This chapter draws from a study funded by the Society of Research into Higher Education which used a range of creative research methods to explore embodied academic identity. My background before becoming an academic was as an accredited somatic movement therapist and educator (ISMETA 2017) and yoga teacher (BWoY 2010). Although I continued with my own movement practices, I struggled with the tensions between them and everyday academic life. I wanted to find out from other academics who self-identified as having an embodied practice how they reconciled this with their academic work and their identity as an academic, whether they experienced similar tensions, and whether their practice impacted positively on their feelings of wellbeing and if so, how. The study had full ethical approval from the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Kent. I took a reflexive and autoethnographic stance throughout as I was conscious of my own investment and story within the research and felt that it was important to be honest and open about the effect this had on the collection and analysis of the data. I have approached this chapter from an embodied and philosophical perspective. I am not a feminist scholar, though I have found that my approach to research and embodiment resonates with much feminist work through its focus on affect, and the sensory and the embodied self. The participants reflected on whether their embodied practice impacted on their personal wellbeing and if so, how. I consider different understandings of wellbeing and argue that an embodied practice will impact positively on personal wellbeing, however ability to engage with a practice can be constrained by illness, injury, work practices and the like. In addition, the type of wellbeing the participants felt from their practices is different from the vision of wellbeing that can be ‘given’ in a corporate sense by an institution.
Embodiment/Disembodiment
Currently the academy could be described as a disembodied place. Universities privilege working environments devoid of emotion and physical presence (Bloch 2012). Learning, teaching and research are often disconnected activities that focus on the cerebral rather than the physical, emotional or sensory. Reports of mental health and disability from students and staff are increasing as people fold under the pressures placed upon them (Gill 2010). Could an explicitly embodied perspective shed light on this situation? Embodiment is itself a contested term (Sheets-Johnstone 2015), and whilst the concept is found across many disciplines it does not have a defined meaning. For example, sociologists often use embodiment to describe how people use their bodies to represent themselves at an individual or cultural level (Shilling 2012), and some might argue that we are all embodied because we all obviously have bodies, and by extension everything we do is inherently embodied.
Whilst this predominantly constructionist view of embodiment focuses on embodied experiences and emotion work, it tends to ignore the body as physiology (Freund 1990). Phenomenology attempts to rectify this, however it can identify the body as an object (see for example Merleau-Ponty 2002; Young 1980). An alternative understanding sees embodiment as both a state of being and a process of learning about the self (Leigh 2012). Embodiment can be understood as an on-going process of bringing conscious self-awareness to and about the body and can be exemplified by somatic movement education and therapy practices. The idea of bringing conscious self-awareness to and about the body means to become aware of the thoughts, feelings, sensations, images and emotions that are present within us, to reflect on them, and to use this knowledge to inform our actions and choices. By extension, any practice that increases this conscious self-awareness is an embodied practice, such as dancing, running, and martial-arts. In the West, somatic movement practices, therapy and bodywork approaches have been written about and practiced since the early twentieth century (Todd 1937). These encompass a range of specific practices such as Authentic Movement (Adler 2002), Integrative Bodywork (Hartley 2004), Feldenkrais (1981) and yoga (Iyengar 1966; Pattabhi Jois 1999; Rosen 2002) among others (Johnson 1995).
The term ‘bodywork’ is also contested. The use in connection with movement therapy implies an element of touch that may include, but is not limited to, massage or physical therapy: ‘a variety of manipulative therapies’ (Juhan 1987: xix). This definition of bodywork is distinct from the sociological use to mean work on the body by way of exercise, tattoos, piercings and the like (Crossley 2006). Bodywork meaning hands-on work on the body would instead include work to affect the body’s capacity for and awareness of movement and choice of movement facilitated through touch. Such work operates under the premise that by affecting the nervous system through tactile stimulation and movement it is possible to influence the organisation of the mind and body, and the relationship we have with the environment around us: ‘movement is the unifying bond between the mind and body, and sensations are the substance of that bond’ (Juhan 1987: xxv). Moving the body through different positions, and using it differently, can affect our emotional attitude (Cacioppo et al. 1993). Most embodied practices have at their core an implicit or explicit philosophy of acceptance and non-judgement, with the therapeutic approaches understanding that it is only once we accept where we are that we can allow change (Hartley 1989). These philosophies also safeguard the notion that we do not need to be ‘whole’ or ‘healthy’ in order to be embodied or increase our sense of embodiment. Being embodied is about being aware of ourselves, not about reaching some kind of bodily perfection and is accessible to anyone regardless of illness or disability. Understood in this sense, embodiment seeks to fully bridge the gap between the Cartesian mind-body dualism and provides a dialogue between constructionist and physiological understandings of the body. Those who engage in bodywork and embodied practices thus aim to access a greater level of self-awareness. Embodiment is becoming an important idea impacting multiple aspects of academic work across many disciplinary fields (Leigh 2019). This research project explored what happened when academics incorporated these kinds of practices into their lives, and the affect it had on their academic work and their feelings of wellbeing.
Wellbeing
Wellbeing is a ‘funny’ concept, apart from a lack of consensus over how it is spelt, there are many discourses over what it actually means and who is responsible for it. The UK National Account of Well-being (2012) defines it as a dynamic thing, a sense of vitality that people need to undertake meaningful activities, to help them feel autonomous and as if they can cope. However, as Richard Bailey puts it, ‘many of these discussions take it for granted that wellbeing equates to mental health’ (Bailey 2009: 795). Popular, government and institutional communications and directives in turn seem to conflate mental health with being ‘happy’, or with factors that are personal, and to do with whether life is going well for the individual or not. James Griffin (1986) explicitly connects wellbeing with happiness, similar to Aristotle’s idea of it being the fulfilment of human nature (Barrow 1980). Philosophically, wellbeing can be associated with either a hedonistic ‘desire fulfillment’ whereby it is achieved when an individual has sated their desires, or as a more objective theory which judges whether things are good for people or not (Parfit 1984). This latter view is one which sometimes results in lists of factors that indicate wellbeing or quality of life (Nussbaum 2000), and quantitative measures of wellbeing (Sen 1999). However, quality of life should be seen as a dimension of wellbeing rath...