Activating Embodied Imagination During COVID-19: A Performative Reflexive Autoethnography.

Mark B DeGarmo

doi:10.1177/1077800420962474

Abstract

Embodied imagination is a learning theory that reverses the accepted Western “think first, then act” learning sequence though movement improvisation followed by reflection and reflective methods across verbal and nonverbal, including embodied-kinesthetic, modalities. Healing the Cartesian divide might have positive effects on world cultures and people across socioeconomic strata, especially urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic as multiple disruptions to daily life have quickly increased uncertainty and stress, compromising health and well-being, especially of traditionally marginalized excluded People of Color. Expanding the performative reflexive autoethnographic project through embodied imagination broadens and deepens this global, transcultural, transdisciplinary effort through the human body, traditionally not considered human thinking’s locus. Benefits across global societies include greater self-care, the ability to act effectively quickly in response to a world with exponentially increasing complexity, and awareness that creativity is a global communitarian human birthright, not a rarity relegated to exceptional people.

Highlights

Overlapping global crises confront the United States
The COVID-19 pandemic might characterize ours as the “Century of Pandemic,” as the 20th earned “Century of Genocide (Kapuściński, 2001)
Bricolage and Performative Reflexive Autoethnography Bricoleurs are obsessed with recovering meanings about the physical, social, political, psychological, and educational worlds that have been lost, that have fallen through the disciplinary cracks of modernism

Summary

Global Crises

Overlapping global crises confront the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic might characterize ours as the “Century of Pandemic,” as the 20th earned “Century of Genocide (Kapuściński, 2001). Awareness is growing, albeit slowly and without consensus, among the White geographically dispersed general public that U.S genocide and slavery built the country’s and possibly their own wealth, and never ended with treaties and abolition These massive legacies continue to inform, pollute, and undermine U.S social, educational, political, economic, housing, healthcare, and police funding and enforcement policies and practices. With aging, embodied imagination is not a tight circling or spiraling It is a flow of movement whether through air or water with much broader loops, more akin to submerging and surfacing in the water that create a pattern more like an eddy or reverberations of ripples.

Will my loved ones ever hold me?

Will i?

Who am i?”

Author Biography