Lead Forward Webinar Series (Christine Hsu & Sookie Bardwell)

This month's topic: Every Body Changes - Supporting Life-long Movement Access Through a Body Liberation-centred Approach

The Lead Forward Webinar Series is a national virtual learning initiative designed to bring together researchers, practitioners, community leaders, coaches, and organizations working to advance equity, inclusion, leadership, and positive experiences for girls and women in sport and physical activity.

The series will run from July 2026 to January 2027 and will feature monthly sessions focused on research translation, practical strategies, emerging issues, and collaborative dialogue across the sector, prioritizing research from an intersectional lens.

This session will focus on the following topics. Having/being a body is an experience of constant change- always ageing, growing, shifting, and becoming different in all kinds of ways. In this session, we’ll explore how a Body Liberation-centred approach can support greater access to lifelong joyful and functional movement for every body while navigating the many shifts and changes that take place over a human lifespan. Together, we’ll discuss how we can engage in “future forward” thinking that acknowledges and accounts for the reality of our ever changing bodies in the ways in which we discuss bodies and movement, and in the programming that we design. We’ll also cultivate our collective capacity to recognize and address common embodiment-centred violence(s) that impact our relationships with our bodies/selves and show up in movement spaces in ways that can cause harm, impede belonging and limit access, and explore how we can practice anti-violence and harm-reduction in support of greater individual and collective safety and well-being with an approach rooted in an understanding of the Social Model of Disability and Universal Design. Bodies will change, but their inherent worthiness of respect and care doesn’t, and we can all contribute to a movement culture that’s welcoming and accessible for everybody’s changing bodies.