Educational Embodiments: Life Writing the Body (Research in Life Writing and Education)

Educational Embodiments: Life Writing the Body focuses on life writing that centers body politics and embodiment in educational spaces. The aim of the book is to consider, examine, and voice the lived, fleshy, textured body as a site of politics, a site of embodied educative experiences, and a site of learning and teaching. Researchers and educators alike have long championed the disembodied researcher and teacher as the ideal collectors and vehicles for knowledge production and emphasized the intellect over the body in pedagogies, analyses, and fieldwork. We are always enfleshed in diverse ways in various locales, always changing, moving, becoming, aging, singing, aching, growing, becoming marred and scarred and stronger and bigger, and smaller again. We are embodied with others, interacting with other body-mind-souls that awaken interrelational proxemics and kinesthetic experiences.

Educational Embodiments offers perspectives from which scholars, teachers, and students can draw to support their work. The 14 chapters in this collection attend to national, international, and local concerns, include varied theoretical and methodological approaches, and reflect a range of class, ethnic, and racial heritages. Chapters consider practical, theoretical, ethical, and educational issues. The authors include established and emerging scholars. The book sparks conversation, debate, and reflection and is a valuable resource that inspires scholarship about how embodied intersections shape the life-writing inquiry process.

Lucy E. Bailey is Professor in Social Foundations, Qualitative Inquiry, and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at Oklahoma State University, USA.

KaaVonia Hinton is a Professor in the Teaching & Learning Department at Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA.