Are you familiar with the work by Erin Manning? It changed me, it changed my practice and it continues to change my life. I want to begin with a quote from her paper:
In “Body/Power” Foucault writes: “One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs.” While the university is certainly not the only site of power/knowledge, I turn to the university for this account of “what kind of body the current society needs” because it is a site of contestation where the exception often reigns in the name of alternative pedagogies and practices, a site where many of us, myself included, imagine other ways of working and sometimes are even able to activate them. I turn to the university because there is a troubling asymmetry at the heart of teaching and learning practices, on the one hand creating a path for new ways of thinking and making while on the other imposing forms of knowledge that do violence to the bodies they purport to address. I turn to the university because there is of necessity a discontinuity between the individual and collective practices of experimentation it houses and the neoliberalism that undergirds it. I turn to the university because it has been a site of resistance and a site where new orientations toward study have been born: black studies, queer socialities, postcolonialism, disability studies. And I turn to the university because most days I am not at all certain that the site for these explorations and activations of power/knowledge is actually capable of the kind of complex work necessary for the decolonization of knowledge, at least not as long as the centrality of the (white) (neurotypical) human as purveyor and guarantor of experience reigns supreme.
Manning, E., 2018. Me lo dijo un pajarito: Neurodiversity, black life, and the University as we know it. Social Text, 36(3), pp.1-24.
Erin Mannings work takes place of the intersection of STS, pedagogy and intersectionality and mad studies. Despite not being a scholar “on the digital” Manning is a scholar of knowledge, knowledge-power and “the body”. Respecting embodiment and the learner’s body and the teacher’s body in encounters-of-learning and learning-encounters, is a key issue I feel strongly about.
In this sense I recently watched an interesting and challenging video on the topic of “modal learning and learning styles” i.e. the common belief that some of us are visual learners, auditive learners, kinetic learners or … etc. There seems to be little empirical evidence of these modes of learnign are more than pedagogical myths.
Further research though (and this finally leads me to this topic of embodyiment and experiential learning) indicates that “great teachers” are facilitating multimodal learning in their sessions that activate multisensory and synchronised messages across a number of media. They show, they tell, they facilitate exeriences and make use of intellectual and emotional modes of knowledge-mobilisiation.
Below I will unpack the quote by Manning, which I posted above.
In “Body/Power” Foucault writes: “One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs.”
Bodies know stuff and bodies are at the centre of creation, externalisation and reception of knowledge. Yet, in the context of designing and thinking about pedagogies, the visceral material body, of either – the student/learner and the teacher – remain overlooked; remain taken for granted. Remain mute and are docided into overhearing.
While the university is certainly not the only site of power/knowledge, I turn to the university for this account of “what kind of body the current society needs” because it is a site of contestation where the exception often reigns in the name of alternative pedagogies and practices, a site where many of us, myself included, imagine other ways of working and sometimes are even able to activate them.
What does it say about our society then, and us and The University if this site at the forefront of knowledge is consistently failing the students, its teachers and the learning. Knowing about knowing is the matter of STS; hence I think that these discissions of knowledge-power are fundamentally at the heart and part-and-parcel of STSing.
Dissecting and retelling the story of the academy through the lens of the body; of subaltern bodies and bodies subaltern … leads us inevitable to instances of friciton and subjugation of knowledges.
Bodies not only “know”; “following the body leads to new knowing”.
And some bodies know more about fricitons than others.
That’s sad; that’s a fact; that’s a state that we should not accept; tolerate or leave unchallenged.
I turn to the university because there is a troubling asymmetry at the heart of teaching and learning practices, on the one hand creating a path for new ways of thinking and making while on the other imposing forms of knowledge that do violence to the bodies they purport to address.
Amen.
I turn to the university because there is of necessity a discontinuity between the individual and collective practices of experimentation it houses and the neoliberalism that undergirds it.
The increasing neoliberalisation of the academy is a catalyst of these undesirable new tendancies; but it is also a distraction from any realistic goals we can seek to achieve as a university, as an institute, as individual lecturers on a specific course.
Yes, fine, let’s take down capitalism- but until capitalism has ended; let’s improve the conditions of teaching and learning hilst our colleagues vanquish Mark Zuckerberg, Empire and borders.
I turn to the university because it has been a site of resistance and a site where new orientations toward study have been born: black studies, queer socialities, postcolonialism, disability studies.
If my legacy is the catalisation of more of those conditions of transformation, I am happy.
It is what I am trying to achieve in my UALONLINE project; it is what I am pusuing by studing and teaching critical theory.
Criticality in this sense is not about critique it is about care, critical care. Intensive care. The kind of care that prevents death and preserves life. Critical thinking at the inception of technology saves lives. Not metaphorically; but literatlly.
And I turn to the university because most days I am not at all certain that the site for these explorations and activations of power/knowledge is actually capable of the kind of complex work necessary for the decolonization of knowledge, at least not as long as the centrality of the (white) (neurotypical) human as purveyor and guarantor of experience reigns supreme.
I close this blog post with a page from my own doctoral work.