In print · on paper · on the record
Where my work has lived in the wider world — magazine features, peer-reviewed journals, and chapters in edited volumes.
Featured anthology · 2024
Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change.
Sará King contributes the chapter “Healing by Practicing Loving-Awareness-in-Action,” co-authored with Davion “Zi” Starchild — appearing alongside Jacoby Ballard, Leslie Booker, Kerri Kelly, Hala Khouri, Tessa Hicks Peterson, Taj James, Nkem Ndefo, and Valorie Thomas in a gathering of scholar-activists asking how movements might practice the world they are working to build.
The book offers a pathway for transforming the effects of trauma, injustice, and oppressive structures — personally, in community, and systemically. It asks how we can align our values with our daily operations, resist urgency culture even when the work is urgent, and make space for healing, imagination, and beloved community inside the long arc of change.
“A powerful resource that can be used by those who work tirelessly for justice but also understand the need to maintain balance and wellness. What a treasure during these turbulent times.”
— Pedro A. Noguera, PhD · Dean, USC Rossier School of Education
Dissertation · 2017 · UCLA
A Complex Web of Relationships and Resilience in the Search for Student Well-Being.
This is where the work began for me — the ground the Science of Social Justice grew up out of. A close, careful look at nine students of color in an urban, low-SES school participating in a classroom-based yoga, meditation, and mindfulness intervention called For Youth (FY) — and at the relationships that held the intervention up.
The dissertation argues something I have not stopped thinking about since: you cannot disentangle the impact of contemplative practices from the human relationships that carry them into a room. What students were healed by was never only the practice. It was the practice and the people, woven together. The findings ask researchers and educators to take that seriously — to redefine well-being for marginalized students, to ask what emotional resilience actually requires, and to build interventions that honor both.
“Researchers cannot disentangle the impact of the relationships that students have with the adult stakeholders who implement these interventions, from the effect of the practices of yoga, meditation and/or mindfulness themselves.”
— From the abstract
Section one
Profiles, interviews, and features in publications whose readers cared to look closely.
Mindful · mindful.org
A feature on the bridge between contemplative neuroscience and the work of collective liberation — and why the bridge has to be built from both sides at once.
Mindful · mindful.org
Named among ten women shaping the contemporary mindfulness field — alongside teachers and scholars who have made this field what it is.
Yoga Journal
A profile alongside other yogis whose practice has reached beyond the mat into questions of justice, healing, and what a public yoga can be.
Non Profit Quarterly · nonprofitquarterly.org
On the role of art in collective healing — what it can do that policy alone cannot.
Note: authorship to be confirmed — this piece may belong under a future "Essays for external publications" section.
Voyage LA · voyagela.com
A local Q&A on how MindHeart began, what the early work looked like in Long Beach, and what the long road has taught.
Section two
Academic articles published in peer-reviewed venues.
Thomas Philip & Sará Y. Benin (now King) · Journal of Teacher Education · 2013
A peer-reviewed examination of how programs of teacher education shape, reproduce, or interrupt the formation of white teacher identity — co-authored during graduate study at UCLA.
Sará King · The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry · 2022 · ~9,000 words
The framework paper proposing that social justice and well-being are the same thing, and introducing the Systems-Based Awareness Model (SBAM) as a visual extension of the argument. The intellectual spine of the body of work.
Sará King & Selma Quist-Moëller · Routledge Mindfulness and Education Series · 2022
A peer-reviewed examination of what contemporary neuroscience can and cannot say about the relationship between contemplative practice and ethical behavior — co-authored with Selma Quist-Moëller.
Sará King & Selma Quist-Moëller · Routledge Mindfulness and Education Series · 2022
A second peer-reviewed piece co-authored with Quist-Moëller, taking up human rights as a spiritual practice — what it means for ethics to live in the body and in the relational sphere rather than only in law.
More peer-reviewed work will live here as it is gathered — OHSU postdoctoral work and other journal articles. Send the citations as they crystallize and I will fold them in.
Section three
Chapters and contributions to edited volumes.
Sará King · The Yoga and Body Image Routledge Series · 2020
A chapter on yoga as a practice of return for the body shaped by chronic homelessness — written from inside the body that lived it, and from inside the science that holds it.
Sará King & Davion “Zi” Starchild · in Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change, ed. Tessa Hicks Peterson & Hala Khouri · North Atlantic Books · 2024
A chapter co-authored with Davion “Zi” Starchild on loving-awareness as a daily, embodied practice of liberation — featured prominently at the top of this page.
More anthology contributions will live here as they are published. Send new chapter citations and I will fold them in.
California · Photo: Sará King