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Background: What difference does embodied and artistic practice make for how early-career-researchers relate to themselves, each other, and well-being as a relational, ecological process within academic communities? Amid ecological crisis, social fragmentation, and pervasive stress, EcoSomatics emerges at the intersection of art, science, and well-being. It understands health as a living, relational process unfolding within bodies, communities, and academic environments.

Objectives: This workshop investigates how embodied and artistic practices foster well-being across individual, collective, and ecological levels among early-career-researchers. Rather than defining EcoSomatics, it explores what difference it makes as a lens and practice, shifting attention from isolated selfhood toward relational, process-based belonging. It asks what becomes possible when the body is experienced as a living organism within interdependent systems, and how an embodied, ecological perspective can strengthen belonging and well-being in academic contexts.

Methods: Participants engage in embodied research through artistic practices, movement, sensory attention, ritual, reflective dialogue, scientific inquiry, and listening practices. The workshop functions as a living laboratory, a temporary ecology in which perception, embodiment, and relational presence generate shared sense-making and situated knowledge.

Insights: Participants report shifts in bodily awareness, relational dynamics, and their sense of embeddedness within larger social and ecological contexts, alongside increased responsiveness and mutual support.

Conclusion: EcoSomatics offers an alternative way of relating, sensing, and participating within the academic ecosystem. By weaving art and science into lived experience, it supports practices of re-membering – reconnecting body, society, and ecosystem as co-creative partners in health.