New Directions in Social Theory, Education and Embodiment

John Evans, Brian Davies

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415839365
• eBook ISBN: 9781317849797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book exemplifies the nurturing spirit of inter-discursive debate with a view to opening up new theoretical and empirical insights, understanding, and engagement, with debates on issues relating to pedagogy, policy, equity and embodiment. From a variety of social science perspectives, an international force of contributors apply a multitude of concepts to research agendas which illustrate the multiple ways in which 'the body' both impacts culture and is simultaneously and seamlessly positioned and shaped by it, maintaining social reproduction of class and cultural hierarchies and social regulation and control. They attest that once we begin to trace the flow of knowledge and discourses across continents, countries, regions and communities by registering their re-contextualisation, both within various popular pedagogies (e.g., newspapers, film, TV, web pages, IT) and the formal and informal practices of schools, families and peers, we are compelled to appreciate the bewildering complexity of subjectivity and the ways in which it is embodied. Indeed, the chapters suggest that no matter how hegemonic or ubiquitous discursive practices may be, they inevitably tend to generate both intended and unexpected 'affects' and 'effects': people and populations cannot easily be 'determined', suppressed or controlled.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport, Education and Society.

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

John Evans^a and Brian Davies^b

^aLoughborough University, UK; ^bCardiff University, UK

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.

Introduction

Knowledge relations: within and between

Where might we begin analyses of the ‘body in society’, ‘body pedagogies’ and the psycho-socio, political and cultural functions they serve? A more ‘embodied’ sociology that better recognised itself as relational social practice would attend to sentient individuals with attendant emotions, value systems, preferences and interests to serve. It would be capable of acknowledging that social organisation, relations and knowledge structures both shape and constrain understanding of how social injustices are perpetrated and maintained in relation to class, gender, ability, race, age, education and poverty in fast changing, volatile social worlds. In doing so we ought to begin by examining the theoretical orthodoxies and perspectives to which we have grown accustomed and the knowledge boundaries and conceptual binaries they helped sustain. These have concerned issues, often expressed in binary terms, concerning body-mind relations, agency-structure primacy, micro-macro levels, private-public domains, qualitative-quantitative and formal-informal dimensions and direct-indirect, influences. All have been found wanting, incapable of adequately addressing the complexity of embodied subjectivity and human endeavour of the people, populations and communities we claim to serve. We have turned in recent years to a veritable plethora of perspectives, variously termed constructionist, feminist, postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial and all manner of others pre, parallel and, now, post-post, within sociology and other social sciences in endeavouring to address such matters. Many have sought to press beyond such dualisms so as to better demonstrate the intersections of biology and culture without dissolving each to the other, whether id to ego, or ‘I’ to mere discursive refraction of a governed and regulated ‘We’.

Indeed, as many of the papers in this issue attest, once we begin to trace the flow of knowledge/s, or discourses, across continents, countries, regions and communities, registering their re-contextualisation via and within various popular pedagogies (e.g. newspapers, film, TV, web pages, IT) and the formal and informal practices of schools, families and peers, we are compelled to appreciate the bewildering complexity of embodied subjectivity. In multiple ways ‘the body’ both impacts culture and is simultaneously/seamlessly positioned and shaped by it, maintaining social reproduction of class and cultural hierarchies and social regulation and control. The perspectives represented in this special issue certainly, together, foreground the complexity of processes such as these. They address ways in which attitudes toward and understandings of individual bodies and populations are nurtured and configured both within and in relation to culture, not least by messages concerning knowledge/s and power relations transmitted through public health knowledge, popular pedagogies, formal education policies, the body pedagogies of schooling and informal family and peer practices. Together they offer vivid illustration both of the regulative and unintended, unpredictable outcomes of policies and body pedagogies, confirming that no matter how hegemonic or ubiquitous discursive practices may be, they inevitably tend to generate both intended and unexpected ‘affects’ or ‘effects’. People and populations manifestly cannot easily be ‘determined’, suppressed or controlled.

The contributions to this issue, however, also reflect something of the sociological turn that has occurred in the social sciences of recent years, wherein attention increasingly has centred not just on how individuals and populations are positioned in ‘relation to’ knowledge, discourse and culture, but also ‘relations within’ them. The structure of the relay (pedagogy) itself and how ‘segmented’ knowledge and ‘knower structures’ (Maton, 2006, forthcoming) may help sustain knowledge communities, both within and between the social and physical/bio-sciences and facilitate or constrain accumulation of knowledge, and consequent possibilities for social and educational change. It may indeed be the case that a different kind of Sociology of Education and Physical Education and Health (PEH) is emerging, one that has ‘for some time remained largely unrealised because unrecognised’ (Moore, 2006, p. 30), constituting a shift that takes as its object the specialised discourse of education, the medium of reproduction that is associated with ‘knowledge and the manner of its transmission, acquisition and evaluation’. Bernstein refers to this as the ‘voice of pedagogy’ (1990, p. 190) that is constituted by the pedagogic device¹ (see Maton, 2006; Moore, 2006), illuminating in the process ‘what makes some ideas, texts, actors, group or institutions special or appear to partake of the sacred, and others profane’ (Maton, 2006, p. 44). Such interests, reflected, for example, in Michael Gard’s paper in this issue, have been voiced widely in the social sciences, perhaps most persistently in post-structural social theory, as well as most recently by those espousing a ‘mobility paradigm’ (see Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller & Urry, 2006; Cresswell, 2010) or variants of ‘complexity theory’ (e.g. Morrison, 2006; Davis & Sumara, 2008; Mason, 2008). The latter is an appeal for progress beyond disciplinarity² and toward disciplinary, conceptual and ideational, border crossings both within and between the social and physical sciences in the interests of better addressing substantive interests that are of shared concern. While acknowledging the political and epistemological difficulties of transcending disciplinary boundaries and putting into question the fundamental ‘territorial’ ‘sedentary’ precepts of twentieth-century social science (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 2), such intentions are, indeed, echoed by others and us in this special issue.

In our view, the papers presented here illustrate the benefits of bringing together a variety of perspectives within the social sciences to bear on a shared interest in the nature of embodiment and the part played by ‘body pedagogies’ in its development and processes of social and cultural reproduction. Arguably, in ‘our’ vibrant, sometimes unstable, pick and mix, knowledge-led societies, new possibilities are emerging for intellectual engagements of this kind. ‘Border crossings’ and new associations can develop both ‘organically’ within and across disciplines, inside institutional work places and between ‘contemporary consociates’ who ‘share a community of time without sharing a community of space’ (Zhao, 2004, p. 91). Despite the growth in some countries and contexts of severely curtailing and regressive research assessment exercises, or institutional orthodoxies presaging retreat to narrow disciplinary, rather than trans-disciplinary, associations and ideals a new social science lexicon has emerged of recent years. This not only speaks of assemblage, polyphony and hybridity in the meaning-making of research subjects but also of ‘mobility’ (Hannam et al., 2006), ‘interdiscourse’ and ‘transdisciplinarity’ among researchers and research communities (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 35). The later term, in the language of complexity theory, is used to signal both an approach and an attitude of mind that compels disciplinary border-crossing in the interest of sharing knowledge accumulation and seeking to effect more enlightened social and educational change. It flags a desire to ‘step outside the limiting frames and methods of phenomenon-specific disciplines’, and ‘a research attitude in which it is understood that the members of a research team arrive with different disciplinary backgrounds and often different research agendas, yet are sufficiently informed about one another’s perspectives and motivations to be able to work together as a collective’ (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 35).

All the contributions to this special issue embody at least the spirit of nurturing inter-discursive debate. Bringing together a variety of social science voices with a view to opening up new theoretical and empirical insights and understandings, as well as new engagements and debates on issues, lies at the heart of SES’s remit in relation to pedagogy, policy, equity and embodiment. From a variety of locations and perspectives within sociology and other social sciences, our contributors apply their distinctive conceptual wares to research agendas which share a common interest: illuminating the ways in which the body both impacts and is impacted (and shaped) by society and culture, and how we might go about better understanding these things. For example, Jane Kenway is Professorial Fellow of the Australian Research Council and Professor of Education at Monash University. Her current Australian Research Council research project, with an international team, is a multi-sited global ethnography centering on elite independent schools in globalising circumstances. Her co-author Elizabeth Bullen, however, is located in Literary Studies in the Department of Literary Studies, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne. Her research areas are class, gender and sexuality in fictional and media narratives for young adults, with current focus on post-feminist girlhood, popular culture and sexual illiteracies. She is particularly interested in how popular culture constructions of hypersexualised, consumerist girlhood are entering fiction, and the lessons about sex they teach.

Wendy Luttrell is Professor of both Urban Education and Social Psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY) and studies formation and transformation of social identities and subjectivities in school settings. Her research extends ethnographic tradition by offering participants active roles in representing their worlds, as they understand them. Carrie Paechter is Professor of Education, Goldsmiths, London whose interests span gender, identity and embodiment, especially in childhood, and relationships between gender, power and knowledge in relation to curriculum forms. She is currently investigating how a community of practice evolved in the context of a divorce support forum and its associated learning and identity change. Bethan Evans is a Lecturer in Human Geography and Medical Humanities within a Department of Geography and Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University. Her research develops critical accounts of contemporary biopolitics with particular focus on obesity policy and the role of children and young people within biopolitical forms of governance. Her co authors and colleagues are also lecturers in Human Geography. Kathrin Hörschelmann’s research is focused on young people’s political agency, youth culture and globalisation, and the cultural politics of post-socialism. Rachel Colls’ research is concerned with theorising and researching bodies. Framed within feminist poststructuralist theories of the body and an adherence to the practices and politics of Fat Studies, her work has included that which focuses on women’s embodied experiences of clothing consumption, the materiality and governance of fatness, the practices of touch and children’s experiences of being weighed and measured.

Sarah Pink is Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her research is interdisciplinary and usually involves the use of visual methods and media and currently focuses on digital media and everyday life practices. Andy Sparkes is Professor of Sport and Body Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education, Community and Leisure, Liverpool John Moores University and like co-author Brett Smith, a Senior Lecturer in Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, he is committed to studying ways that people experience different forms of embodiment over time in a variety of contexts. Alan Bairner is Professor of Sport and Social Theory, Loughborough University, whose research reflects commitments to understanding sport and national identity, leisure and space, sociology and literature and Marxist theory. Martha Bell is Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago, where she is engaged in a three year funded research programme entitled ‘Troubling Choice’: exploring and explaining techniques of moral reasoning for people living at the intersection of reproductive technologies, genetics and disability. Her research interests span the sociology of the body and the embodiment of physicality, ability/disability and mobility in society. Michael Gard, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, CSU Bathurst researches the workings and meanings of the human body, having begun work in physical education teacher education and now studying health, dance, sport’s history and sports journalism and, currently, hydration for exercise.

These authors’ professional biographies and research interests illustrate their willingness to transcend discursive boundaries and demonstrate the virtues of bringing multiple, if quite disparate, perspectives to bear on the relationships of body and culture in the interests of greater knowledge of and engagement with social and educational change. Some of the substantive interests expressed in this issue may seem remote from the interests of a SES readership, not least bullfighting (see Sarah Pink’s paper) or flaneuring (see Alan Bairner’s paper) or e-media (see Martha Bell’s paper). Yet all raise fundamental questions about embodiment, challenge conventional ways of thinking as to how ‘the body’ is positioned and perceived in culture and society and how we might go about studying its movement, enactment and positioning in time, place and space. In these and all the other papers presented there is not just willingness to make cognate border crossings but also commitment to what some adherents of complexity theory call transphenomenality (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 35). They express desire to effect analytic ‘level-jumping’, either through theorising, conceptualisation or research method, for example, between psychological and social, individual and organisational, local, national, global and transnational levels and flows of knowledge, discourse and culture within and between them. In so doing they illuminate the inseparable intersections of biology and culture and the workings of what we have elsewhere referred to as the ‘corporeal device’ (Evans et al., 2009, Evans et al., 2011). In the first paper, for example, Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen draw on a ‘transnational feminist perspective approach’ to centre attention on ‘how skin functions as a site where female subjection and abjection are produced and reproduced’. They examine the ‘skin industry’, pointing to its ‘extreme commodification of the female body and the inexcusable pressure this places on females of most age and cultural groups’. They argue that the ‘socio-cultural normalisation of perfect skin is a product of a range of contemporary and enduring social and cultural forces overlain by complex pedagogies of power, expertise and affect’. Their case studies vividly reveal how ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment
• 2. Skin pedagogies and abject bodies
• 3. Where inequality lives in the body: teenage pregnancy, public pedagogies and individual lives
• 4. Gender, visible bodies and schooling: cultural pathologies of childhood
• 5. ‘Change4Life for your kids’: embodied collectives and public health pedagogy
• 6. From embodiment to emplacement: re-thinking competing bodies, senses and spatialities
• 7. Inhabiting different bodies over time: narrative and pedagogical challenges
• 8. Urban walking and the pedagogies of the street
• 9. The feel of mobility: how children use sedentary lifestyles as a site of resistance
• 10. A meditation in which consideration is given to the past and future engagement of social science generally and critical physical education and sports scholarship in particular with various scientific debates, including the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ and contemporary manifestations of biological determinism
• Index