Flowing with Embodiment and Materiality: Touch and Time for New Educational Futures

Abstract

AbstractEmbodiment is a lively and vital current in my pedagogy, research and writing. For a considerable time, I have overtly entangled embodiment, enmeshed with materiality into the notion of dialogue to argue that, with multiple others, we create, think and do in many ways that are as influential as words. This is part of wider endeavours to disrupt practice and research using posthumanising creativity to create spaces for emergent educational approaches which are fit to respond to Anthropocentric challenges. This chapter steps into the flow of this current armed with the knowledge that the mindbody binary is a specifically Western problem and that much can be gained from combining posthuman approaches with learning from Indigenous epistemologies and Eastern philosophies. The chapter goes on to explore embodiment and materiality through the concepts of touch and time. These reflections show how the usual storylines of disciplines can be ruptured, emphasising the role of multi-epistemic literacy, and the affordances of slowing and playing with time. The chapter moves on to discuss the power of cumulative ruptures which have the potential to create spaces for educational approaches that can match and respond to the rapidly changing global challenges that we face.