing, inclusion, accessibility over extraction, exclusion and wealth concentration. Overall, Ustopias seek to create a vision for the future that enables everyone to thrive as opposed to simply survive.

Yet, imagining this Ustopia in VR immediately brings up a necessary tension. It forces us to use a purely digital medium to design a future that paradoxically demands a deeply embodied, multisensory, and grounded connection to nature. This inherent push-and-pull effect signifies the importance of multisensory experience. The simple, necessary reality of feeling textures and sensations, like the wind on our skin. The Ustopian future, it seems, cannot be purely digital.

While VR offers great opportunities for good, this promise is balanced by the harm it can inflict if created without ethical guidance. It immediately raises larger questions about responsibility: Who is responsible for creating this technology and determining its use cases? Who benefits, who is harmed? How can tech justice be built into the foundation, not bolted on as an afterthought? From a creative perspective, VR is a fantastic way to visualise complex ideas and to walk and talk through these ideas with others. Still, this vision must be anchored in human-centred accountability, community, inclusive design and development.

The somatic strategy: Embodying the transformative journey

If the VR dreamspace helps us design the destination (the imagined Ustopia), the second session, focusing on somatic practice with Martin Sherwood, showed us how to navigate the journey and ground our strategy in collective wellbeing. Somatic practice involves using the body as a primary tool for awareness and transformation.

Martin first guided the group through a centring practice and then transitioned into a visualising exercise that helped us explore tech justice through a social-analysis lens. During this practice, the group was invited to move between three distinct decision-making spaces: the first, the second, and the third. Martin invited us to notice how we each felt, physically and mentally, in each of these levels of being: self, in community, and in the universe.

The first space: Isolation, urgency, and resistance

For me, the first space, experienced only through my head and headspace, was a powerful exercise in awareness. I can describe the feeling as ‘effervescent’. The thoughts and actions that sprang to mind felt like they were bubbling over and fizzing. This first space felt like isolated, urgent, and highly intellectualised work.

When invited to consider taking action, I felt a strong sense of resistance to taking action and making decisions over email or through intellectualised channels, particularly in isolation. My somatic response suggests that the current patterns of digital, disembodied work, even when focused on justice, often provoke a physical reaction of overwhelm and inaction, signalling that current digital working norms may either limit or inhibit our capacity to become active agents for effecting change. The body says: This cannot be done alone.

The second space: The power of being held

Taking one physical step back, I entered the second space, which required my body to be present. I found myself adopting a more embodied approach to decision-making with the invitation to do so in community. Visualising taking action with the support of colleagues and the wider tech-justice community shifted my feelings towards decision-making. This shift immediately highlighted the feeling of being held, juxtaposed with feeling isolated in the first space. The second space was clearly one of collective strategy and relational work, and one I found myself deeply wanting to stay in.

The invitation here is powerful: in community, solutions are not only thought but also felt, anchoring them in shared trust, presence, and collective action. This space compels one to move from isolated thinking to relational action, making them more effective and resilient agents for tech justice.

The third space: Vastness and unlearning

Taking one more physical step back into the third space, acknowledging that I exist beyond the body and within the universe, was expansive. It highlighted that even the problems we seek to solve often remain contained within the framework of the second space (community action). Whereas the third space possesses a different energy, way of being, and immense vastness. This expansion of the mind garnered a greater, much-needed perspective.

The invitation of the third space is profound: it calls us to allow shakti (divine energy, often associated with creation and power) to flow. This embodied space offers a moment to pause, reflect, explore, test, and most importantly, unlearn from a grounded position. It does not summon urgency, nor does it demand immediate decisions. Instead, it suggests strengthening inquiries and seeing the bigger picture before leaping into action, empowering us to make decisions rooted in universal context, not only immediate pressure.

Provocations for action

The power of the unconference was in demonstrating that tech justice requires us to engage both the digital imagination and the somatic intelligence. Through this experience, I realised that this embodied, dual approach offers a compelling and robust path forward for the tech justice movement. We can dream of the Ustopian endpoint through VR, but we must also walk the strategic path by strengthening our inquiries, connecting with our bodies, and acting from a place of collective resilience.

As such, I am left with three key provocations which I share with you:

1. The cost of convenience: When convenience is optimised by technology, are the gains in ease and efficiency truly worth the unseen costs to our personal skills, privacy, and community resilience?
2. Form, function, and colonial legacy: How does technology’s drive for ‘universal’ function and data control perpetuate historical colonial biases, and what strategies can we adopt to dismantle these inherited asymmetries in knowledge and power?
3. Generative AI and creativity: Will generative AI destroy the role of creatives, or will it fundamentally redefine that role by becoming the most powerful tool in our arsenal? What checks and balances do we need to ensure we protect creativity, authenticity and creative intelligence?

Both the VR dreamspace and somatic practice feel like tools we can return to as we sit with these questions and make choices about the technologies we build and use. Our next essential step is strengthening the inquiries and identifying the concrete checks and balances needed to move from vision to embodied action.

About Nikita

Nikita Yasmin Shah is the founder of [Hyphen Poetry](http://www.hyphenpoetry.com), an independent consultant, poet and dancer. With over 12 years of experience, Nikita guides organisations across the social justice, climate, and technology sectors to move complex systems thinking from theory into embodied practice. Her work is underpinned by an anti-racist, intersectional feminist, and decolonial methodology, prioritising collective liberation.

Nikita is actively engaged in the tech justice movement. Her research supported the Tech Justice Report and a Manifesto for a Tech Just World. Nikita played two roles in the Tech Justice Roadtrip, including a Circle Member and a partner who led reflective sessions. She has also contributed to knowledge sharing on decolonial evaluation and designed a creative exercise called ‘The glitch in the garden’ in the Tech Justice Roadtrip Zine, which explores our vision for an ustopia. She has also supported Chayn in exploring decoloniality at an organisational level whilst considering the link to tech justice. Most recently, Nikita, with ImpactEd, led the qualitative strand of an evaluation of Google DeepMind’s Research Ready Programme.

Nikita holds an MA in Global Governance from the University of Waterloo and a BA (hons) in Politics from the University of Warwick.

About Hyphen Poetry

***Hyphen Poetry* seeks to decolonise the mind and body using creative practices, including spoken word poetry. The consultancy focuses on four key pillars: research, evaluation, learning, and creative facilitation, working across a broad range of issues linked to social justice, wellbeing and equity. Underpinning this work are principles of anti-oppression, anti-racism, somatics, healing, embodiment, and a commitment to shifting power and systems change.