Embodying Academia

This pilot project explores embodied learning in anthropology and asks: What kinds of creative potential for research can be released and nurtured by explicitly training kinesthetic and affective sensitivities and attention? The study explores current anthropological research and teaching practices and, experimentally, brings three alternative embodied learning methodologies into these: contact improvisation, storytelling, and bodily-emotion-attention training. Anthropology is an especially privileged site to examine embodied knowledge practices, due to the centrality of the researcher’s body and emotions in fieldwork and analysis. Our aim is to advance knowledge of bodies as agents and resources in academic knowledge-making more generally. The study brings together a team of collaborators with experiences in embodied learning methodologies: Aja Smith (post doc), Joe Dumit, Kathleen Stewart, Donna Hurford, Andreas Roepstorff and Anne Line Dalsgård (PI).