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Humanities
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With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied
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With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2023) | Viewed by 14950

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Tara Page

E-Mail Website1 Website2
Guest Editor
Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths University of London, London SE14 6NW, UK
Interests: praxic entanglements of making and learning; new materialist theories; embodied and material practice research methods and methodologies; artistic, pedagogic, and research practices

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Bodies and things are not as separate as we were once taught, and their intra-relationship is vital to how we come to know ourselves as humans and how we learn and know our environments—our place-worlds [1].

In 1994, bell hooks conceived of pedagogy as a ‘union of the mind, body and spirit, not just for striving for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world’ (15); using this conception, practices and theories of teaching and learning can be understood as an entanglement of the body with the world (social and material), which can be both learnt from and utilized to teach from. So, the body–bodies are complex intra-actions (Barad, 2007) of the social and affective, where embodiment is a process of intra-actions with other bodies—the body–bodies—and these practices of embodiment are the core of our ways of knowing, learning, and being.

This is a call for contributions to a Special Issue of Humanities, which will present research and research processes that are embodied, affective, and relational to explore the complex materialities of bodies. Contributions might explore this topic through a focus on methodology, theoretical framework/s, or political positioning—such as through bodies immersed in social relations of power. This Special Issue aims to examine how we are always with–in bodies, and how research assemblages work the entanglements of bodies with–in matter, bodies with–in theory, bodies with–in practice, bodies with–in research, and bodies with–in other bodies—to develop the new, disrupt the current, and bring together knowledges and understandings of embodiment across disciplines and place-worlds.

This Special Issue of Humanities openly encourages and supports submissions that entangle practice with research, theory with practice, bodies with–in methods, and ultimately work in the spaces between disciplines. This Special Issue seeks to enable a place that enriches, extends, and disrupts the ways we do, make, think about, and talk about research with–in bodies; submissions that work in the spaces between traditional forms of scholarship and research outputs—i.e., text-based articles and the archival, documentary, oral, material, visual, or material—are encouraged.

Reference

[1] A particular place that has specific and particular forms of human and non-human socio-material knowledges, performances, and practices (Page, 2020, 10). 

Dr. Tara Page
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information 

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • bodies
  • embodiment
  • sensory
  • research
  • practice
  • social
  • material

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 2451 KiB  
Article
Dorsal Practices—Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World
by Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 63; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020063 - 7 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1578
Abstract
Dorsal Practices is a process-based, interdisciplinary artistic collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer–artist Emma Cocker. This research enquiry explores the notion of dorsality and the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to the self, [...] Read more.
Dorsal Practices is a process-based, interdisciplinary artistic collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer–artist Emma Cocker. This research enquiry explores the notion of dorsality and the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to the self, others (human, more-than-human), and interconnected world. Since 2021, Dorsal Practices has unfolded through the interrelation of three fields of experimental, embodied research practice: movement-based practices, conversation practices, and experimental reading practices. Dorsal Practices explores how the tilt or inclination towards dorsal (dis)orientation might enable new modes of thinking–perceiving and being–with, and more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness based on the reciprocal, entangled relationship between self/environment. We ask: How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our embodied, affective, and relational experience of being-in-the-world? Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? Central to this enquiry is an attempt to explore how different linguistic practices might be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality: how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied)
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16 pages, 303 KiB  
Article
A Thousand Concepts and the Participating Body: Concept Play Workshops at Kunsthall 3,14
by Heidi Marjaana Kukkonen
Humanities 2024, 13(1), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010011 - 8 Jan 2024
Viewed by 2055
Abstract
Participation has become the keyword in museum and gallery education during the past decades. However, the focus on participation might contain neoliberalist tendencies, creating more entertainment and consumerism than art. In this study based on practice-based research, I explore a gallery educational method [...] Read more.
Participation has become the keyword in museum and gallery education during the past decades. However, the focus on participation might contain neoliberalist tendencies, creating more entertainment and consumerism than art. In this study based on practice-based research, I explore a gallery educational method to mediate contemporary art to primary and high school students inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s process philosophy and new materialist theory–practice. What kind of roles can the method of Concept Play Workshop create for the participating body and how can it challenge neoliberal tendencies in museum and gallery education? In the workshops, children and young people create philosophical concepts with contemporary art, dialogue-based practices and artistic experiments in the exhibition space of Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, Norway. I argue that the method can create philosophizing, critical, uncomfortable, resting, dictatorial and protesting bodies. Representational logic becomes challenged, and discomfort and resistance become educational potential. The method creates multiple and overlapping roles for the participating body, shifting the focus towards multiplicities instead of the passive/active binary. Humans are not the only participating bodies, but attention is given to agential matter, contesting human-centeredness. The study is a contribution to the field of post-approaches in gallery and museum education. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied)
17 pages, 551 KiB  
Article
How Does a Collective Body Arrive, Move, and Learn? Becoming through Practice-Based Research as a Stringing-(Em)bodying Process
by Mireia Ludevid Llop, Jonathan Martin, Ben McDonnell, Sara Ortolani, Molly Pardoe, Clare Stanhope and Ana Vicente Richards
Humanities 2024, 13(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010009 - 4 Jan 2024
Viewed by 2467
Abstract
This practice-based paper explores the methods of answering the question: what is our collective body? This article offers a case study of collaborative research and seeks to enact a collective body as a means of transgressing and occupying individuated neoliberal spaces of higher [...] Read more.
This practice-based paper explores the methods of answering the question: what is our collective body? This article offers a case study of collaborative research and seeks to enact a collective body as a means of transgressing and occupying individuated neoliberal spaces of higher education. Understanding the processes through which knowledge is collectively built highlights the in-becoming nature of practice-based research and the enabling forces of this inquiry. The methods enacted access a particular rendering of how we understand ourselves as a collective; we answer the question through doing together. The ways we encounter the collective enable understanding around the shifting boundaries of the individual–collective connection, made palpable by a string. Through playful forms of dissent, such as embodied, remembered, and writing encounters, enable connections with others and inspire a refocusing of our individual practices. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied)
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15 pages, 7257 KiB  
Article
The Letter Cloth: Sensory Modes of the Epistolary in Prison Theatre Practice
by Molly McPhee
Humanities 2023, 12(6), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060139 - 28 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1665
Abstract
In this article, I explore performances of letter writing within the archives of the London-based theatre company Clean Break, who work with justice-experienced women and women at risk. Clean Break’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London contains an extensive collection of production [...] Read more.
In this article, I explore performances of letter writing within the archives of the London-based theatre company Clean Break, who work with justice-experienced women and women at risk. Clean Break’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London contains an extensive collection of production ephemera and letters. Charting the company’s development across forty years of theatre productions, public advocacy, and work in prisons and community settings, these materials of the archive—strategic documents, annotated playscripts and rehearsal notes, production photography and correspondence—reveal the acute importance of the letter to people living on the immediate borderlands of the prison. Despite these generative resonances, however, the epistolary form is very rarely used in Clean Break’s theatre: as the archive reveals, since the company was founded by two women in HM Prison Askham Grange in 1979, stagings of letters have occurred in only a handful of instances. In this archival exploration of the epistolary in three works by Clean Break—a film broadcast by the BBC, a play staged at the Royal Court, and a circular chain-play written by women in three prisons—I investigate what lifeworlds beyond prison epistolary forms in performance propose. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied)
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16 pages, 3798 KiB  
Article
Kinesthetic Experience: Emancipatory Corporeal Scores
by Celia Vara Martín
Humanities 2023, 12(6), 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060138 - 24 Nov 2023
Viewed by 2717
Abstract
This article investigates the corporeal practices by the Catalonian artist Fina Miralles (b.1950) in some of her performances during the 1970s. I specifically focus my analysis on the manner in which the artist verifies the existence of her body under the acute political [...] Read more.
This article investigates the corporeal practices by the Catalonian artist Fina Miralles (b.1950) in some of her performances during the 1970s. I specifically focus my analysis on the manner in which the artist verifies the existence of her body under the acute political restrictions on the body during the last years of Francoism (1939–1975). I argue that she does this by a process of sensorial investigations, which include painting, filming and touching natural elements, and moving them and leaving different types of tracks, which lead to generating corporeal scores and body mapping. I elaborate on the way that producing corporeal sensorial knowledge generated from her body mapping and kinaesthetic knowledge is a transgressive and emancipatory feminist intervention. My argument is that kinesthesia generates a process of body-mapping awareness within the body and its movement, which reinforces a sensorial way of knowledge that leads to a reconstitution of the body that function as corporeal agency. Based on feminist theories of embodiment and agency, taking the Carrie Noland concept of kinesthesia (2009) as a central analytical tool, and with a background as a psychologist, I approach this research with embodied methodologies (conversations with the artist, recreation of her actions, etc.) and draw mainly from research-creation methods and kinaesthetic empathy. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied)
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11 pages, 224 KiB  
Article
Mutual Doings: Exploring Affectivity in Participatory Methodologies
by Karin Gunnarsson
Humanities 2023, 12(6), 131; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060131 - 6 Nov 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1615
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore the affective implications of working with participatory methodologies within the context of sexuality education. For this exploration, a feminist posthumanist approach is put to work, building on a relational ontology and the notions of affectivity, [...] Read more.
The aim of this paper is to explore the affective implications of working with participatory methodologies within the context of sexuality education. For this exploration, a feminist posthumanist approach is put to work, building on a relational ontology and the notions of affectivity, assemblage and environmentality. Drawing from a practice-based research project concerning sexuality education conducted together with teachers in Swedish secondary schools, the analysis puts forward how the research assemblage navigates and manages affective conditions in ways that produce, allow and exclude certain feelings. With (dis)trust, uncertainty, frustration, laughter and shame, the assemblage made bodies act and become in specific ways. Thus, the analysis shows how participatory and practice-based research become moulded by power relations and intense flows of desire working together. This raises questions about how participatory methodologies within an ontological view of interdependence afford to manage affective intensities to move in certain directions of socially just sexuality education. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied)
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