Body poetic: uncovering an educational panopticon

Abstract

The speed of change in education-- driven by disease, surveillance capitalism, and technology-- has overtaken us. To collapse this dromological velocity and allow educators to carve out space for sense-making (and to catch our breath) we co-created a paper designed to frame the consideration of what these alterations mean for our craft as educators, and more broadly, our lives as human beings. Thus, we cobbled together, through rhyzomatic connections, a shared story of experience enabled through the meaning making of poetry and guided by a question: what does it mean to erode the last of our private space in service of learning objectives and how does this reveal a larger narrative over the state control of bodies, more saliently women’s bodies, in contemporary higher education? We challenge, we play promiscuously with form and theory, and we discover cracks in the plateau. Through this poetic exploration, we hope to uncover a path forward, re-narrating our identities and making connections in more agentic, embodied ways.