Body Pedagogics Research Articles

Exploring Engaged Spirituality through Martial Arts

In this article, through a carnal and participant approach to ethnography, we consider the pedagogical repertoires of Boxe Popolare (a style of boxing codified by Italian leftist grassroots groups) and Odaka Yoga (an innovative type of postural yoga blended with martial arts elements). We provide a close reading of what we call the pedagogies of engagement cultivated by these two practices, appreciating how their underlying spiritual philosophies are internalized in self-reflective projects oriented towards societal transformation. Our analysis draws from Pierrre Bourdieu’s dispositional sociology and the concept of “body pedagogics”. With regards to this framework, we explore the physical-spiritual apprenticeship to Boxe Popolare and Odaka Yoga in relation to the rise of a series of engaged dispositions, which bring practitioners to conceive of their own transformation as a way to encourage social change and support social justice programmes. More specifically, we emphasize the ritual dimensions of these practices, their forms of commitment, and finally their ambivalences regarding contemporary neoliberal governmentality and societal transformation. We conclude by reflecting on how the neoliberal character of contemporary martial activities, too often simply assumed, is socially reproduced—in practice— via specific processes of knowledge transmission; and calling for more attention to the overlaps between different social fields.

Body pedagogics and the corporeal curriculum in “no-excuses” charter schools

Body pedagogics and the corporeal curriculum in “no-excuses” charter schools

Body Pedagogics, Transactional Identities and Human–Animal Relations

The sociology of the body developed as a reaction against Cartesian conceptions of homo clausus that haunted disciplinary thought in the late 20th century but exhibited anthropocentric tendencies in neglecting non-human animals. Building upon recent attempts to address this situation, I develop a transactional approach towards body pedagogics that explores how the shifting borders governing human–animal relations influence people’s embodied identities. Transactions between humans and (other) animals have been an historic constant across contrasting societies, but the patterning of these exchanges is framed by specific cultural body pedagogics. Focusing on the institutional means, characteristic experiences and corporeal outcomes of ‘civilising’ and ‘companionate’ human–animal body pedagogics, I explore the identity-shaping impact of these different modalities of inter-species inter-corporeality and demonstrate the sociological utility of this transactional approach.

Body pedagogics, transactionalism and vélo identities: Becoming a cyclist in motorised societies

Sociological research into the body pedagogics of occupational, educational, religious and sporting groups focuses on cases in which the social and material environment reproduces these ‘ways of life’, yet devotes little attention to how cultures persist within circumstances hostile to their maintenance. Developing a transactionalist approach to body pedagogics, I address this lacuna by investigating the case of cycling within societies dominated by automobility. Cycling, in these contexts, requires individuals to engage creatively with challenging physical and environmental exchanges. Such exchanges frequently alienate but can involve the development of ‘outsider’ mobile status, have been reorganised into stable practices by vélo cultures, and highlight embodied processes relevant to general sociological investigations into marginalised cultures.

Embodying Daoist Internal Arts: Walking the Line between the Reification and the Instrumental Use of Cognition

Existing research into the body pedagogics of cultural practices emphasises tacit/pre-reflective/corporeal knowledge, yet the role of cognition requires further non-dualist/non-conflationist theoretical elaboration. This article contributes to this task through an ethnographic case study of Daoist Internal Arts (DIA) – eastern self-cultivation practices including neigong, qigong and tai chi. Daoist Internal Arts practitioners employ cognitive thought to facilitate a phenomenological shift from a Cartesian/dualist to a non-dualist mode of embodiment whereby mind and body are experienced in their ontological unity. Yet the effective use of thought in this process requires practitioners to walk a fine line between reifying cognition as a substance separate from corporeality, thus opposing mind and body, and utilising it as an instrument to address corporeality and foster mind–body unity. In underscoring this ambivalent character of cognition, I outline a sociological perspective of embodiment that avoids both dualist and conflationist accounts of cognitive and corporeal dimensions.

Embodiment, Relationality and Epistemics: Observations from Alexander Technique Training in Music Master Classes

Following Shilling’s arguments on body pedagogics in sociology, we show how the negotiation of epistemic concerns is central to our understanding of practices of embodied interaction. Using conversation analytic methods, we examine audio and visual data from recordings of tuition in the Alexander Technique to accomplished amateur musicians. Our analysis builds on previous research on the body in pedagogic contexts, and focuses on embodied and discourse practices through which imperceptible changes to the body are warranted, the management of recruitment and agreement to embodied change, and the use of embodied mimicry. We position our approach as a rapprochement between the concerns of the sociology of the body and interactional studies of embodied action.

Body pedagogics, culture and the transactional case of Vélo worlds

During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the ‘body pedagogics’ of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific ‘ways of life’. Focused on practical issues associated with ‘knowing how’ to operate within specific cultures, however, body pedagogic analyses have been less effective at accounting for the incarnation of cultural values. Addressing this limitation, with reference to the radically diverse norms involved historically and contemporarily in ‘vélo worlds’, I develop Dewey’s pragmatist transactionalism by arguing that the social, material and intellectual processes involved in learning physical techniques inevitably entail a concurrent entanglement with, and development of, values.

Situated Abstraction: Body, Speech, and Cognition in 911 Emergency Communication

Drawing on literature on the body and embodiment, body pedagogics, and conversation analysis, this article adopts an integrative approach to the body and seeks to demonstrate the process through which bodily experiences are interpreted and transmitted across individuals, time, and space in the case of 911 emergency communication. With data from three years’ fieldwork in an urban 911 center in the US, the author shows how this process is accomplished in two key steps—foregrounding and visualization—and how this process is patterned by the organizational context of emergency communication.

‘Doing’ competitive swimming: Exploring the skilled practices of the competitive swimming lifeworld

Despite a developing literature on various facets of sporting embodiment, there is currently a research lacuna with regard to in-depth analyses of actually ‘doing’ sporting activities within specific physical cultures. In this article, we address that gap by drawing on a developing theoretical literature in sociological phenomenology to investigate a particular physical–cultural domain. Here, we present and analyse data from an ethnographic study of competitive swimmers undertaken in the UK. Responding to calls to explore the domain of ‘body pedagogics’, we investigate the embodied work involved in the skilled practice of ‘doing’ and learning how to ‘do’ competitive swimming. This embodied work plays a key part in the swimmers’ ability to inhabit the competitive swimming lifeworld. In the analysis, we highlight how the acquisition and ‘habituation’ of these body techniques and skilled behaviours are not achieved simply through the repetitive rehearsal of coherent movements over time. These processes are complex, demanding practical experimentation, discovery and the ability to adapt constantly to changes in the environment and the swimmer’s own corporeality.

Body pedagogics: embodied learning for the health professions.

Bodily dysfunctions bring patients to their doctors and even diseases of the mind can originate in patients' bodies. Doctors respond by using their own bodies - hands, eyes, ears and sometimes noses - to make diagnoses and treat diseases. Yet, despite the embodied nature of practice, medicine typically treats the body as an object, paying scant attention to the subjective embodied experiences of patients and doctors. Much health professions education (HPE) reflects this, prioritising cognition over learners' sense of embodiment. Hence there is a gap between the embodied realities of practice and the disembodied nature of medical education. This article introduces readers to 'body pedagogics' as a framework that can help to re-establish embodiment as a central principle of HPE. This embodiment theory, drawn from sociology, anthropology and phenomenology, has informed such disparate fields as glassblowing education and military training. Body pedagogics emphasises learning as a physically embodied process. It illustrates how multisensory experience causes embodied changes that become an automatic part of physician expertise. We introduce core body pedagogic concepts using physical examination as an example, examining the bodily means of HPE, students' bodily experiences and the resulting bodily changes. Body pedagogics can help us to focus attention on embodiment as a central principle of HPE that transcends the discipline-specific teaching of clinical skills. Moreover, it provides a set of conceptual foundations for an interdisciplinary practice within HPE with implications for instructional design. Body pedagogics can also help us to make strange the habits and disregarded aspects of embodied learning and in so doing help us to consider embodiment more critically and directly in practice and education, and in the ways we research them.

Embodying Teaching: A Body Pedagogic Study of a Teacher\u2019s Movement Rhythm in the \u2018Sloyd\u2019 Classroom

The article draws on body pedagogics and considers that teaching and learning experiences and outcomes are directly related to the different characteristics of movement behaviour. In this article movement behaviour specifically centres on a sloyd (handicraft education) teacher’s walk through the classroom. The analysis illuminate the specific teaching use of the body as a spatial, temporal and situational movement rhythm in the classroom and how teachers and pupils tune into educational discourses by means of different body techniques. A wireless GoPro camera was attached to the teacher’s chest in order to gain detailed view of pupil–teacher–body–material–tool encounters and a specific visual perspective of the sloyd teacher’s walk. During a 2.5 years fieldwork, 25 wood–metal sloyd lessons were observed and recorded (circa 50 h of video). The study is informed by Dewey’s embodied theory of learning and focus the alternation between active and passive phases in the stream of experience. From such Deweyan perspective the rhythm of an activity for organising experience, is fundamental to the creation of intelligent moving habits. The results show the body pedagogic experiences, outcomes and means by highlighting the teacher’s (a) spatial path by describing mutual relationships between the material arrangement of the classroom, the teacher’s bodily movements and the pupils’ participation in the lesson, (b) temporal pace by his ‘flights and perchings’ through the lessons and how he moves from pupil to pupil and assignment to assignment, (c) specific pacts by describing body techniques and situated teacher–pupil encounters that terminate in an agreement about how to proceed.

Conference Baby: Gendered Bodies, Knowledge, and Re/Turning to Academia

Inspired by children’s nursery rhymes, this research poem is an autoethnographic exploration of the processes of bodily learning that takes place in the neoliberal university and what it is like to bring a baby along to a conference. The academic conference is a key site for academic socialization and the passing on of norms and values. In focusing on the body pedagogics of the academic conference, this poem reveals how different discourses of academic work, knowledge, and gender equity are communicated through bodies and become naturalized in academic cultures and values. It also rethinks the division between productive and reproductive labor when returning to academia.

Embodying culture: Body pedagogics, situated encounters and empirical research

Contemporary research into the field of body pedagogics has produced a growing number of studies concerned with the embodied character of cultural transmission, experience, reproduction and change. This article advances this sociological development by reinterpreting recent writings on situated epistemic relations (SER) and practical epistemological analysis (PEA) as complementary, methodological, techniques that can enhance these investigations. After outlining existing explorations into the body pedagogics of occupational, sporting, religious, educational and other cultures, the author demonstrates how the interlinked approaches to learning made possible by systematizing SER and PEA can be developed into a new approach that increases the effectiveness with which the theoretical and empirical concerns of studies into embodied acculturation are harnessed.

The ‘body pedagogics’ of an elite footballer’s career path – analysing Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography

ABSTRACTBackground: Pedagogical research on career is encouraged to not limit sport learning to athletic skills, coaching effectiveness and coach–athlete relationships, but to also focus on learning in a multidimensional sense in the context of an athlete’s individual and social biography. This article examines an elite athlete’s career path as a body pedagogic phenomenon involving processes of self-transformation in relation to practical, social and embodied environments.Purpose: The purpose is to analyse the career path of the elite footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic by focusing on how different learning environments relate to different embodiments of techniques and skills and how values and norms shape professionalism.Theoretical frameworks: A combined framework of body pedagogics and John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience is used to understand an elite career path as a learning trajectory involving different self-transformation means. Hence, the elite athlete is viewed as a career climber who creates his own educational pathway and engages in processes of participating, acquiring and becoming.Data analysis: A practical epistemology analysis (PEA) with a focus on aesthetic judgements is used to analyse the narrative of Zlatan’s career path as it is portrayed in the biography I Am Zlatan: My Story on and Off the Field. One major theme is identified, namely that Zlatan develops from being a dribbler to a striker. Against this background, Zlatan Ibrahomovic’s self-transformation is scrutinised in relation to three different sub-themes (suburb, arena and team) in three different ways (auto-didactic, education and educator) to create distinct and heterogeneous forms of knowledge in support of professional artistry.Results: The analysis offers an elaborated empirical description of how the means and ends of self-transformation develop reciprocally throughout Zlatan’s elite career and how this relates to practical, social and embodied environments. Examples of body pedagogic outcomes are: (1) different commitments to training, team culture and the coach–athlete relationship (social), (2) that Zlatan uses his dribbling skills more purposefully for scoring goals and satisfying the coach (embodied) and (3) that he is able to win different leagues and titles with different teams (practical).

Body Pedagogics: Embodiment, Cognition and Cultural Transmission

This article contributes to the growing sociological concern with body pedagogics; an embodied approach to the transmission and acquisition of occupational, sporting, religious and other culturally structured practices. Focused upon the relationship between those social, technological and material means through which institutionalized cultures are transmitted, the experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of this process, existing research highlights the significance of body work, practical techniques and the senses to these pedagogic processes. What has yet to be explicated adequately, however, is the embodied importance of cognition to this incorporation of culture. In what follows, I address this lacuna by building on John Dewey’s writings in proposing an approach to body pedagogics sympathetic to the prioritization of physical experience but that recognizes the distinctive properties and capacities of thought and reflexivity in these processes.

Embodying Meaning: Qualities, Feelings, Selective Attention, and Habits

ABSTRACTRecently, there has been increasing pedagogical interest in the qualities and characteristics of movement. This article examines these qualities and characteristics in terms of John Dewey’s distinction between abstract, linguistic significant meanings and concrete, embodied imminent meanings. Imminent meanings are comprised of intuitive qualities, feelings, selective attention, and habits. We examine each of these in turn in hopes of better understanding the learning of “body techniques” while illuminating some important aspects of body pedagogics.

A Transactional Way of Analysing the Learning of ‘Tacit Knowledge’

Methodological challenges point to a reconceptualization of ‘tacit knowledge’ to ‘tacit knowing’. The paper outlines the concept of ‘tacit knowing’ and explores the need for educational research to reformulate questions about tacit knowledge as a practical learning concern. Using John Dewey’s transactional perspective on learning ‘tacit knowing’ is analysed as embodiment of knowledge. An approach of ‘body pedagogics’ is used to frame this analysis. From a perspective of ‘body pedagogics’ our bodily being and the actions we perform as such beings cannot be reduced to neither cultural nor subjective experience. Rather, we are in a continuing educating process when it comes to our bodies (Shilling and Mellor 2007, p. 533). On the background of this a transactional model of learning is developed that recognises educative bodily experiences in relation to ‘tacit knowing’. A sailing vignette is used to show that ‘tacit knowing’ becomes visible in a sailor’s embodied inquiry of which situated epistemic relations it is necessary to embody to acquire a certain ‘body technique’. Empirical focus lies on how dinghy sailors grow into purposeful ‘body techniques’ (Mauss, Econ Soc 2(1):70–88, 1973) by taking the measure of their ongoing, continuous experience while coordinating their movements with the environment. The analysis show how understandings and bodily skills are simultaneously used in the educational situation where the dinghy sailor has to handle both the environment and various instructions given by the trainer. Thus, ‘tacit knowing’ in dinghy sailing is not merely a collection of motor skills, but rather the grasping, in the practical embodied way, of physical principles.

Adventurous activities, embodiment and nature: spiritual, sensual and sustainable? Embodying environmental justice

This paper examines research on adventurous physical activities in nature from the perspective of the sentient body. Drawing upon ethnographic and autoethnographic research, I examine what has been termed 'peak' happenings or 'flow' which many who practise adventurous activities claim to experience through their whole body when in the 'zone'. I consider the concept of 'edgework', voluntary risk-taking, and insightful mobile and social understanding of the relationships between body, emotions and the elements, where the adventurous activity is experienced and interpreted as oneness with nature or expressed as 'spiritual' not only in high but also low risk nature-based sport. I then consider if and in what ways these knowledges may bring about greater understanding and action in relation to social and environmental justice. I argue that adventurous activities/nature-based sport may provide processes and practices that are alternative or complementary to traditional sporting 'body techniques' or 'body pedagogics'. I suggest that modern embodied adventurous practices in nature challenge dominant narratives of body/mind separation and potentially provide a pedagogic process fostering kinetic empathy. Finally I draw attention to the paradox of (re)-presenting sensorial experiences of sport in nature and ask for consideration on how we interconnect with the environment when we participate in adventureous nature-based sports.

I am sailing—towards a transactional analysis of ‘body techniques’

In recent years there has been a growing interest in questions related to embodiment and learning. Within the field of ‘body pedagogics’ great efforts have been made to develop theory and methodology that can deal with the corporeal aspects of experience and knowledge without adopting any form of dualistic conceptions of body/mind and organism/environment. This article connects to this body of research. The purpose is to first present a synthesis of James' radical empiricism, Dewey's transactional understanding of experience and learning and Marcel Mauss' concept of ‘body techniques’ and the notion of education embedded in it. Against the background of this theoretical development, and with a Transactional Model of Analyzing Bodying (TMAB), we then show how we can analytically come to terms with different dualistic problems that research into ‘body pedagogics’ has to deal with. We use an empirical example of dinghy sailing to create knowledge about what we learn when learning embodied knowledge, and how this learning takes place. We argue that experience is an important concept for understanding the acting knowing human being, describing how experience is organized and developed and outlining how this organization can be understood as learning. We hold that situations where someone learns to embody certain knowledge are cases of overt actions, in which we can see what kinds of relations are created and how these relations become meaningful for further action.

Embodiment and social and environmental action in nature-based sport: spiritual spaces

This paper explores the interrelationship of space, the elements and the embodied experiences of water-based physical activity. It draws upon alternative forms of research and representation to draw out the embodied nature of the experiences in exploring the practices of windsurfing amongst communities of windsurfers. It proposes that ethnography and autoethnography can provide for unique insights into the embodied experiences of the life-worlds of ‘being’ in nature. These inter-related methodologies provide particular insights into understanding when the body, grounded through its senses, makes sense of and interacts with its natural surroundings. It argues that autoethnography may provide methodologies for understanding and analysing connections between personal embodied nature-based experiences, culture and nature. This paper brings into play personal experience in windsurfing and autoethnographies of other nature-based sport to uncover connections between body, affects, emotions and the senses as the body engages with natural elements. It engages with expressions of spirituality, as alternative to ‘flow’, and the speculative notion of kinetic empathy to propose the concept of body pedagogics as analytically useful in exploring social and environmental action in local and global spaces.