rhizome

SPARKES, A. C. 2007. Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: a story seeking consideration. Qualitative Research, 7, 521.

why: #embodiment

because          this locates and bounds social life; it establishes the requirement to be rigorous in determining the nature of dis/connections: within and between material objects

social life happens within and between bodies – ideas, experiences, metaphors, transformations, sedimentations, echoes and shards of meanings happen within, to, between and surrounding bodies

it is part of an explorations of the socio-material – that bodies are part of the world, part of a social / material continuum

bodies have a racial and a gendered identity – this may not be explicitly brought into the discussion, but they are always and already there – lurking (invisibilised or ignored)

bodies refuse Cartesian dualities – the mind is in / part of the body; knowing can be articulated through the senses: the physicality of ideas

Sparkes (2007) narrates a story about REF that offers no analysis, a story and a series of reactions: with embodiment we notice the physicality  – that attends anger, fear & disappointment

it seems I have chanced upon a sensorial turn in anthropology – one in which ‘Doing Sensory Ethnography investigates the possibilities afforded by attending to the senses in ethnographic research and representation. An acknowledgement that sensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, understand and represent other people’s lives is increasingly central to academic and applied practice in the social sciences and humanities.’

 “ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences.”

PINK, S. 2009. Rethinking ethnography through the senses. Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

it locates literacy within other semiotic means of communication, such as visual and gestural ‘modes’, thereby focussing on ‘multi modality’ or on ‘multi literacies’ rather than on just ‘literacy’ which they see as  less central to the communicative needs of a globalising world (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001; Cope and Kalanztis, 2000).

I have elsewhere made a distinction between ‘quality-as-embodied’ and ‘quality-as-an abstraction’ and now wish to explore this further.

The distinction I made was between a notion of quality that had significant material representation – websites, spiral bound booklets, policy papers but seemed to have no direct lived dimension. This was in contrast to the experiences of practitioners that had clearly articulated and embodied dimensions beyond a written or policy sanctioned frame located within professional motivations and aspirations