New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment

Abstract

This paper introduces the contents of the special issue whose authors, in our view, together demonstrate the need for transdisciplinary study of body pedagogies focussed on embodiment, emplacement, enactment and subjectivity. We celebrate theoretical and methodological diversity in the social sciences while calling for border crossings between the disciplines and perspectives of the social and bio-physical sciences in the interest of better understanding how social and cultural reproduction occurs both within schools and beyond them.

Keywords:

• Embodiment
• Emplacement
• Enactment
• Subjectivity
• Socio-cultural reproduction

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to Michael Gard for his comments on an earlier version of this introduction.

Notes

1. The ‘pedagogic device’ is ‘a grammar for producing specialised messages, realisations, and a grammar which regulates what it processes: a grammar which orders and positions and yet contains the potential of its own transformations’ (Bernstein, 1990, p. 190) (in Moore, 2006, p. 30). We use the term ‘corporeal device’ to focus on ‘the body not just as a discursive representation and rely of messages and power relations external to itself but as a voice of itself. As a material/physical conduit it has an internal grammar and syntax given by the intersections of biology and culture and the predilections of class which regulate (facilitate and constrain) embodied action and consciousness’ (Evans et al., 2011, p. 180)

2. ‘A discourse is a structurally coherent domain of language use—along with the activities associated with the use of that language—that organises and constrains what can be said, done, and thought. Every discourse has its own distinctive set of rules, usually operating implicitly, that govern the production of what is to count as meaningful and/or true. Discourses always function in relation to or in opposition to other discourses. No discourse stands alone, although some (such as fundamentalist religion, scientism, or modernism) lay claim to a certain totalised and exclusive understanding of the universe. By attending to evolutionary pace, complexity thinking enables and compels a simultaneous appreciation of the insights of such disparate discourses as post-structuralism and analytic science. Notably, as a collective, educational researchers have acknowledged this point’. (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 37).

3. In his forthcoming book Karl Maton argues that because relations between stances and knower's are mediated by what he terms ‘the axiological cosmology’, the ‘nature of this moral order becomes a key concern for actors in these [segmented] kinds of fields, leading to an emphasis on the moral or political connotations of language rather than its epistemological import’. (See Maton, forthcoming, Chapter 9).