Methodologies of Embodiment: Inscribing Bodies in Qualitative Research 9780415816915, 9780203582190

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Methodologies of Embodiment

This volume is dedicated to exploring and exposing the challenges, the possibilities, and the processes of empirical work in embodiment. Grounded in qualitative inquiry in the humanities and social sciences, the chapters describe perspectives and contexts of embodied research, but focus on the methodologies, methods, and analytic frames taken up to grapple with this ever-more theorized aspect of qualitative inquiry. The authors drawn together in this volume share an investment in the ways in which the body inscribes and is inscribed within research that foregrounds the cultural, social, affective, and political discourses that are at the core of how bodies act and are acted upon. Mia Perry is Research Director for the eclfoundation (eclfoundation.org), based in Scotland. Carmen Liliana Medina is an Associate Professor in Literacy Culture and Language Education at Indiana University.

Routledge Advances in Research Methods

1 E-Research Transformation in Scholarly Practice Edited by Nicholas W. Jankowski 2 The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society Edited by Ann Rudinow Sætnan, Heidi Mork Lomell, and Svein Hammer 3 Multi-Sited Ethnography Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods Edited by Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann 4 Research and Social Change A Relational Constructionist Approach Sheila McNamee and Dian Marie Hosking 5 Meta-Regression Analysis in Economics and Business T.D. Stanley and Hristos Doucouliagos 6 Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research A Reflexive Approach Edited by Louise Phillips, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehviläinen and Ewa Gunnarsson

7 The Emotional Politics of Research Collaboration Edited by Gabriele Griffin, Annelie Bränström-Öhman and Hildur Kalman 8 The Social Politics of Research Collaboration Edited by Gabriele Griffin, Katarina Hamberg and Britta Lundgren 9 Place in Research Theory, Methodology, and Methods Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie 10 Video Methods Social Science Research in Motion Edited by Charlotte Bates 11 Qualitative Analysis in the Making Edited by Daniella Kuzmanovic and Andreas Bandak 12 Non-Representational Methodologies Re-Envisioning Research Edited by Phillip Vannini 13 Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry Edited by Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts and David MacLennan

14 Researching Marginalized Groups Edited by Kalwant Bhopal and Ross Deuchar

15 Methodologies of Embodiment Inscribing Bodies in Qualitative Research Edited by Mia Perry and Carmen Liliana Medina

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Methodologies of Embodiment Inscribing Bodies in Qualitative Research Edited by Mia Perry and Carmen Liliana Medina

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Methodologies of embodiment : inscribing bodies in qualitative research / edited by Mia Perry and Carmen Liliana Medina. pages cm. — (Routledge advances in research methods ; 15) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Experiential research. 2. Qualitative research. I. Perry, Mia. II. Medina, Carmen Liliana. BF76.6.E94M48 2015 001.4'2—dc23 2015014027 ISBN: 978-0-415-81691-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-58219-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Foreword

ix xi xiii

KATHLEEN GALLAGHER

Acknowledgments 1

Introduction: Working Through the Contradictory Terrain of the Body in Qualitative Research

xvii

1

MIA PERRY AND CARMEN LILIANA MEDINA

2

Devising in the Rhizome: The “Sensational” Body in Research in Applied Arts

14

MIA PERRY

3

4

Making the Body Visible Through Dramatic and Creative Play: Critical Literacy in Neighborhood Bridges CANDANCE DOERR-STEVENS, CYNTHIA LEWIS, DEBRA INGRAM, AND MARIA ASP The Disenchantment of Western Performance Training, and the Search for an Embodied Experience: Toward a Methodology of the Ineffable

28

53

JANE TURNER

5

Becoming Attuned: Objects, Affects, and Embodied Methodology

69

JAMES ASH AND LESLEY ANNE GALLACHER

6

Embodied Multimodality Framework: Examining Language and Literacy Practices of English Language Learners in Drama Classrooms BURCU YAMAN NTELIOGLOU

86

viii 7

Contents Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodologies of Embodiment: Testimonios in the Young Adult Novel, Before We Were Free

102

CAROL BROCHIN AND CARMEN LILIANA MEDINA

8

Behind the Body-Filled Scenes: Methodologies at Work on the Body in Graphica STEPHANIE JONES AND JAMES F. WOGLOM

116

Afterword: Troubles with Embodiment ELIZABETH ADAMS ST. PIERRE

138

Contributors Index

149 153

Figures

1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

Girl and boy enacting gun shot Sam and Victoria (foreground) Kyle and Victoria Students repurpose chairs as escape tunnel Students use split stage technique to heighten conflict in scene Students use paired spinning to represent animal shape-shifting Students practice using their bodies while playing “Freeze” TA facilitates embodied expressions of power Students perform multiple retakes of Paul Bunyan ending Student actors revise story through use of multiple narrative tools

8 21 23 37 39 40 42 43 46 48

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Tables

1.1 3.1

Perspectives on embodiment Applying MDA filters to Neighborhood Bridges teaching session 3.2 Patterns of tool use 6.1 Analysis of performance data using embodied multimodality framework

4 34 36 93

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Foreword Kathleen Gallagher

THE PLACE OF BODIES IN THE ORDER OF THINGS “Openness towards method, then, is at one and the same time openness towards experience” (Apperley, 1997, p. 23). Over my career, I have argued that there is a social science possible that does not divest experience of its ambiguities and contradictions. Mia Perry and Carmen Medina’s new work on the corporeal in qualitative research has moved us considerably closer to those productive doubts and shadows that make qualitative research the interesting site of contestation that it is. My sense of this important collection is that bodies, theories, and philosophies of embodiment, all that is felt, artistic, creative, sensed, comes into productive relationship with thought and language as our sentience asserts itself; our bodies insist on being heard. The contributors to this book choose to read and analyze through an embodiment lens. In feminist and philosophical work, it is possible to trace key movements and theories of corporeality, but rarely do we see these enacted, or carefully sketched, through particular practices. The methods explored in these pages are dedicated to translating theoretic insights into the empirical realm. This contribution alone makes invaluable the processes described in these chapters, which have adeptly inscribed bodies and body-knowing from a diverse and interesting range of qualitative projects. In my own research, I have used story and storytelling as a way to cultivate a plurality of the mind; such a storytelling attends to social relations and embodied knowledge of histories and contexts. The chapters in this book offer other exciting pluralities, rather than the usual mind-body binary traps and make central the embodiment frame in their processes of analysis. Very helpful to appreciating this kind of analytics is Ahmed’s (2004) economics of emotions, where feelings do not reside inside people, but circulate; they are, rather, the effects/affects of the fundamental sociality of emotion (p. 8). In earlier foundational work, however, on the sociology of emotion, scholars like Hochschild (1983) argued that we “infer other people’s viewpoints from how they display emotion” (p. 31, emphasis added); instead more culturally attuned and poststructural research would suggest

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that such emotions are not held within individual bodies, but are rather produced as the effects of bodies and emotions in relation. Such a turn in scholarship is particularly important for qualitative researchers who wish not only for emotions and bodies to unlock ideas in research participants, but for those researchers, as in this book, who see the role of bodies in the epistemology of knowledge and understand that how they are ‘accessing’ such lived knowledge has everything to do with the practices they undertake together with their research participants. The chapters in this book also reveal how bodies inhabit and produce specific social, historical, and discursive frameworks and how those very bodies are not reducible to objects of study wherein precise methods can discover specific meanings. Instead, embodied experiences, in the hands of careful methodologists, are the very ground from which knowledge can be discovered. The turn to privileging embodied knowing that these chapters represent also makes certain the necessity of recognizing the interdependence of subjectivity in the research encounter. One of the challenges faced by many authors of these chapters is the effort to render three-dimensional, sensory experiences onto the twodimensional page. Our language misses the ineffable and the slippery. Ideas found through performance and art, for instance, and felt as a consequence of experiences that attend to the phenomenological body, can find themselves sabotaged by efforts of representation, losing their important symbolic value. Our bodies run up against our metaphors, our poetic accounts, our symbolic language and ‘results’ either obscure those bodies or impoverish our linguistic accounts. In the traditional language of analysis, the felt experiences of bodies engaged in complex methods might recede. To be fully appreciative, therefore, of the reciprocity and collaboration that sits at the center of the many embodied methods explored in this text, we need to think further about how the ‘reporting’ of those experiences, and their subsequent ‘translation’ by the researcher can more effectively garner the collective efforts of researchers and their participants, their quest to communicate, in view of the sociality of emotions so elegantly theorized by Ahmed. Moving from the philosophical problems with empiricism to its representation, and doing so with feminist, collaborative, social justice principles in place, necessarily requires a serious rethinking of how such embodied and socially entangled knowledge gets reported. Most qualitative methods tomes, however, continue to treat bodies (subjects/participants) and knowledge (representation) as separate entities; but what if neither is assumed to have an independent existence? What if neither exists entirely without the other? What if the embodied methods themselves are changed by the responses they evoke? If we take such a course, a very different manner of reporting is needed. If each shapes the other, not only do we have a conceptual dilemma, but we have a dilemma of representation as well. In their various ways, the authors of these chapters make the body substantive in their explorations, and each comes to write about this kind of research engagement differently. The editors suggest a desire in their

Foreword

xv

introduction to use embodied methods to help keep the knowledge moving, to invest in it as an ‘emergence’ that changes over time. The editors have accomplished what they set out to do, or rather, to not do; that is, “to impose uniformity on a diverse set of approaches.” Whether examining work on texts, in training, or with particular disciplinary knowledge in view (literacy or applied theatre or creative play, for instance), all of the authors of the collection remain available to a knowledge that is hard to pin down, hard to measure or even account for. As I embarked on the pleasurable journey of reading this text and preparing this foreword, I was having the paradoxical experience of intense bodily pain. Months into a herniated disc and rather uncontrollable physical pain, I came to reading these accounts of attention to bodies while inevitably reflecting simultaneously on the crypt of physical pain my own body had become. Without hyperbole, I was experiencing the worst physical pain I’d ever experienced. I am well aware that on the scale of physical pain, and however much pain I was suffering, there are many suffering much worse physical pain. Alas, physical pain as a sensation makes relative thinking difficult. After specialists and medication, physiotherapy, naturopathy, acupuncture, osteopathy, and meditation “interventions,” I came to thinking and reading about physical pain theoretically. In Elaine Scarry’s (1985) seminal theoretical account of pain, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, I stumbled upon the most relevant point for a consideration of a methodology of embodiment: “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt” (p. 13). Methodologists paying attention to bodies, therefore, valuing embodied knowing is, according to Scarry, embarking on a course that cannot provide certain evidence of anything. Research that records the passage of felt experience into knowable records, and further into public discourse, is a near impossibility. This is the case for physical pain, she would argue, a pain that defies language. But what of other sentient experiences housed inside and performed by bodies? Is that the uncertainty researchers are inevitably left with in the absence of the firsthand felt experience? Is that the best that research could ever wish to do; that is, to create an account of sentience that is racked through with doubt? Physical pain, Scarry insists, is the most interior of experiences, but it is surely not the only interior experience—and by implication an inexpressible interior experience—that one could attempt to understand. Where does that leave a methodology of embodiment? Are we left only with the signs, the graphics, the insipid visual representation, as it were? What symbol stands in for the inexpressible? And by extension, Scarry considers, “While the advantage of the sign is its proximity to the body, its disadvantage is the ease with which it can then be spatially separated from the body” (p. 17). And yet, the symbol can have exactly the opposite of the desired effect. For instance, if one shows a weapon, a gun let’s say, to signal the pain caused by a gun shot, this may represent an attempt to present pain, but in its casual (aesthetic, fashionable, literary) use it may also have the effect of

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forcing the properties of pain into deeper obscurity. In other words, I take from this the cautionary note that how we represent bodily sensation in our research can both lend symbolic force to the inexpressible as well as diminish the effect of that experience, as it is only ultimately knowable, in its full sense, to the one who experiences it. Taking in Scarry’s long meditation on physical pain, however, does lead one to a potentially positive way forward with respect to qualitative accounts of sense and sensation in human experience. The most notable aspect of Scarry’s account of physical pain is that it is the only sensation without an object. It is the only bodily experience that has no representative value in the external world. Despite Western medicine’s attempts to create scales for describing physical pain, physical pain remains without any external referents. But other forms of pain (emotional) and other somatic experiences do have external referents. We are afraid of x, we desire y. Other sensations, hearing, touch, sight, taste, do have objects in the external world. This means that researchers can count on the symbolic value of objects to offer explanatory meaning for interior bodily sensations described by a research participant. While this does not erase doubt, nor does it make communicating easy, it does succeed in making a kind of communication of interiority possible outside the boundaries of the body. It should be no surprise that a number of authors in this collection have turned to art-making practices and creative experimentation to get inside their understanding of phenomena external to their own experiences. Symbol and metaphor, in theatre and fiction, stand in for concrete objects, tangible experiences, and ineffable relationships much of the time. We use our imaginations to make the leap. If imagination always has its object in the world, than using the imagination to better understand bodily experiences may be of great use to researchers of such experiences. Scarry would call this “the making of the world” rather than its inexpressible “unmaking of the world.” In many of the following chapters, the body is a learning, yearning, striving, surviving thing. This means there is work to be done between researchers and participants who wish to bring body-knowing to the fore of the research encounter. There is hope in all that doubt. Mia Perry and Carmen Medina’s edited collection sets us on a promising course.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge. Apperley, A. (1997). Foucault and the problem of method. In M. Lloyd & A. Thacker (Eds.), The impact of Foucault on the social sciences and humanities (pp. 10–28). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press.

Acknowledgments

Earlier, partial versions of this research appeared as: Jones, S., & Woglom, J. (2013). Teaching bodies in place. Teachers College Record, 115(8), 1–29. Perry, M. (2011). Devising in the rhizome: The “sensational” body in drama education and research. Applied Theatre Researcher, 12, 16 pages (no page numbers due to online format)

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Introduction Working Through the Contradictory Terrain of the Body in Qualitative Research Mia Perry and Carmen Liliana Medina Our perception of embodiment in research “[involves an] acknowledgement of our bodies as whole experiential beings in motion, both inscribed and inscribing subjectivities . . . the experiential body is both a representation of self (a ‘text’) as well as a mode of creation in progress (a ‘tool’).” (Perry & Medina, 2011)

Through most of our lives either consciously or unconsciously, our work has focused on the intersection of artistic and pedagogical practices that foreground the body as the means to experience, communicate and interact with ideas, sensations, politics, relationships, and landscapes/spaces. For Mia, this trajectory of work began in professional theatre and performance practice in Ireland, England, and Canada. Studies in the Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin, and the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, equipped Mia with expertise in contemporary performance practices, in particular, devising. These skills were put to practice with companies in Canada such as urban ink productions (intercultural and interdisciplinary arts), and radix entertainment (experimental and participatory arts). Performance and outreach work in rural Ireland (community and youth theatre), Moscow (contemporary cultural practices), and Canada (professional performance production and educational outreach) directed Mia to pursue art as a framework for pedagogy and social development. Through research with Forced Entertainment (a British devised theatre company), and collaborations with artists, teachers, and youth throughout her doctoral studies, Mia’s project became one of bridging contemporary cultural practices and paradigms of practice with current social and pedagogical spaces (formal and informal education, community and social theatre). Carmen’s path of life and work has included years of formal dance training in her youth, moving into a diverse range of work in theatre arts. Carmen explored a new kind of theatre practice in Puerto Rico working with Rosa Luisa Marquez and Los Teatreros Ambulantes that grounded its approaches

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in Latin American perspectives, including Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1979). She worked with Peruvian theatre director, Miguel Rubio (Yutachkani Theatre), whose work is grounded in theatre anthropology (Barba & Savarese, 1991) and the contemporary theatre movement with the Bread and Puppet Theatre. Later these performance practices became the background for her work on literacy education, particularly research at the intersection of Critical Literacy (Freire, 1970; Luke & Freebody, 1999; Medina & Costa, 2013), Drama in Education (Edmiston, 2013; Gallagher, 2001; Heathcote, 1984; Medina, 2004b, 2006; O’Neill, 1995), and Performative Pedagogies (Alexander, Anderson, & Gallegos, 2005; Medina & Weltsek, 2013; Pineau, 2005). Our paths crossed some years ago at the University of British Columbia in the Language and Literacy department. Our work there gave us a common language through which to consider embodied practices, but also prompted new questions around the affordances and limits of social semiotics and multiliteracies work. In that space we were able to explore and push our thinking as drama and theatre educators informed by the overlapping fields of Drama in Education, Contemporary Performance Practices, and Critical Performative Pedagogies, among others. As teachers and researchers in this area, we have spent considerable time wrestling with the questions of how to do research within the complex landscape of performance pedagogies and student engagement in performative experiences (Medina 2004a, b, 2006; Perry, 2011; Perry & Medina, 2011; Weltsek & Medina; 2007). As we searched for an approach to the analysis of these experiences, we have been informed by, and have considered our practices and research methods in relation to, performance and cultural studies (Diamond, 1996, Dolan, 1993), social semiotics (Franks, 2004), feminist and gender perspectives (Butler, 1990, 2005; Cruz, 2001; Grosz, 1994), social theory (Ford & Brown, 2005; Shilling, 2003), and affect theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Leander & Rowe, 2006; Ling 2009; St. Pierre, 1997). During the course of our work in this field, we have found the notion of embodiment to be essential to a methodology that is concerned with education in relation to the multiple cultural and political landscapes we navigate in our work. As we shared in the opening quote, our perception of embodiment in research involves an “acknowledgement of our bodies as whole experiential beings in motion, both inscribed and inscribing subjectivities . . . the experiential body is both a representation of self (a ‘text’) as well as a mode of creation in progress (a ‘tool’). In addition, embodiment is a state that is contingent upon the environment and the context of the student [performer]” (Perry & Medina, 2011, p. 63). In this introductory chapter, we situate and unpack this definition by sharing how our perspectives and understandings of embodiment in research have evolved to develop an expansive view of its potential contributions and challenges to new qualitative research practices.

Introduction

3

POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS As mentioned above, our work inside and around the edges of the fields of the Arts and Education has involved explorations of the body from various perspectives, in various paradigms. Across all the fields and discourses we have encountered, a commonality has been the ever-increasing recognition of the significance of the body in qualitative research. As a result, a sophisticated body of theory and literature related to this is emerging. If we consider the body as a constant in qualitative research, regardless of the discipline, the inquiry, or the paradigm, then it is no surprise that the body in theory is an area of overlap, intersections, and transdisciplinary discourse. So, whether we look to the Arts, Humanities, Sciences, or Social Sciences, there is scholarship that engages with questions of embodiment in some way. What has happened in this space to date is important to take into account. Primarily through conceptual research, historical accounts of theories of the body are perhaps the most substantial area of inquiry. In particular, the body is positioned in relation to the mind, often stemming from Cartesian Dualism and building a critique from there. Building on this, there are intricate and varying conceptual studies on the construct of embodiment, largely in advocacy for the recognition of a new understanding and consideration of the body. Because research on embodiment is such an interdisciplinary area of studies, we recognize that a review of all the work on this area is beyond the limits of this introduction. Nevertheless, throughout the chapters in this book, the reader will be able to get an in-depth view of many theories and methods that move the body to the center or focus of research practices. We recognize that fields such as Human Geography, Cognition, Biology, and Information Technology have well-established trajectories of research in embodiment, but the discussion or inclusion of these are beyond the scope of this book. With that being said, we can identify many moments in qualitative research that have propelled the work on embodied methodologies in crossdisciplinary ripples. Working in ever-more interdisciplinary spaces, the diversity of perspectives and approaches that we can draw from is important to take account of. Phenomenology, for example, has driven many scholars to acknowledge experience as more than that which is cognitively understood and, therefore, has challenged research to find ways to account for the body. Social Semiotics is notable as one of the most common paradigms of research practice that has influenced the Arts and Social Sciences, and the relevance of the body within this framework emerges in terms of the semiotics of the visual, gestural, or vocal (the body as a visual sign system or an instrument of sound). The poststructural and posthumanist movements over the past two decades have prompted us to rethink the categories and boundaries of text and meaning, body and mind, emotion and intellect, etc., but also to unsettle the notion of our bodies as containers, and separate not only from our minds, but also from our environments, and the objects that surround us

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and constitute our worlds (e.g., Bennett, 2010; Manning, 2013). The following chart illustrates the varying positions of, and perspectives on, the body across multiple paradigms of research that we have encountered. The project of this book comes about as a response to the realization that despite the extensive and rich theory on the body, and the advocacy of the place of the body in our work as teachers, scholars, and practitioners, there are very few resources available to support the practice of this work. Said another way, after the theoretical frameworks are articulated, and the research questions formed, what practical methods can be, or have been, developed to put these ideas and perspectives into practice? What do we do in the field with the body? What constitutes our embodied data? And what do we do with it when we have it? Can we pause in the gray area between research theory and research practice for a moment and consider the ways in which we put theory into action? We are not alone in asking these questions Table 1.1

Perspectives on embodiment (Chart revised from Medina and Perry (2014))

Embodiment: Perspectives on Theory and Research

Key Claims

Biological body (naturalistic)

The body “is” when it is born. Its finalized physiology determines who we are and how we behave.

Body as sign (semiotics)

The body as a site for the production of meaning. The body as representational, as text.

Body as unity (phenomenology)

The body as a part of the conscious self, affecting perception and experience accordingly. Every experience is therefore considered as embodied, and every self as a unity present only to itself. In this way, there is no “other” accounted for.

Experiential, relational, and sensational body (poststructuralism, affect theory)

The body as a fluid and unfinished entity, always becoming in relation to forces of affect.

Embodiment as cultural practice (social theory, cultural performance, critical feminism)

The body is completed in engagement with cultural practices. History and cultural discourses are reproduced and recontextualized in/through our bodies (the gendered body, racial body, popular culture body, etc.).

Discursive body (Foucault)

The body as discourse embedded with, and positioned by, structures of power.

Relational and decentralized body (Post-Humanism)

The body as one of many entities interacting on a shared plane of influence (with nonhuman materialities).

Introduction

5

or looking for these resources: the contributors of this volume have been asking similar questions and have found others to support their inquiries. What is still largely unspoken and unwritten then, is how we might grant the body its (well-theorized) status in the practice and representation of research. How can we make the body substantive in our research? How do we talk or write about the body? These questions have various implications in research, beginning with research design and methods of data generation, extending to representation and dissemination of research. The body in itself is riddled with taboo and political, social, and cultural sensitivities. The art of rhetoric and the wordsmithing of academia has made an impressive job over the years of sidestepping physical and biological sensitivities in order to focus on all number of behavioral science and humanities topics without broaching the “human flesh”: the size, shape, the color, the physical abilities, the sensations, the illogical or preintellectual emotions and instincts, and the tastes and contortions of the body. The predominant message, in traditional social science and humanities research, as well as in schools, universities, and government institutions, is “do not discriminate” based on physical characteristics, and “do not touch” each other’s bodies. As researchers, we can sometimes talk about body image, we can even talk about biological health, but these are sensitive and contextually bound areas that can be put to words through careful discursive practices that have been developed to protect us from the unwieldy expanse of taboo around the body. In terms of design and methods of research, then, we generally incorporate (whether consciously or not) a safe distance from the bodies of our participants and ourselves. Commonly, we interview and analyze spoken text, we observe and analyze certain behaviors or images, we investigate contexts, policy, culture, etc. In traditional qualitative research, we then typically resort to an organization of data through language: coding (for words or themes depicted through words), narrative, thick description, reflexive researcher statements, quoting, anecdotes, summaries, etc. We then write it up, we organize sentences and paragraphs, subsections and chapters, and books (!), and do our best to disseminate our words to our audiences to sit and read or sit and listen to. Sometimes we stand in front of a slide show and talk our ideas to a seated listening audience. This overgeneralized snapshot of qualitative research is heavy with challenges but also with possibilities for embodied methodologies. We hope to contribute, with this volume, an array of examples of research that employs these traditional structures of qualitative research in innovative ways, and examples of research that challenges them. QUESTIONING EMBODIED PERFORMANCE IN SOCIAL, PUBLIC, AND PEDAGOGICAL SPACES To illustrate briefly a product of our inquiries and encounters with the theory and practice of embodied research, we share here a short tour through a framework that we have found productive and useful.

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In a performance-based workshop with a group of young people in Puerto Rico, Carmen co-facilitated an activity whereby the participants used dramatized and choreographed scenes to explore the issues and implications of violence in their experiences (often mediated by mass media). The process of data generation, therefore, included a collaborative and embodied (physical, emotional, body as tool, body as signifier, etc.) engagement with the social and cultural construct of violence. The design and facilitation of this work was built upon drama education structures, as well as work in cultural performance. The performance-based activities facilitated were driven by our understanding of performance as a set of signs, as well as a site for action and creation in meaning making, experiencing and becoming. We perceive the participant or learner to be simultaneously inscribing and inscribed by social codes and cultural performances that get created, reproduced, and recontextualized in particular moments in time. This inscription occurs through engagement in activities and in relation to the multiple histories and subjectivities that performers bring to a creative moment (Pineau, 2005). The process of capturing and recording the data included traditional methods of video, transcripts, and field notes. It is in the process of analyzing this data where we return to our theoretical influences in an attempt to engage them in the practice of analysis. We take up the participant as a relational body/mind/self, who through sensing, responding, and expressing is always becoming or “in motion” (Ellsworth, 2005) and creating new forms of participation. Therefore, both the cultural-historical social performance and embodied engagement of the participant are at the core of how we approach analysis in embodied practices. Grounded in these views, our framework for analysis is structured by a set of guiding questions: 1. What is represented through texts (spatial, physical, verbal, etc.)? This question is grounded in a representational and semiotic approach; an approach that is far reaching in the Social Sciences, a benchmark, to the extent that other questions of/to the body and other approaches to the body are contingent on the primacy of the semiotic perspective. 2. How are cultural norms, histories, and knowledges inscribed or disrupted in relation to emerging narratives and identity constructs (such as gender, race, class, etc.)? Feminist performance theory and social theory make up the main foundations of this question. Performativity is taken up by Butler as “a cultural ritual, as the reiteration of cultural norms, as the habitus of the body in which structural and social dimensions of meaning are not finally separable” (2000, p. 29). In performance studies, “actors” are perceived to take stances, enact discourses and social actions in relation to the multiple positionings that reiterate particular cultural norms and expectations. From a sociocultural perspective, bodies, language, images, movement, and all the complex range of textual

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practices that makes a performative moment emerge, could be traced to normative discourses and ways of being that get recreated, recontextualized, and reinvented in any improvisational moment. 3. What relationships and dynamics (affects and forces) can be observed between bodies, between positions, material and immaterial contexts, instruction and action? This question emerges from poststructuralist ideas and takes up experience as a process of relationality, sensation, and emergence. Based on the understanding that we are always becoming in relation to our environment, the question foregrounds those relationships, thinking through data as complex and entangled, implicating the researcher, the onlooker, the inanimate, and the immaterial. Deleuze and Guattari propose a system of thought that “does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds” (Massumi, 1987, p. xii). When these three categories are unsettled, the ways in which we think about and analyze experience expands. Rather than basing experience and emergent learning on the material signs of representation (as in question # 1), which can all be considered as beginning or end “points” or positions, this question lends focus to the transitions and movements between these points. 4. What is happening in this process (as seen through all the abovementioned foci)? What and how are changes, events, creations occurring? From a similarly poststructural perspective, this question is positioned to maintain the essence of emergence in the analysis. Massumi states, quite simply, “When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time . . .” (2002, p. 1, emphasis in original). We keep this in mind as we think through data as moving, relational fragments. As we navigate the various, unharmonious, foci of our guiding questions, we turn again to Massumi (2002) who explores the problems of putting corporeality back into the body and matter back into cultural materialism. To this end, he suggests that our task is not to contradict signification (or the project of semiotics), rather to “find a semiotics willing to engage in continuity” (p. 4). To summarize, we endeavor to think through data in terms of what is happening (empirically and conceptually), as opposed to what is done, or what is meant (Conquergood, 2002; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Sontag, 1999; St. Pierre, 1997). The image and transcript that follow represent a moment from a performed scene depicting murder and robbery. The robbers and the robbed demonstrate their knowledge of violence and death through enacted death threats, guns, and the detailed embodied performance of death. Death is performed by material signs and discourses that are represented in a hand

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Figure 1.1

Girl and boy enacting gun shot

positioned to imitate a gun, followed by very calculated shooting gestures and verbal statements, such as “no me mates por favor” (please don’t kill me), and “si te voy a matar” (yes, I’m going to kill you). A very precise and coordinated sequence of gestures portrays the impact of a bullet in a body, and then the action of falling to the floor. La mano de la niña/pillo se mueve hacia arriba y su cuerpo se mueve hacía atrás como resultado del peso y velocidad de la bala cuando se dispara. El hombre robado encorva su cuerpo recibiendo el impacto de la bala y cae al piso. The girl/robber’s hand moves up as she shoots the gun, and her body moves backs from the speed and weight of the bullet coming from the gun. The robbed man curves his body as he receives the impact from the gun and falls to the floor. When we ask the previously described questions of this scene, our analysis considers the body in relation to cultural understandings (the presence of, the types of, and the media representation of violence in Puerto Rico), specific contextual details (the children, the school, the teacher) as well as what we observe in the performative moment. We noted the fluidity and

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ease of this enactment of violence by the students; the inevitability of events initiated by the hand made into a gun. We noticed, in the performance of death, how the movements of the students (robber and robbed) establish an embodied relationship among people, space, artifacts, and sounds that can be seen as ritualistic. This enactment was more than a representative portrayal of violent action; rather, it was an embodied, affective performance of the students’ relationship to violence. As we have explored in previous analyses of this data: These engagements, that bring personal perspective into imagined performance, do not directly shed light on the nature or demeanor or violent offenders in Puerto Rico, neither do they accurately demonstrate the youths’ attitude to violence; rather, they create and re-create narratives of possibility in their individual and shared realities in the negotiation of multiple social geographies. The performance itself does not reflect reality any more than the media does, but it does reflect relations between media and student, between good and passive behavior, between safe and violent spaces. (Medina & Perry, 2014, p. 129) We share this brief illustration of an embodied methodology to set the stage for the experimental and diverse methodologies explored in this volume. In addition, we use it as a base from which to pose some questions of our own work and of the perspectives in the book. The sensational, affective, and relational aspect of our work is further developed by Mia in chapter two, “Devising in the Rhizome.” In addition, there are contributions in this volume that are grounded in social semiotics frameworks (Yaman Ntelioglou; Doerr-Stevens, Lewis, Asp, & Ingram). The project of this book involved questioning our work thus far and exploring and inviting multiple perspectives into the conversation around embodiment. We set out to make explicit the practices taken up in embodied research, and to this end have endeavored to make processes and research practices visible through this collection without being prescriptive or without imposing uniformity on a diverse set of approaches. *** Grounded in qualitative inquiry in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the chapters in this volume describe perspectives and contexts of embodied research, but focus on the methodologies, methods, and analytic frames taken up to grapple with this aspect of qualitative inquiry. The contributing authors are positioned in various fields including: Education (particularly literacy education); Performance Studies; Applied Arts; Literature Studies, Media, and Human Geography. In many cases the distinctions between these fields disintegrate with the transdisciplinary work that has been selected. The contributors share an investment in the ways in which the

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body inscribes and is inscribed within research that foregrounds the cultural, social, affective, and political discourses that are at the core of how bodies act and are acted upon. Each chapter includes a context, both of the theoretical framework and the data drawn on. Upon this basis, the foci of the chapters settle on the questions, complexities, methods, and processes undertaken in the research that considers the body as a significant element of, if not, the substance of, the data analyzed. As the terrain of qualitative research continues to be explored and remapped, this book does not set out to represent every version of embodied methodologies, nor does it promote a particular approach; rather, we have selected what we consider to be innovative and well-informed approaches to the body in research from varying perspectives. In chapter two, Perry takes up the body in terms of senses, relationships, and forces of affect. This experiment uses the theory of nomadic thought (Deleuze and Guattari), in particular, the structure of the rhizome, in an attempt to shift the focus away from the represented signs of bodies, gestures, images, and linguistic text. In contrast, chapter three, by Candance Doerr-Stevens, Cynthia Lewis, Debra Ingram, and Maria Asp, uses social semiotics to approach the question of embodiment in a youth theatre project. The authors use this framework along with mediated discourse analysis to explore critical literacy and, in particular, to understand meanings of bodies and objects in practice. Moving into autoethnographic data, Jane Turner, in chapter four, considers her experience of learning Balinese Topeng Pajagen (a traditional dance theatre form) in Bali. Through a fascinating exploration of the theory of Barba and Zarilli, Turner introduces perspectives of performance training to broaden and complicate the body-mind question and discourses. In her analysis of practice, the body-mind relationship is put in relation to cultural and social conditions that implicate embodied learning as well as performance training. James Ash and Lesley Anne Gallacher introduce a language of sound and music theory in chapter five, to propose an approach to embodied research. Embedded in a posthumanist perspective, the authors consider data without prioritizing certain senses or certain aspects of experience. The concept of attunement is unpacked and taken up as the basis for a methodological approach that attends to the multiple relationships between bodies and their environments. In chapter six, Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou proposes an “embodied multimodality” framework of analysis within an ethnographic methodology. The framework interweaves poststructuralist, postcolonial, and third-world feminist perspectives to address research in second-language education. In chapter seven, Carol Brochin and Carmen Liliana Medina stretch the limits of textual analysis in the exploration of a piece of feminist Latina literature. They marry conceptual and material theories of the body with methods of discourse and text analysis to carry out an embodied inquiry of text. The final chapter reminds us of the momentous question of representation of

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embodied research. This work is the product of a collaboration between scholar Stephanie Jones and graphic artist James F. Woglom. The graphic article prompts us to consider how we as readers are implicated in the process of reading and making meaning of research. It also draws attention to the possibilities and implications of the way we represent and disseminate the embodied research that we do. Lastly, in the Afterword, scholar Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre approaches the idea of the “troubles with embodiment” to pose very important questions about the limits and possibilities of foregrounding the body in qualitative research, the need for this work (or not), and the possibility of new ways to rethink our work on embodiment outside of the traditional body-mind binary. As we conclude our work in curating and editing the chapters and ideas brought together in this volume, we depart with more questions than when we began. Amid other commentaries and critiques of nontraditional approaches to qualitative research (such as the myriad methodologies that can be categorized as arts-based inquiry), we are wary of the glorification of the body and the limits of what it allows us to do, see, and experience as we engage in the complex process of qualitative research. Despite the wealth of innovation and thoughtful theorizations illustrated in this volume, there is no such thing as an innocent methodology; every approach involves hierarchies of some sort, priorities, and sociocultural influences that shape and direct the research undertaken. There is not a definitive set of questions, or a definitive process of seeking answers to them. With this in mind, we acknowledge that this work will always be unfinished. Our hope with this volume is to provide readers interested in embodied methodologies with an opportunity to immerse themselves in the work of researchers who are actively engaging with the body in and as data. We hope this book prompts you to seek beyond it and to develop new perspectives and approaches that trouble and push the boundaries of the work shared herein. REFERENCES Alexander, B. K., Anderson, G. L., & Gallegos, B. P. (Eds.). (2005). Performance theories in education: Power, pedagogy and the politics of identity. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Barba, E., & Savarese, N. (1991). A dictionary of theatre anthropology. London: Routledge. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Boal, A. (1979). Theater of the oppressed. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance studies: Interventions and radical research. The Drama Review, 46, 145–156. Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(5), 657–669.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Diamond, E. (1996). (Ed.). Performance and cultural politics. New York, NY: Routledge. Dolan, J. (1993). Geographies of learning: Theatre studies, performance and the “performative.” Theatre Journal, 45(4), 417–441. Edmiston, B. (2013). Transforming teaching and learning with active and dramatic approaches: Engaging students across the curriculum. New York, NY: Routledge. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media architecture pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge Falmer. Ford, N., & Brown, D. (2005). Surfing and social theory: Experience, embodiment and narrative of the dream glide. New York, NY: Routledge. Franks, A. (2004). Teoría del aprendizaje y educación dramática: una perspectiva vygotskiana, histórico-cultural y semiótica [Learning theory and drama education: A Vygotskian, historical cultural and semiotic approach]. Cultura y Educación, 16(1/2), 77–91. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder & Herder. Gallagher, K. (2001). Drama in the lives of girls: Imagining possibilities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Leander, K. M., & Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “a pedagogy of multiliteracies”: Bodies, texts and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Leander, K. M., & Rowe, D. W. (2006). Mapping literacy spaces in motion: A rhizomatic analysis of a classroom literacy performance. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(4), 428–460. Ling, X. (2009). Thinking like grass, with Deleuze in education. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 7(2), 30–47. Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1999). Further notes on the four resources model. Retrieved from http://www.readingonline.org/research/freebody.html Manning, E. (2013) Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s Forward: Pleasures of Philosophy. In Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Medina, C. L. (2004a). Drama wor(l)ds: Explorations of Latina/o realistic fiction through drama. Language Arts, 81(4), 272–282. Medina, C. L. (2004b). The construction of drama worlds as literary interpretation of Latina feminist literature. Research in Drama Education, 9(2), 145–160. Medina, C. L., & Campano, G. (2006). Performing identities through drama and teatro practices in multilingual classrooms. Language Arts, 83(4), 332–341. Medina, C. L., & Costa, M del R. (2013). Latino media and critical literacy pedagogies: Children’s scripting telenovelas discourses. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 9(1). Retrieved from http://jolle.coe.uga.edu Medina, C. L., & Perry, M. (2014). Texts, affects, and relations in cultural performance: An embodied analysis of dramatic inquiry. In P. Albers, T. Holbrook, & A. Seely Flint (Eds.), New methods in literacy research (pp. 115–132). New York: Routledge. Medina, C. L., & Weltsek, G. (2013). Deconstructing global markets through critical performative experiences in Puerto Rico. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 57(3) 189–191.

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O’Neill, C. 1995. Drama Worlds: A Framework for process drama. ON: Pearson Education Canada. Perry, M. (2011). Devising in the rhizome: The “sensational” body in drama education and research. Applied Theatre Researcher, 12. Perry, M., & Medina, C. (2011). Embodiment and performance in pedagogy research: Investigating the possibility of the body in curriculum experience. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 27(3), 62–75. Pineau, E. L. (2005). Teaching is performance: Reconceptualizing a problematic metaphor. In B. K. Alexander, G. L. Anderson, & B. P. Gallegos (Eds.), Performance theories in education (pp. 15–39). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Perry, M. (2011). Theatre as a place of learning: The forces and affects of devised theatre processes in education. Unpublished dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Shilling, C. (2003). The body and social theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sontag, S. (1999). Art and consiousness. In B. D. Marranca & G. Dasgupta (Ed.), Conversations on art and performance (pp. 2–9). Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2), 175–189. Weltsek, G., & Medina, C. (2007). In search of the glocal through process drama. In M. V. Blackburn & C. Clark (Eds.), Literacy research for political action and social change (pp. 255–275). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers.

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Devising in the Rhizome The “Sensational” Body in Research in Applied Arts Mia Perry

This chapter investigates the research of embodied, affective inquiry and representation as taking place through a theatre devising process with youth. The devising process drawn upon, involves a negotiation of contemporary performance creation methods with more traditional constructions of drama education. The research described involves a sensational approach to data analysis, taking up embodied and affective relations as the focus of the analytical endeavor. In this way, the research explores aspects of experience that often elude the semiotic and prevailing representational paradigm molding research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Taken from a larger study, the YouthCLAIM project (Rogers, Winters, Perry, & LaMonde, 2015; Perry & Rogers, 2011) that examines the affordances and complexities of arts practices in critical literacy education, this chapter describes an embodied approach to research in the field of applied theatre and drama education. The research of drama practices in education has been dominated by a social constructionist paradigm that has permeated the field since its establishment in the mid-twentieth century (Perry, 2010). Elizabeth Grosz describes a perspective on the body shared by social constructionists as one in which “bodies provide the base, the raw materials for the inculcation of an interpellation into ideology but are merely media of communication rather than the object or focus of ideological production/reproduction” (Grosz, 1994, p. 17). As a result of this approach, the body, in social constructionist drama and theatre education research and practice, is generally considered as a tool for inquiry and representation only in as much as it is a signifying object (Franks, 1996; Osmond, 2007). A growing dissatisfaction with this perspective prompted my exploration in the intersections between theories of embodiment, drama education, and qualitative inquiry. My preoccupation with devised theatre methods in education stems from my experiential and theoretical findings of the connections between these practices and poststructural notions of pedagogy and research (Britzman, 1991; Davies, 2005; Ellsworth, 2005; Lather, 1992). This chapter will weave between the practice and theory of carrying out research in arts in education. In a yearlong devising project, cofacilitated by myself and the drama teacher of a grade 9 secondary school program in Western Canada, 16 students

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were guided through devising methods, studies in spectatorship and performance analysis, and, finally, a performance creation process culminating in a public production. The descriptions and analysis of practice included in this chapter are focused on one creation cycle (a process of preparing, performing, and reflecting on performance-based inquiry) whereby characters and context are being developed through improvisation. METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK: THE DANCE OF THEORY AND PRACTICE This methodology is situated within a poststructural and sensational perspective on contemporary theatre practices and embodied research. I use the term sensational in reference to performance and research as lived, experienced, and affective (through senses), which is in contrast to the more typical perspective on these constructs as experienced and evaluated according to representational logic, reliant on semiotic systems (word, image, design, etc.). Considering performance and research as embodied is essential to this perspective, as our minds then, the subject of the majority of education research and practice, can account for only a part of the whole experience. The work of Gilles Deleuze (1990, 1994) and his collaborations with Felix Guattari (1983, 1987) have provided the foundation and much of the discourse that I draw on in order to consider experience according to, and in relation to, forces of sensation, affect, and interrelation. Drawing on Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005), I consider the student/participant a ‘body/mind/brain’ and a ‘learning self in motion.’ In this way I am interested in considering experience, and the learning experience in particular, as a process of sensation and emergence. An attention to sensation and emergence (movement) brings to the forefront an attention to the body. Massumi states, When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. . . . an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other’ (2002, p. 1, emphasis in original). Finally, the notion of emergence suggests the change inherent in embodied experience. Ellsworth calls for a pedagogy that “address[es] a student that is not coincident with herself, but only with her change. . . . a learning self that is in motion” (2005, p. 7). The theoretical perspective introduced here can be summarized as a ‘nonrepresentational’ mode of thought, which offers an alternative, although not a replacement of, the ubiquitous engagement in interpreting meaning from semiotic systems of representation. Said another way, semiotics relies on interpretations of meaning represented in ‘signs’ that are inherently abstract,

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to varying degrees, from the ‘signified’ (Deleuze, 1994). Those signs might consist of words, images, tableaux, or might combine signifiers in presentations or productions. When we consider the relationship between one sign and another, as we do to make meaning, we find connecting lines from word A to word B to image C, and so on. Eventually this analysis of experience could resemble a grid (Massumi, 2002). A nonrepresentational paradigm, on the other hand, materializes in an attention to forces of affect rather than semiotic signs. This concept can be understood as the change or movement that occurs as a result of something that influences, touches, or connects with something else. In analysis then, the question becomes: What affects are occurring in this experience? Rather than: How can we interpret the representational signifiers of this experience? I use the theoretical construct of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987) to help articulate my analytical framework. To support the analysis within this chapter, I describe and interpret some key concepts within what is a large and complex body of thought. The rhizome can be described as a network of never-ending lines, where there are multiple entryways and places of departure, and every line can connect to any other, “multiplying its own lines and establishing the plurality of unpredictable connections in the open-ended, what Deleuze called smooth space of its growth” (Semetsky, 2007, p. 200, italics in original). Deleuze and Guattari explicate the rhizome theory in terms of six principles, the first two of which are those of connectivity and heterogeneity: Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything and must be . . . This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order . . . A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7) Characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, the rhizome is not one side of a binary; that is, the rhizome is not the opposite of a root. By extension I will add that in this work, the body is not the opposite of the mind, and affect is not the opposite of a sign of representation. In all cases, one construct needs the other in a codependent relationship in order to function, to make change, to emerge. In basic terms then, rhizomatic lines fall into two categories: those that organize or maintain structure, and those that disrupt previously established structures. The former can be referred to as a line of segmentarity, describing lines or structures that form a hierarchical system of segments/orders/compartments (binaries, cycles, linearities). A line of segmentarity can be realized as a process of action, a system of behavior, an ideology, etc. This type of line exists in every rhizome as an organizing component. The latter category of line can be described as a line of flight, or a line of deterritorialization. These lines disrupt and depart from either lines of segmentarity or another line of flight.

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Finally, as a rhizomatic lens is concerned with pathways of thought or action, space and time are integral to every concept. I draw on two particular articulations of space in this chapter: smooth and striated. The smooth space, as taken up by Deleuze and Guattari, implies a space that allows for difference, irregularity, and change, in contrast to the striated space that is considered a space that fixes, organizes, and prescribes.

Devised Theatre Devised theatre describes the form of theatre practice upon which the exercises under consideration herein are based. But beyond that, the characteristics of this practice connect very closely to those of the theoretical frame that contributes to the overall methodology of this study. Devised theatre is a sprawling category with practices and interpretations varying from continent to continent, as well as from theatre company to theatre company. ‘Postmodern’ and ‘postdramatic’ have both been used to describe devised theatre and its various performative relatives, and terms and definitions continue to swirl in the theory and critique of the practice as it evolves. A particularly useful way to approach a definition of devised theatre is proposed by Govan, Nicholson, and Normington (2007) in their book on contemporary performance practices. They suggest that devising may be most accurately described in terms of a plurality of “processes of experimentation and sets of creative strategies—rather than a single methodology” (7). Typically, devised theatre is the creation of original work or the reimagining of traditional texts by one or more theatre artists, often in collaboration with visual art, creative technologies, and other forms of performance, such as music and dance. Devised theatre is often more closely related to Live Art (Heathfield, 2004) and performance art (Goldberg, 1988, 2004; Wark, 2006) than traditional notions of dramatic theatre; but ultimately, the maze of terminology serves devised theatre better as a metaphor in itself than as a descriptive tool. The presence of professional theatre understood as devised is strong across the theatre industries of most Western urban centers today. Influenced by my own training in devising along with my personal journey of being a spectator, a practitioner, and a teacher of devised theatre, I have developed an understanding of, and an approach to, this work. In relation to drama education and arts-based research, I postulate that there are affordances within the devising paradigm that differentiate it from other types of collective play creation models in terms of inquiry and representation. These include the commitment to multiple perspectives and subjectivities (specifically those of the creators involved), to multimodalities (specifically lending equal weight to movement, sound, and visual technologies, as well as text), and by extension to performances that are not led by a ‘sing[ular] vision,’ or an ‘authorial line’ (Etchells, 1999, p. 55). My own subjectivities (including preferences, desires, and beliefs) feed directly into what is

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essentially my interpretation of the form. This understanding creates a lens through which I watch, understand, and analyze performance of all kinds, but also a paradigm of practice from which I facilitate drama and theatre work in education. EXAMPLES OF ANALYSIS: CONSENSUS AND DISSENSUS IN THE CLASSROOM The following section consists of a demonstration of analysis, or perhaps more accurately, an articulation of thinking through data using the aforementioned framework. As a facilitator of a performance devising process, I endeavored to find ways for the students to be on stage as themselves, or in roles that would function to expose and explore aspects of their collective identities and individual subjectivities. To this end, I ‘distracted’ them from their expectations of ‘pretending’ and ‘acting’ by creating performance pieces with them based on found texts, based on objects, based on subjects. They journeyed with me for a time, we built scenes based on Spiderman, on fantastical underground tunnels from Canada to China, on immigrating to Australia; the list goes on. But concern mounted in the class as the end of term and end of term performance began to weigh on our minds, and during a group discussion, some of the more vocal students expressed their frustration at what was perhaps “a bit too much of the abstract stuff” and a desire to get down to the real ‘acting’ (Geraldine, Focus Group, February 25, 2008). This discussion points to a key tension between the process we were engaged in, and the systems and structures (e.g., school and culture) in which the youth functioned. The school production staged by the drama program the previous year had been Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; the simultaneously occurring production being rehearsed by the music department at the time of this research project was Oklahoma. These plays were typical of productions at this secondary school. Students auditioned for parts, rehearsed, and performed in character, in costume. Outside of these school productions, the youth had experienced very little theatre or staged performance. In short, the mode of performance that I was facilitating was unfamiliar territory for the students, and thus deviated from their expectations of this program. Bringing this background to the project reveals lines of segmentation in relation to performance. The form of performance that was familiar and comfortable for this group was in specific space supported by blacks, props, sets, lights, costumes, curtains, and characters. This is a space that delineates the relationships between the performer and the performed, between the performed and the spectator, between reality and the fiction portrayed. In pursuing performance creation in the absence of a significant pillar in this construction (that is, character), and asking students to look to themselves,

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to their own bodies/minds/selves, for performance material, I was deterritorializing a central aspect of their drama program as they understood it. Recognizing and working through this space of rupture became a pedagogical issue as well as an artistic one. I was prompted to establish a process that contained enough recognizable traits in order for students to engage and invest in the work, while at the same time maintaining some integrity in my performance creation and pedagogy. The following performance-based inquiry occurs in three distinct phases that are typical of this type of work: preparation, performance, and reflection or spectatorship. Put together, these processes make up what I refer to as a creation cycle. In the creation cycle that follows, a student, Diane, describes an idea, the other students discuss it, and I proceed to set up an improvisation based on it. The improvisation lasts approximately 10 minutes (still images have been captured from video footage for the purpose of illustrating the analysis). Finally, in a group discussion after the improvisation, reflection, impressions, and ideas are shared.

Preparing: Establishing the Scene In the process of discussing an idea for performance and planning for the embodied and performed exploration for it, the students made a collaborative attempt to articulate an assemblage—an outline of the spaces and content— for the imagined world under construction. This process was led by the students and carried out in the form of a group discussion. The students spoke to each other from their positions as fellow students, taking up their roles as participants in the class. In this manner, they proceeded in a process that can be considered in terms of lines of segmentarity. Deleuze and Guattari write of the segmentation of our lives in society into pathways, definitions, binaries, and groupings. Segmentation allows for stratification, and, therefore, in this case, for common organizing principles and recognizable structures. Accordingly, this is the primary tactic used by the students in the phase of performance planning. Diane suggested: “I think if people came on from different sides . . . [and] I could try to get a background for the screen where it’s like traffic . . .” She continued, but then faltered, saying, “I have a vision in my mind, but I can’t really describe it” (Focus Group, April 15, 2008). Here we come to an intersection in the discussion, but the drive to strengthen the lines of segmentarity is taken up by another student. Victoria steps in to help: “It’s . . . like the idea of a street, people all go somewhere . . .” Diane corroborates: “Exactly” (Focus Group, April 15, 2008). With every new comment in this process, the territory of the work becomes more and more defined, and the opportunity for movement and innovation within that becomes more restricted, but at the same time, more likely. This dual consequence of territorialization is because the tighter the definition, the shorter distance you have to go to step outside of it, but also the less freedom you are given to do so.

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Early on in this emerging assemblage, processes of deterritorialization are happening. Adrian Parr (2005) states: “In so far as it operates as a line of flight, deterritorialization indicates the creative potential of an assemblage” (p. 67). Diane, even in introducing her idea and initializing the territory within it, offers possibilities for flight: “Someone might have something in it, someone might drop it and everything falls out, someone might just keep going . . .” In my role as facilitator, my contribution to the discussion feeds this aspect of the process, “Does your briefcase have a laptop in it, does your suitcase have your whole world in it . . .?” Apart from these possibilities for lines of flight, the group discussion functioned primarily to organize, align, and striate; the students took on a common purpose to establish lines of segmentarity. It isn’t until we look at the embodied improvised performance that the space of creation becomes smoother and more susceptible to rupture.

Performing: Improvising in Smooth Spaces The process that follows—the improvisation (performance)—begins to offer alternatives to consensus-driven models of inquiry. In this case, the students take up the tools of a character (and all that that allows) and a bag or container of some kind; in addition, they let go of the spoken discourse and rely on physical and gestural modalities (their improvisation taking place to a backdrop of music). With these tools and adjusted hierarchy of modes, the complex web of relationships that exist within the group of students (allegiances, social and academic hierarchies, etc.) is loosened, allowing for new possibilities to emerge in terms of connections, ideas, and deterritorialization. The following images (Figures 2.1 and 2.2) show stills taken from a video recording of the improvisation. I have selected these two moments in part for the simple reason that they are clearly visible in the recordings, and the interactions have translated very well to the visually recorded mode. Other interactions involved more subtle exchanges or exchanges that were partially concealed from the eye of the camera, etc. These two examples, therefore, represent just a fraction of what occurred among the 15 youth at any moment within the 10-minute improvisation. Figure 2.1 portrays a moment that was immediately preceded by Sam knocking over Victoria’s bucket—a bucket that she was lugging around as if very, very heavy. When knocked by Sam, the “empty bucket” jettisoned across the space, revealing its actual weight. In the still image, Victoria is investigating the bucket as if looking or checking for its contents; Sam is meanwhile holding his hands in the air as if to plead innocence or ignorance. That is a rough context and description of what can be interpreted from the visual and gestural signifiers in the image; what this image (indicative of action) is doing involves another line of analysis. There are many molecular lines and lines of flight that can be seen to be emerging within

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Figure 2.1

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Sam and Victoria (foreground)

this interaction. The collision of forces (forces of people, action, intention, and internal and external character movement) is a rupture in itself seen as two lines meeting momentarily, and then diverging once again. As Sam knocks Victoria’s bucket, he can be seen to be creating a rupture, dismantling the pretense of weight that Victoria had been creating with her performance. Whether intentional or not, the action breaks down the previous attempts at consensus (described in the analysis of the site of preparing) with a direct challenge to her position (that is, to the imagined world she is playing in and representing). At the same time, the collision affects both characters physically, altering or forming a physical dynamic that wasn’t there previously. This dynamic, frozen in time in an image, sees Sam standing over a crouched Victoria. The sensation of this corporeal interaction, like any other, affects the experience of the performers and the progress of the action; the sensations have influenced the journeys of those characters.

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In my analysis of this moment, based on the image above, I make no claims for the particular significance of this moment over any other; it is a fleeting, responsive, embodied interaction that, like every other, contributes to the rhizomatic growth of ideas, experiences, and performance creation. It is as significant as any other in the improvisations of students within the devising process, in that improvisation in this context is a space and time of inquiry. If we were to follow these two student performers closely throughout the discussions and inquiries previous and subsequent to this improvised moment, we could map points on a trajectory that led them to the nature of their roles and participation in the final performance, as well as their reflections in final interviews. Without mapping the entire process here, it is worth noting that in the final production, Victoria’s character is portrayed in the role of a bartender at work who is also an aspiring musician. In the same scene, Sam plays the role of a performing musician. While the final production came about as a result of a series of embodied and improvisational inquiries and discussion, by the time of the public performance, it was scripted and rehearsed. The improvised moment analyzed here, however, and the infinite other moments that took place around it, resulted from an actual interaction that occurred in time and space between bodies/minds/ selves in relation and could not have been prescribed. Within this analyzed moment of inquiry, the dynamics of interrelation are explored—façade, misunderstanding, and colliding forces all play out through the affective intensities of two people, with characters, in relation. Figure 2.2 is taken from an interaction that happened a few moments after that of Figure 2.1. In this image, Kyle, who is moving across the space carrying a guitar case over his head, has caught Victoria’s attention. Considering the assemblage created in the site of preparing, and considering the lines of segmentarity put in place (with the proposal of an imagined busy street, traffic, people coming and going, etc.), this interaction can be seen as an active deterritorialization. Kyle chose his bag in accordance with his character (a young musician) and “played” with the affordances of this improvisational mode. He moved with the case as if floating or flying the case through the space. Perhaps he was lifting his guitar case over his head because the imaginary surge of so many people left no space for such a bag; perhaps his guitar case was indeed floating or flying. There are myriad interpretations of this interaction with his prop, with the space, and with the other participants. What is more important in terms of this analysis, however, is what is happening in the moment that allows for this line of flight. The improvisational mode freed Kyle of the striations of verbal text adhered to in discussion, and perhaps as a result of this, or perhaps in part due to the interaction with a broader scope of forces (bodily, material, cosmological), his action emerges as a divergence or line of flight from objectives and consensuses established in the preparatory discussion. In this moment, music is playing, bodies move around the space engaged in various activities, and

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Figure 2.2

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Kyle and Victoria

forces of sensation swirl through the group. The inquiry facilitated by this experience is sensory, embodied, and relational. Kyle is affected by the bodies, sounds, sights, along with less tangible forces around him, and in relation to that, discovers a way of being in, and of contributing, to the emerging assemblage of the performance. In the case of this work, the spaces opened up by donning a character, by disrupting the dominance of spoken discourse, and by putting students in relation to each other in unexplored circumstances, allowed for pathways of investigation and inquiry that were unexpected and unplanned. These interactions did not all function to confirm decisions or stabilize territories that were established in the preparatory discussion. Many of them, including the two moments analyzed here, can be considered as lines of flight from the segmentary lines of expectation, convention, and consensus. The inquiry that occurred in this process can therefore be seen as rhizomatic.

Spectating: Regaining Common Ground The process of spectatorship here is based on the reflective discussion carried out by the students immediately after the improvisation drawn on in

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the previously mentioned discussion (Focus Group, April 15, 2008). Two main points of focus emerged through this discussion: firstly in relation to character development and, secondly, in relation to the multiple modes of interaction and representation. The notion of “character” remained very important for this group of students in the overall performance creation process. It provided the transitional space, or the safe context, in which to play, create, and investigate the dynamics of the group and circumstances of the work. In light of this, it is not surprising to find that one of the main foci of their spectatorship and reflection of this process was the way in which characters were explored or represented. The following comment, offered by Diane, suggests the significance of character representation in the improvisation process, and attributes a quality to the extent that one can achieve a verisimilitude in their performance: “Everybody was really, really natural with it, it wasn’t like trying to perform, which is kinda nice because . . . that’s happened a lot, so it felt really natural, it felt like everybody was actually their character.” The notion of ‘natural’ is a pivotal and contentious point in this reflection, as well as more generally throughout the creation process. From the perspective of devising practice, embodying and representing the ‘natural’ flows, connections, and disconnections in meaning and experience is central to the aesthetic form. The improvisation, considered as a smooth space, serves this objective in allowing for the natural movement of events without the imposition and striation of script or third-party direction. The students took up the improvisation willingly on these terms, but with the insertion of character, which I consider in this context to function not only as an intermediary (between their own subjectivity and the world), but also as a mask—lending a metaphoric and porous barrier between themselves and their audience (of peers, teachers, researchers, communities, etc.). Victoria refers to the character inquiry involved in the improvisation: “It helped because I know a little bit about my character but not everything . . . thinking about how is my character going up to other people because you wouldn’t necessarily know that . . . so it helped build my character.” This comment suggests the affordances of the embodied act in relation. In terms of inquiry, this comment implies the process of the encounter, which is described by Deleuze as “something in the world that forces us to think” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 139). He differentiates this from the object of recognition, which would assume that previous knowledge or experience is being confirmed. The encounter in improvisation is encouraged by the smooth space of the practice. A number of students focused their reflections on the modality shift at work in the improvisation (that occurred to the background of music and required no specific verbal text). Sam, for example, “liked how . . . you could just go up to someone else’s character and just have a conversation without even saying anything, you could just like with eye contact or something . . .” Kyle adds: “Because we couldn’t talk that much . . . we had to express ourselves with our movement and our facial expressions, so while we were

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still our characters we were almost overdoing them so that we could get our point across whenever we interacted with someone else.” These comments suggest, not only the significance of the unsettling of the primacy of spoken discourse, but also the notion of play. That is, the improvisation, in smoothing the striations of verbal language, narrative structures, and specific objectives, allowed for a level of freedom in the students’ explorations, interactions, and representations. What is happening in this reflection draws on much of the same processes that occur in the preparation phase. Reclaiming dialogue as the primary mode of communication, the students return to mutually supportive roles, complementing each other and ‘making sense’ of what happened in the improvised moments. In this way, they can be seen to have been reterritorializing the work, and creating new lines of segmentarity. The instability that emerged in the improvisation, in terms of the relationships between students and the relationships between the performed and the ‘real,’ was restabilized in reflection. Diane’s comment on the success of their character portrayals (previously quoted) serves this function of stabilizing the performance dynamics of the event. Later she adds: “Like some people would be coming on and off and some people were actually on the entire time, just like sitting . . . some people were showing their actual character and some people were showing the feelings of their character . . .” By emphasizing the character-driven aspect of the work, the students can be seen to have been relieving themselves in part of the responsibility of their actions and interactions. In discussion, they do not take up the notion of the ‘real’ in the performance, or the performance in the ‘real.’ Through the process of reflection, the students organize a revised assemblage. In recounting and describing events that occurred in the improvisation, in stabilizing notions of performance, the students are identifying and reterritorializing from lines of flight that had occurred. This is not a retreating process, however, or a reversion to a state previous to the improvisation. Reterritorialization, Leander and Rowe (2006) describe, involves a process in which “deterritorialized elements recombine and enter into new relations” (p. 433). In this way, transformations have occurred in the way the students are able to think about the assemblage of the work and therefore in the way that they are able to deterritorialize once again, in a process that is continual. CONCLUSION: DEVISING WITH RESEARCH WITH BODIES In this chapter I suggest that the body is intricately related to our notions of self, other, and the functions of our minds. The implications of the body in this area of research extend to the way we imagine and construct embodied pedagogies, as well as the methods we take up to research and analyze learning and creative experiences. Learning occurs by means of the body, mind,

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spirit, and subjectivities in the ongoing emergence of the learning self. As characters are explored through performance, the interrelation taking place takes on further dimension when the body is implicated in the experience. The body as sensational, as well as semiotic, disrupts the signification of text, and imagined physicality (of character) is put in relation to the actual performing body. The experience of the mind/body/self in the process of character development and performance can be seen as one of hybridity, synchronicity, and change. As many scholars before me have suggested, we sense first and intellectualize second (de Bolla, 2001; Ellsworth, 2005; Massumi, 2002). Forces of sensation are visceral and physical; therefore, a nonrepresentational perspective on research data demands an engagement with the body in conjunction with the mind and self (subjectivities). The tension between representational and nomadic thought is as tangible in my analysis as it is in the very practice it considers. My endeavor is to avoid resting my conclusions on the meanings that I recognize, and not to lend weight to interpretations of representations that shadow the occurrences of affect, sensation, disruptions, and cohesion in the processes under analysis. By considering the experience of data through notions of sensation, affect, and interrelation, we bring the body back to a substantive position in the process and analysis of the performing arts in education.

REFERENCES Britzman, D. (1991). Practice makes practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Davies, B. (2005). A body of writing: 1990–1999. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. de Bolla, P. (2001). Art matters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense (M. S. Lester, C., Ed., C. V. Boundas, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference & repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H.R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media architecture pedagogy. New York: Routledge Falmer. Etchells, T. (1999). Certain fragments: Contemporary performance and forced entertainment. London: Routledge. Franks, A. (1996). Drama education, the body and representation (or, the mystery of the missing bodies). Research in Drama Education, 1(1), 105–119. Goldberg, R. (1988). Performance art: From futurism to the present. London: Thames and Hudson. Goldberg, R. (2004). Performance: Live art since the 60s. New York: Thames and Hudson.

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Govan, E., Nicholson, H., & Normington, K. (2007). Making a performance: Devising histories and contemporary Practices. Oxon: Routledge. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heathfield, A. (2004). LIVE: Art and performance. New York: Routledge. Lather, P. (1992). Post-critical pedagogies: A feminist reading. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp. 120–137). New York: Routledge. Leander, K. M., & Rowe, D. W. (2006). Mapping literacy spaces in motion: A rhizomatic analysis of a classroom literacy performance. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(4), 428–460. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual. London: Duke University Press. Osmond, C. R. (2007). Drama education and the body: “I am, therefore I think.” In L. Bresler (Ed.), The International Handbook of Research in Arts Education (pp. 1109–1118). Netherlands: Springer. Parr, A. (2005). Deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (pp. 66–69). New York: Columbia University Press. Perry, M. (2010). Theatre as a place of learning: The forces and affects of devised theatre processes in education. PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Perry, M. and Rogers, T. (2011). Meddling with “drama class,” muddling “urban”: Imagining aspects of the urban feminine self through an experimental theatre process with youth. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 16(2), 197–213. Semetsky, I. (2007). Towards a semiotic theory of learning: Deleuze’s philosophy and educational experience. Semiotica, 164(1–4), 197–214. Wark, J. (2006). Radical gestures: Feminism and performance art in North America. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queens University Press.

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Making the Body Visible Through Dramatic and Creative Play Critical Literacy in Neighborhood Bridges Candance Doerr-Stevens, Cynthia Lewis, Debra Ingram, and Maria Asp

Ok, so listen up, you are going to move in slow motion as you hear my voice. So, right now you are King Midas rising up . . . No talking just movement in slow motion. Now pretend that you are touching something and turning it to gold for the first time . . . and now you realize that you actually just touched your daughter . . . now melt to the ground with grief . . . No talking. Show me just with your body. Show me just with your body. Elaine (pseudonym), Neighborhood Bridges TA

The words above illustrate the critical literacy work of a Neighborhood Bridges teaching artist as she speaks to fifth grade students, directing the expressive capacity of their bodies to convey emotions, action, and meaning without words. For this activity, all students start by lying still and silent on the ground. Through a series of directives, the students animate their bodies, “rising up” to the calls of the teaching artist. The students are fully engaged in this narration, enjoying the opportunity to get out of their desks and move. Although the students’ voices are muted, their bodies, movements, and facial expressions speak volumes, heralding the need to make visible the body as a tool of narration and resource for critical literacy. Building on critical literacy scholarship that explores students’ stances as they read the texts surrounding them (cf. Comber, 2001; Janks, 2009; Luke, 2000), a body of work has turned attention to the potential of the body as a kinetic place of learning (cf. Ellsworth, 2005; Perry & Medina, 2011; Pineau, 2002). Seeking to further expand understandings of critical literacy beyond powerful uses of language, scholars have begun to examine powerful uses of bodies, voices, spaces, and objects in order to forge new tools of narration (Comber & Nixon, 2008; Medina & Perry, 2011; Wohlwend & Lewis, 2011). In this chapter, we are particularly interested in how elementary

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students in urban classrooms use their bodies to revise and transform dominant cultural story lines. This chapter presents our process of examining what it means to use critical literacy for both students and teaching artists in The Children’s Theatre Company’s Neighborhood Bridges (Bridges) program. Placing critical literacy as central to its philosophy of learning, an important goal of the program is to develop in children the capacity to analyze and challenge dominant social and cultural story lines as they create new story lines through imaginative retellings and reenactments.

DESCRIPTION OF NEIGHBORHOOD BRIDGES Bridges is a school-based theatre arts program that involves elementary and middle school students in 31-weeks of storytelling and creative drama.1 Each week, Bridges brings a teaching artist (TA) into participating classrooms to work collaboratively with the classroom teacher (CT). In 2009–2010, the year of this study, 10 schools in two urban districts participated in the program. Across the 22 participating classrooms there were a total of 557 students and 15 TAs participating in the program. A typical two-hour Bridges session is composed of four parts: 1. The Fantastic Binominal: The TA and students spontaneously create a story through free association based on two arbitrarily chosen nouns and a preposition. Then students create their own stories and write them in their Bridges notebook. Each week, two to three students are asked to present their stories to their peers. The TA and CT coach the students in using gestures and voice to dramatize their stories. 2. Storytelling and Discussion: The TA and CT each tell a tale, often two different versions of the same tale, or tales related to each other. The tales are drawn from an anthology provided with the Bridges curriculum. Over the course of the year, tales are presented from several genres, including fairy tales, “pourquois” tales, and myths. The stories are followed by discussion designed to help students think critically about the content of the tales and the implications for their lives. 3. Scenes and Theatre Games: Students work in small groups to create and perform brief scenes based on the stories they have just heard. The TA leads students in games designed to develop their skills in areas such as focus, diction, gestures, and collaboration. 4. Writing Games: Students participate in a reflective writing exercise to solidify the day’s learning and incorporate the creative energy of their scenes into their own stories.

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In addition to the weekly Bridges components, students also create and perform a play on stage at a professional theatre company.

Critical Literacy in Neighborhood Bridges Informed by the foundational critical literacy scholarship of Freire (1970) and Lankshear and McLaren (1993), Bridges describes itself as an “explicit critique of functional literacy and how schools and politicians hinder learning by instituting programs that allegedly teach kids the basics and test their rote skills.” Instead, Bridges believes that storytelling and creative drama provide the impetus to “project oneself into the world and to narrate one’s own life” (Zipes, n.d.). In trainings with teaching artists, this definition is fleshed out as an orientation to reading that includes an understanding of how texts (oral stories, books, media) position readers (listeners/ viewers), how readers position texts, and how texts are positioned within social, cultural, historical, and political contexts (Lewis, Ketter & Fabos, 2002). In turn, the practices central to the Bridges program are among the strategies found to be most effective for inviting and enhancing critical literacy: (1) reading multiple texts, (2) reading from a resistant perspective, and (3) producing countertexts (Behrman, 2006, p. 490). In other words, traditional stories are paired with stories that provide supplemental or alternative story lines and perspectives. In addition to appreciating stories, students are encouraged to question, challenge, and probe stories, as resistant listeners. Finally, through scene making and writing, students create countertexts to the stories they have heard and discussed, often imagining and creating scenes or stories of their own from perspectives that challenge the dominant perspective in the original stories. In this way, “critical literacy means practicing the use of language in powerful ways” (Comber, 2001, p. 1). Seeking to expand our understandings of critical literacy beyond powerful uses of language, this study focused specifically on the critical storytelling that was expressed via the students’ bodies, voices, spaces, and objects of a given context in order to forge new tools of narration. Also of interest was how the teaching artists present and encourage the use of these narrative tools in ways that promote the students’ abilities to envision and produce multiple story lines. This research addressed the following overarching question and related subquestions: What does critical literacy look like in the context of drama/creative play during the Neighborhood Bridges program? • How do students use their bodies in drama/creative play that supports critical literacy? • What tools (e.g. body, voice, space, and objects) are made available to students as they use drama/creative play for narrative storytelling?

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How do these tools allow for a critical probing or reimagining of dominant social and cultural story lines? • What is the role of teaching artists (TAs) in facilitating the use of tools for critical literacy? MAKING THE BODY VISIBLE: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS To theorize and analyze our data, we turned primarily to scholarship in social semiotics and secondarily to sociocultural anthropology and work on embodiment in educational philosophy. Using social semiotics to reframe concepts about critical literacy, we apply the theory and method of mediated action, which we draw from the work of Scollon (2001) and Norris and Jones (2005) focused on mediated discourse analysis and from Scollon and Scollon (2003) on geosemiotics. Briefly, this work regards meaning making to be both semiotically discursive and material. It foregrounds action in social spaces and provides a lens through which to understand the meaning of bodies and objects in practice. Social action is carried out by social actors/agents who interact with mediational means in sites of engagement. In the case of this study, the social actors are the students, the TA, and the teacher, each possessing specific sets of mediational means with differing affordances. The mediational means, such as oral and written texts, language, props, and bodies moving in space, “are carriers of social, cultural and historical formations that amplify certain social actions and limit others” (Jones & Norris, 2005, p. 49). Scollon (2001) referred to the locus of mediated action as a “site of engagement” which Norris and Jones (2005), paraphrasing Scollon, defined as “the real-time window that is opened through an intersection of social practices and meditational means that make that action the focal point of attention of the relevant participants” (p. 139). The site of engagement, then, is the spacetime through which the mediated action occurs and is constituted—in our study, the scene-making phase of Bridges. Geosemiotics provides principles and approaches for interpreting signs within social and physical space, components we felt were essential given our focus on the body. Three principles are central to geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003): indexicality, which holds that all signs gain meaning based on how they are placed in the world; dialogicality, which holds that signs are intersemiotic (signs interact with other signs); and selection, which holds that signs are foregrounded and backgrounded and given meaning by social actors. As the anthropologist Duranti (1992) has argued, social actors interpret their hierarchical statuses through a combination of words, gestures, and spatial orientations, and place their bodies in space in keeping with their assumed roles relative to other social actors and objects. Institutionally, school is a space that regulates the bodies of youth, a space for movement to be controlled, for small motor skills to rule the day, and for desks to be used

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to contain bodies. This is the social and historical baggage of classrooms and the objects within. Yet, during Bridges sessions, students were able to use the classroom space, objects, and their bodies in ways not ordinarily involved, allowing for transformations of power and meaning. In other words, the way social actors, in our case, elementary students, use their bodies and voices can change the text as a site of meaning making in the classroom. Through performances that are both social and embodied, the students index the text as well as various classroom objects as having particular functions or meaning in mediated action. O’Loughlin (2006) represents the body as indivisible from its environment in the formation of subjectivity. Thus, the body is not “fixed but rather emerges again and again out of a constantly changing web of relations to an environment of things, people, projects, and demands” (p. 75). As such, subjectivity is formed through this web of relations. Although the relations between social actors and objects in space continuously change through action, we agree with Jones and Norris (2005) who build on Bourdieu to argue that practices are “actions with a history” (p. 98). In this sense, actions repeated over time within relations of power can become reified practices, such as those typically found in institutions like schools. These practices were disrupted, however, through repeated actions within the Bridges structure, actions that then took on histories of their own and became practices students experienced in school that changed their subjectivities in relation to school. In Bridges, they used their bodies in the space of the classroom in ways not previously associated with school and, in fact, often oriented their bodies in space in ways that changed existing hierarchical relationships among social actors (both student-to-student relationships and student-toteacher relationships). DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS We consulted with Bridges leaders to select three classrooms for close analysis of critical literacy during acting and scene-making segments of the Bridges sessions. The main criterion for choosing the three classrooms was that the selected classrooms must be led by experienced Bridges TAs and CTs in order to increase the possibility of observing critical literacy in action. It was hypothesized that TAs or CTs less familiar with the program would be less likely to thoroughly implement this component of the program. In the resulting sample, all three classrooms—two fifth grade and one combined fifth/ sixth grade—were in schools in a large urban district. One researcher, Doerr-Stevens, made two visits to each of the three classrooms to observe routine Bridges sessions. During each visit, the researcher recorded observations based on the general occurrence of critical storytelling with special focusing on the use of body, voice, space, and objects to

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craft stories that “do something to audiences.” A digital video camera and digital voice recorder were set up in the classroom to capture the embodied movements and audio of each two-hour Bridges session. Digital video footage was analyzed using qualitative coding procedures informed by grounded theory (Strauss, 1987; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and constant comparative methods (Glaser, 1965) and focused on two types of coding procedures: open and axial coding. Open coding, an iterative process that began during data collection, involved exploring possible categories that emerged across data sources. While keeping in mind the geosemiotic focus on physical spaces and the interaction of objects in those spaces, our preliminary categories focused on bodies, spaces, and objects as mediational means. Axial coding involved identifying the most salient categories based on open coding and rereading all data to code according to these categories. During this stage, we reviewed the data through a filter approach, informed by Wohlwend (2009), which helped us to identify key ways in which mediational means interacted via scenes, practices, and sites of engagement, which often led to transformational events (see Table 3.1). This approach highlighted connections and contradictions among our initial categories and led to combining categories, forming subcategories, deleting categories that were contradicted by data, and assessing the relevance of categories to the research questions. For example, initial categories involved repurposing of space and repurposing of objects as separate categories. Upon review of the data, however, it became very difficult to separate a student’s repurposing of a desk into a rock from the moving of that same desk to the front of the room to foreground a sense of staging. In this case, all mediational means intersected to form a site of engagement. Thus, we combined the categories into one, repurposing space and objects, which we felt more accurately represented the dialogicality of space and objects as signs. This coding process led to the emergence of two sets of data-driven patterns and their related subgroups. These sets are elaborated on in the next section on findings: (1) Tools for Developing Critical Literacy through Drama/ Creative Play (2) Facilitating Tools for Developing Critical Literacy through Drama/Creative Play. In this report, tool use focuses specifically on use of body, voice, space, and objects. Once these two sets of patterns emerged, all video footage was reviewed and searched for examples of each. These examples were compiled within each category, and then entered into a chart that listed the school, a brief summary of the example, the phase of the Bridges session in which the example occurred, and a link to a video clip of the pattern occurring during an actual Bridges session. The chart also included a column for comments that were sometimes included to provide more information about a particular example. This chart made research results very accessible for use by Bridges program leaders for discussion and professional development with TAs. Examples that represented those occurrences most typical and atypical of

Mediational Means:

After depicting the arrest of Paul Bunyan, the teaching • Field Notes After presenting their scenes during the artists asks a group to redo the scene to expand the • Video Footage final performance section of the Bridges moment, requesting specifically that the student • Video Transcripts session, groups are often asked to redo playing Paul Bunyan defend herself. The retake a certain part of the scene. The redoing leads to an arrest scene in which the student actors or “retakes” of the scene generally lead complicate notions of criminal and victim by raisto clarification of ideas and often transing issues of police brutality and capitalism. formation of original story lines.

4 Locating Transformative Events

*pseudonyms used for student names

• Field Notes During select acting games, students are • Video Footage prohibited from using their voices and • Video Transcripts instead are asked to use their bodies and space to communicate emotions, authority, and power.

3 Locating Sites of Engagement

“No more talking; Show me just with your body.” The room is silent as students’ bodies move in slow motion to the teaching artist’s verbal commands to show the sadness of King Midas as he realizes he has just killed his daughter by turning her into gold.

During one scene, students extemporaneously use the After initial warm-up activities, students • Video Footage teacher’s markers as props in their play. While usuare asked to rearrange desks to open • Audio Footage ally not allowed to use or even touch the markers, • Video Transcripts a large space in the classroom for stothe teacher permits it on this occasion, an allowrytelling circle and acting stage. The ance that is noticed and repeated by many students cacophonous event becomes a symin play performances to follow. bolic redefining of the classroom space, including its rules and roles.

2 Observing Scenes and Valued Practices

Sebastion*, a student who is seen by many school staff as a “troublemaker,” engages deeply in the highly physical and performative activities of Bridges sessions. Teacher comments that Bridges is a time of the week that he is rewarded for his energy.

Example:

• • • •

Fourth and fifth grade students, parField Notes ticipating in Bridges sessions within Video Footage their regular classroom are invited to Audio Footage participate in acting games and scene Video Transcripts making, which provide opportunities for students to experiment with new identities within the school context.

Key Sources:

Applying MDA filters to Neighborhood Bridges teaching session

1 Locating Participants and Mediational Means

Filter:

Table 3.1

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each category are identified for further analysis and discussion in the next section on findings. EMBODIED CRITICAL LITERACY Interested in moments when the body is made visible—rather than taken for granted—this study has focused on how creative play in conjunction with various tools of narration make explicit some of the assumptions that remain invisible via the use of language alone. In this sense, creativity and play appear to hold much potential for student-initiated critical literacy. Although students were often given specific directives for theatre games and scene making, they were able to use their imaginations and bodies to narrate their own stories, thus speaking back to those they have heard or experienced. These critical enactments often took the form of amplification, humor, or parody, which served to disrupt normative bodily habits and ways of being. In this sense, the young actors grabbed their audience’s attention through interrupting commonplace notions of space, posture, movement, and vocalization, in ways that heightened attention to issues of gender and authority, two topics of particular interest to preadolescent students. In addition to the focus on critical uses of the body (making the body visible) and the tools involved, this study also attended to the special role of the TAs to notice and work with the capacity for critical literacy that children bring to the table. So in addition to naming and describing tools of embodied critical storytelling, we also discuss the different ways in which the TAs facilitated the experimentation and appropriation of these tools. The first set of patterns that emerged involved students’ use of certain devices or “tools” during their creative play and storytelling. These tools were used in ways that made their bodies visible as active entities in the process of storytelling. In many cases, the use of these tools offered opportunities for alternative perspectives or critical renderings of the original story lines. Among these various tools, four categories emerged: 1) Repurposing Space and Objects, 2) Purposeful Enunciation, 3) Animated Staging, and 4) Body as Narrative Tool. In addition to noting the various tools for critical storytelling, we also name the patterns of interaction that the teaching artists played in introducing, encouraging, and/or facilitating the use of these creative tools for storytelling. While the patterns of tool use were observed in all four phases of the Neighborhood Bridges session to some degree, they were most evident in the scenes and theatre games phase. This may be due to the fact that the activities of this Bridges component involved the students in full-bodied movement and thus have a more explicit focus on the embodied—rather than

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verbal—components of storytelling. That said, the teaching artists used a variety of approaches to facilitate use of the tools. Among these patterns of facilitation, four categories emerged: 1) Explicit Dramatic Role-Play, 2) Preand Post-Scene Direction, 3) Audience Priming, and 4) Purposeful Retake. See Table 3.2 for a listing of the two sets of patterns. Table 3.2

Patterns of tool use

Tool:

Definition: I. Embodied Tools of Narration

Tools of narration used by students in ways that made their bodies visible as active entities in the process of storytelling, often offering opportunities for alternative perspectives or critical renderings of the original story. Repurposing Space & Objects

Students demonstrate their capacity for repurposing classroom space and objects into new spaces or narrative props for experimentation with story lines.

Purposeful Enunciation

Students demonstrate the capacity to emphasize the enunciation of their words in order to highlight or disrupt dominant story lines.

Body as Narrative Tool

Students use their bodies as expressive media for storytelling, communicating facets of narrative, such as emotion, animation, tempo, and stillness.

Animated Staging

Students appropriate notions of theatre discourse (staging, costume, mise-en-scène, etc.) into their creative play and critical rendering of story lines.

II. Facilitating Tools for Developing Critical Literacy Tools used by teaching artists (TA) to facilitate student use of embodied tools of narration. Explicit Dramatic Role-Play

TA leads students through an activity that explicitly involves students in practicing one or more tools for developing critical literacy.

Pre- and Post-Scene Direction

TA offers directorial suggestions or deliberate naming of students’ use of given tool(s) to encourage student experimentation with the tool.

Audience Priming

TA asks the audience to become critical consumers of the scene by paying attention to both the story and the tools used in storytelling.

Retake

TA asks students to “redo” a scene, which encourages students to reenvision the scene in ways that open up alternative story lines or ways of representation.

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Embodied Tools of Narration The video and audio recordings of class discussions included several instances of students experimenting with and then using the various tools, in some cases for the purposes of challenging story lines and in others for purposes of elaboration. Often these instances occurred when TAs introduced an alternative way of conveying meaning. The examples that follow exhibit instances in which the students experimented with and/or appropriated the different types of tools in ways that allowed for creative disruption of the original story lines. Repurposing space and objects. This category involved students demonstrating their capacity for repurposing the existing classroom space and objects into new spaces or narrative props for creative play and experimentation with story lines. For example, in one student-generated scene, a group of students repurpose the classroom chairs in order to revise the storyline of Icarus and Daedalus. In this example, the students used the classroom space in ways not ordinarily permitted. The front of the class, traditionally a teacher space, was transformed into a student-centered place of storytelling—a stage. In all of the Bridges sessions observed, there was a symbolic rearranging of the desks and chairs, often accompanied by collective chanting, singing or clapping led by the TA. This key event signaled a transformation of the classroom space that would invite the emergence of bodies in action. The transformation of the classroom space allowed students to reimagine the floor and chairs as narrative props to rewrite the aspects of the story. Through repurposing the floor and chairs as an underground tunnel, the

Figure 3.1

Students repurpose chairs as escape tunnel

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students wrote a route of escape into the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Instead of having the characters of Icarus and Daedalus remain captured in the prison of King Minos, as was narrated in the original story, the students revised the story to build in the opportunity for two new characters, Daedalus’s daughters, to escape from prison through a tunnel. In escaping from the prison, the characters avoided the tragic death of Icarus. This tunnel of escape was created through creative repurposing of the classroom chairs as an escape route. In geosemiotic terms, the social actors transformed the meaning of the chairs through processes of indexicality (meaning through placement) and selection (foregrounding chairs as an escape route). Encouraged to repurpose the space and objects available to them, the students in this group were able to more readily imagine and produce an alternative ending that featured girls as problem solvers who devised an escape route. In the post-scene discussion, the students explained that Daedalus and Icarus reimprisoned the girls after their first escape because the girls had escaped on their own without telling their male family members. But the girls persisted and escaped again, crawling through the “tunnel” of chairs they devised for their successful escape. Thus the chairs, which would more typically signify entrapment—either in terms of regulating mobility during desk time or in terms of serving as a prison-like structure in imaginative play— instead became a sign that signified liberation. Purposeful enunciation. This category involved students demonstrating the capacity to emphasize the enunciation of their words in order to highlight or disrupt dominant story lines. Students were encouraged to use diction when speaking to purposefully enunciate their words. Attention to enunciation or diction rather than increased volume was presented as an alternative way to convey meaning, an alternative approach to conveying power on stage. In this sense, the students experimented with alternative approaches to representing power and character complexity through the manner of delivering their voice. For example, one student conveyed irritation and resistance in her voice when responding to a character that was supposed to be her mother in the story. Although the words the student selects suggest submission to the mother, the student’s delivery of the words in a clearly enunciated yet ambivalent tone reveals a challenge to authority. Such challenges to authority add complexity to characters and context. For other students, the tool of enunciation enhanced deliberate facial expressions, while in other cases students added emphasis to certain syllables while prolonging others in order to add emphasis to the action occurring on stage. The ability to add connotation to the meaning of one’s lines through the tenor and enunciation of words is an important tool for revising story lines, especially in the case of collaborative scene performances when character roles are quickly distributed and students are on their own to breathe vitality into what may feel like a static character. In this way, particular connotations emerged that challenged commonplace meanings—about race

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and gender relations, for example—and allowed for the emergence of unexpected movements and scenes. Animated staging. This category involved students appropriating the constructs of the theatre arts terminology and its notions of staging, costume, and mise-en-scène into their creative play and critical rendering of story lines. For example, in one scene a group of students used staging to heighten the sense of conflict in the retelling of their story. In this scene, the students created a science fiction narrative in which the world is on the brink of World War IV. The Chancellor and Prime Minister are the primary power brokers in the conflict. To intensify the conflict of the scene, the students employ split-focus staging, a technique they learned about during discussions of plays in a Bridges session. Soon after the splitfocus staging opens the scene, a messenger and the Prime Minister’s wife enter the Chancellor’s space for negotiations. The Chancellor retains his power in the story despite his seated position at stage right. The students frequently incorporated specific staging techniques, such as split focus, into their scene making in ways that communicated how power works in the story. In this sense, the use of certain staging techniques helped to make explicit the presence of power in a scene, allowing students to then play with and/or shift that power with other tools of narration. Body as tool of narration. This category involved students’ explicit use of their bodies as an expressive medium for storytelling. In certain cases, the body communicated transformation through symbolic animation. In other cases the rhythm and pacing of the body’s motion communicated mood or

Figure 3.2

Students use split stage technique to heighten conflict in scene

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emotion. In addition to conveying narrative mood, emotion, and tempo, the body also communicated silence and stillness. The following scene serves as an example of these embodied forms of communication, with a group of students using various forms of embodied animation to symbolize character transformations. See Figure 3.3. In this scene, the group of students used body movements to represent a transformation from human to animal and animal to animal. The students’ scene is based on the Greek myth of King Midas who turns everything he touches into gold, including the food he eats and those he loves, such as his daughter. In the students’ retelling of the tale, King Midas’s touch does not turn objects to gold; rather, it turns people into animals. In the aforementioned scene, King Midas turns his wife and children into rabbits. To communicate this transformation to the audience, the student actors spun their bodies to symbolize the transformation. Whereas the turning of objects to gold has a tragic end for King Midas in the Greek version of the myth, the students’ retelling omits the tragedy, including the ability to turn into animals as a fanciful and playful gift from their father, King Midas. Yet through impromptu acting, the students also used the animal transformations as a form of humor for their classmates. In one part of the scene, the children are rabbits, while King Midas, their father, is a lion. The student playing the lion begins to rub his belly and say how hungry he is. He then begins to lick his lips as he looks at his rabbit children. Rather than allowing themselves to become prey to their group member’s creative plot intervention, the students used the spin movement to change into bigger animals, ones that cannot be so easily eaten by the lion.

Figure 3.3

Students use paired spinning to represent animal shape-shifting

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When paired with various embodied materials of mediation, this element of creative play and experimentation was one that made for a context rich in critical learning and literacy. The challenge for TAs was to work with the capacity for critical literacy that children brought to the table. The King Midas example demonstrates the capacity for critical literacy emanating from the social worlds that students inhabit. Here, the body held meaning that emerged in intersemiotic relation to space and objects in the environment. Perhaps the students constructed an alternative ending to avoid the sadness of imagining a father’s loss of his daughters or in order to experience the power of creating a scenario that allowed the daughters to live rather than be silenced in gold. Whatever their inspiration, the creative ingenuity of having the daughters spin into rabbits shows the students to be master storytellers who confidently changed the plot and interrupted the story’s message to accommodate their emotional needs and worldviews, thus demonstrating their capacity for critical storytelling. As the next section reveals, this embodied narration often resulted from the strong mentorship of teaching artists.

Facilitating Embodied Critical Literacy The video and audio recordings of class discussions included examples that show the teaching artists (TAs) working to model and encourage use of the tools presented in the previous section. In some cases, the tools were presented and practiced during the scene games. In other cases, they were highlighted or mentioned within the framework of a scene performance. In nearly all cases, the tools were not required, rather presented as practices to “play with” or as a means of experimentation. These categories of tool facilitation are elaborated on with examples below. Explicit dramatic role-play. This category of facilitation involved the TA leading the students through an activity that explicitly involved the students in practicing one or more of the narrative tools of disruption. One way a TA facilitates the use of various narrative tools is through the acting game called “Freeze.” In this game, students started out lying on the floor still and silent. Then slowly the students stood up illustrating certain emotions or plot events using only their bodies and no words. In the example represented in Figure 3.4, the students pretended that they were different characters from the stories they had just heard, which in this case included the Greek myths of King Midas, Paris and the Golden Apple, and Icarus and Daedalus. The TA guided the students through the activity, calling out to them, “You are King Midas rising up . . . Now pretend that you are touching something and turning it to gold . . . No talking. Show me just with your body.” In response, the students explored different ways in which their bodies could be used as tools of narration to convey meaning that either enhanced or intentionally contradicted the words they might speak when creating the scenes. During the dramatic

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Figure 3.4

Students practice using their bodies while playing “Freeze”

role-plays, students experimented heavily with the use of facial expressions and exaggerated arm gestures to intensify or complicate character response. One student in particular used furrowed brows, pursed lips, and dramatic shaking of her finger to convey disapproval of King Midas’s actions. In using their bodies as yet another mode of narration, the students increased their capacity to represent multiple interpretations within a single enactment. In some cases, the dramatic role-play was more explicit. For example, one TA frequently used the “two people in the middle” activity to model, discuss, and practice different ways of showing power through body positioning. See Figure 3.5. In this instance of explicit dramatic role-play, the TA gathers the students into a circle to watch their classmates act out various representations of power. Two by two, students were called into the middle of the circle to act out different scenarios in which power is not distributed equally. One such scenario asked students to imagine that they are very hungry and that upon walking into the kitchen they realize that their younger sibling has just eaten the last of the Lucky Charms cereal. This scenario struck a chord with many of the fifth graders and offered much fodder for exploring different representations of power and how they can shift in a given moment. In these explicit activities, the TA creates a space to play with spatial positioning, props, and stance as tools for narration. She also poses questions

Making the Body Visible Through Dramatic and Creative Play

Figure 3.5

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TA facilitates embodied expressions of power

to the students such as, “What are the different ways we show power?” Rather than directly teaching the students what to do, the TA extends invitations through repetition, summary, and additional props for learning through doing. She asks the children a classic question in critical literacy “Who has the power?” and uses this question as a starting point for exploring how power can be represented through the body and its positioning. When the students initially represent power as embodied in a strong, upright stance, at times with fists clenched, the TA “freezes” the scene and asks the class about the relationship between the body representing power and the body representing helplessness. She asks students to focus on what they see in the actors’ bodies and stances, and then moves students to connect what they see with ideas about power. When students repeatedly connect power to strength and muscle, she tells the students to improvise or “play with it,” telling them they will need to negotiate which of them will have power and which will not. Near the end of the segment, the TA challenges students to rethink dominant assumptions about power by introducing a new prop—a chair—that serves as a tool for critical literacy. When the TA directs the students to sit in the chair while another student walks around him, she does not tell the seated actor to assert power; yet this is precisely what happens. The seated actor’s embodied response to the improvisational moment is to silence the walking actor and stop his movement, a response that helped students see that power is not always big, muscled, and brandishing a weapon. The TA explains that power is relational and shifting—an idea that can be “played with,” thus explicitly reinforcing the ways in which critical perspectives can surface through embodiment and improvisation.

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The geosemiotics of this improvisational space are also significant in terms of the indexicality, dialogicality, and selection of signs. Children indexed power through forceful body positions. When the TA used language (both direct and indirect) to shift this interpretation of power, little changed. However, when she introduced the chair, this sign interacted (dialogically) with other signs (a body walking in close proximity to the chair) to create a new interpretation of power. The TA selected (foregrounded) a particular sign (the chair) to invite the children as social actors to transform the meaning of power. In this case, the children reinforced the body as a meditational means that privileged certain formations of power, amplifying certain actions. Yet the TA’s pedagogy urged playful improvisation of spaces, objects, and signs, which sought to unsettle these formations and encouraged students to diversify their representations and understandings of power. Pre- and post-scene direction. This category of facilitation involved occasions in which the TA offered verbal direction related to the use of a given narrative tool or set of tools. In the case of pre-scene direction, this facilitation sometimes involved directorial suggestions to prompt the students’ thinking about how their initial staging propels a story into motion. Postscene direction involved the highlighting of specific ways in which a group of students used a given technique to change the story line. The student performance then served as a text for discussion and critique in terms of actor choices and audience effects. The students as audience members then commented on what they found to be effective. To get the discussion started, the TA asked a variety of questions: What decisions did they make as actors? Which scenes did they add? What did they do to make this play? What did this story do to you? What did you find really effective in the telling of this story? Interspersed among peer feedback, the TA also offered helpful feedback by naming the different staging tools that were used. In one performance, the TA commented that the group of actors made good use of “split staging” and added a brief definition explaining that split staging is when action is happening on multiple parts of the stage. Through knowing about the various theatre practices such as split staging, student actors were able to represent multiple story lines at once as well as add stories within stories that complicated character actions and plot events. This space for deliberate naming of actor decisions increased students’ awareness of the various tools of storytelling within their reach. It was not uncommon to see students incorporate theatre techniques into their scenes just after observing and discussing another group’s effective use of the same technique. Audience priming. This pattern of facilitation involved TA’s interaction with the audience during the final scene performances in which the TA asked the audience to become critical consumers of the scene by paying attention to both the story and the narrative tools that the actors used in their storytelling. Common questions or comments during this pattern of facilitation included: “Pay attention to what happens when he starts to act out the story with his body” and “What does the story do to you when he speaks

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in this way?” For example, to prime the audience for critical viewing of the scenes, one TA often had the student actors take their opening positions and then freeze in them. She then asked the students in the audience what they thought was going to happen or “What do we already know about this story just by looking at the actors’ bodies, their faces, and where they are positioned on the stage?” In another classroom, the TA focused the audience on the “actor choices” that were made and their effect on the audience. Before calling “action” the TA primed the audience to both enjoy and question the scene. As critical consumers of the scene, the TA asked the students to pay attention, not only to the content but also to its delivery. As the TA stated, “I really want you to enjoy the story so watch carefully, and watch what kind of choices the group makes. So watch the story, really enjoy the story, but ask yourself why they made this choice and why they made that choice.” In priming the students to notice the “actor choices” the students were asked to attend to the full range of narrative tools that actors use when telling their stories, including embodied practices that might otherwise be overlooked. Whether the tool use was intentional or spontaneous, individual or collaborative, the priming questions helped to focus the students on how the story unfolded. In noticing how their peers used different tools of narration, they were building their own repertoire of storytelling techniques. Retake. Perhaps most significant among the patterns of facilitation in terms of promoting multiple interpretations was that of retake, in which the TAs asked a student or group of students to “redo” a scene. Redoing a scene served one or more of the following purposes: 1) to encourage improvisation and appropriation of narrative tools, 2) to clarify and/or complicate the narration, 3) to promote deeper engagement with the story, or 4) to encourage equitable and broad participation. Whatever the motivation for the retake, the process of redoing the scene ultimately encouraged students to reenvision the scene in ways that opened opportunities to imagine alternative story lines or ways of representation. In one performance, a group of students presented the final scenes in the story of Paul Bunyan. See Figure 3.6. In this example, the group began the scene by acting out a group of “beesquitos” (a hybrid insect composed of both bees and mosquitos). The scene then transitioned to the end of the tall tale. Instead of reenacting the logjam, which was part of the original tale, the students changed the ending to include a scene in which Paul Bunyan was arrested for crimes of “environmental violation.” The post-scene discussion started with a series of questions, similar to those described in the section on “Pre- and PostScene Direction” (e.g., What decisions did they make as actors? Which scenes did they add? What did they do to make this play? What did you find really effective in the telling of this story?). Again, these questions guided the discussion to a focus on the embodied techniques of storytelling and not the plot lines. In other words, the teaching artists continually swiveled the students’ attention toward the ways in which their peers appropriated the

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Figure 3.6 Students perform multiple retakes of Paul Bunyan ending

space, objects, and bodies of their immediate surroundings to render alternative readings and experiences with the story. In the case of this scene, however, the students were asked to repeat or reenact different sections of their scene. After audience members noted that they were a bit confused as to what the buzzing actors were trying to represent, the TA asked the students to redo the scene in order to make it more clear for the audience. To initiate the retake, the TA asked, “Can you do a 30 second huddle to revise how to make the beginning part more clear about the bees and mosquitos? . . . Take in the audience feedback and select your changes as an artist.” In this move to prompt a retake, the TA focused on actor or artist decisions rather than scene correction. The students then redid the scene and audience members noted the differences in representation for the “beesquitos.” Through focusing on “artist decisions” rather than corrections, the TA highlighted the possibility of multiple interpretations and representations of a single story. The use of retake further continued when the TA asked the students to redo the scene once again, this time focusing on the representation of the Paul Bunyan character as he was being arrested. In the first and second takes of the scene, Paul Bunyan showed little resistance to being arrested. In the third take, the TA asked the student actor for Paul Bunyan to “Defend yourself as an actor . . . What are you thinking about at this moment? . . . Talk about how the police are being rough with you.” In the third take, the student playing Paul Bunyan enacted resistance through squirming her body as the police characters cuffed her hands. She also added dialogue to her character

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stating, “I’m chopping down trees in good . . . The wood will be used to build homes and stores . . . Stop being so rough with me!” In this second use of retake, the students reworked the scene once again not to correct interpretations but to add complexity to the representation of a character and the overall message of the scene. Instead of depicting Paul Bunyan as an evil criminal, destroying the environment, the students’ later renditions of the scene added depth to the characterization and explored perspective taking and the complexity of good and bad. Furthermore, the nuanced representation of the Paul Bunyan character, through both body as narrative tool and use of dialogue, challenged both the actors’ and audience members’ abilities to apply a simplistic reading to the story. In all of the TA facilitation of embodied critical literacy, elements of geosemiotics were central in that the facilitating processes quite explicitly indexed signs and invited their possible and multiple meanings. Signs were indexed also in relation to other signs. How did Paul Bunyan’s voice interact with her gestures to defend her position, for example. Such continuous indexing of signs on the part of the TAs helped to raise students’ awareness to the various resources of storytelling available to them. Particular signs were foregrounded over others in order to name embodied effects, challenge embodied meanings, or create new meaning possibilities for the children as social actors.

Narrative Tool Ensemble In most cases, the tools for developing critical literacy through creative play were not used in isolation but rather were used in conjunction with other tools to amplify certain features in the story line. In the following scene, we see the students incorporating a variety of narrative tools to present an alternative solution to the original story, “How Peace Was Found Again.” In the original version of “How Peace Was Found Again,” the students were presented with a futuristic world devastated by nuclear war and barren of almost all forms of life. Only two cities in the form of 500-floor castles exist. In these cities, warring Chancellors spend their days and nights inventing new weapons to intimidate the enemy. While the Chancellors build weapon upon weapon, the women and children find a flower and books; and with that discover, it is possible for plant life to grow once again. With this possibility comes the hope that peace may be achieved. See Figure 3.7. In the students’ creative rendition of the story, they not only changed the story by adding the character element of robots, which were not present in the original, but they also changed the story through drawing on a variety of critical tools of storytelling. These critical renderings contributed additional dimensions to the original story and the dynamics of the classroom. To begin, the narrative tool ensemble allowed the students to take ownership of their stage space through purposeful placement of the three chairs to mark the boundaries of the stage. To highlight this new space, one of the students ran circles around the chairs. This repurposing of the chairs and space were practices that

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Figure 3.7

Student actors revise story through use of multiple narrative tools

weren’t normally allowed during regular class activities, as highlighted by the teacher’s comments, “Here we go with the chairs again,” and “Are we being safe?” The students used chairs as signs to foreground a particular meaning, but those chairs carried histories that limited their meaning potential for their teacher. For the students, the chairs amplified dimensions of the storytelling at hand, but they also marked the students’ attempts to carve out their own space for storytelling, a time/space dimension that had its own rules. In addition to repurposing space and objects, the students used purposeful enunciation of voice and deliberate body movements to enhance characterization. Charles, the robot, used his voice and body to create his character. With little dialogue devoted to the robot character, much of the storytelling was done through the purposeful enunciation of a single line, “I am going to keep doing violence,” which was delivered multiple times in a monotone voice. Furthermore, Charles stood stiff and tall to signify his nonhuman qualities. Later in the scene he moved his arms in a rigid, mechanical manner to further communicate the robotic movements of his character. The animated use of his body in this scene was a shift from his somewhat shy and reserved stage presence in other drama activities, suggesting that he perhaps felt that these movements had significance or purpose in telling the story rather than just playful, impromptu elements. This robotic presentation of the Chancellors, who in the original story were portrayed as war-obsessed men who took little interest in their wives and children, conveyed an implicit evaluation on the part of the students of the Chancellor characters’ personalities and values, suggesting that their

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excessive concern with militarization, weapons management, and war made them seem inhuman or lacking grace. The practice of character elaboration through narrative tools of voice and embodiments was also evident in the character of the mother. The student who played the mother calmly and clearly stated to her children on stage that they “are going to help her” with her plan to build the peace village. She amplifies this command with the firm use of her pointed finger aimed directly at the children’s faces. Distinct from the original version, in which the mother characters were presented as collaborating with the children and scientists to bring about peace, the student highlighted a conflict of authority among parents and children, with the strong matriarch having the ultimate authority. While some may say this representation of the strong mother figure is reproductive of dominant views of child/mother relations, it also can be seen as a revised representation of female power. In the original story, the women, living at the bottom of the 500-floor castles, had little political influence. While in the original it was the women and children who ultimately brought about peace through reengagement with the books and teaching of literacy, their actions were presented as voiceless and without official power. The strong female character was further amplified in the students’ version of the story by presenting the mother as the central decision maker that led to peace. By turning the robots off or unplugging their power, it was the mother who rendered the military force of rule as inert or lacking relevance. In other words, it was the mother, rather than the Chancellors as presented in the original, who enacted the final decisions and solutions that ultimately ended the war and brought peace. Throughout this scene making, the new text emerged in context, through the intersection of bodies, props, movement, space, and language. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS Critical storytelling and embodied narration have long been elements of drama and creative play. In writing this chapter, we hope to identify and name the presence of critical literacy practices as they occur via the embodied participation of drama activities and the creative play of scene making. The central questions shaping our inquiry have attempted to decenter the emphasis on dialogue, asking what critical literacy looks like in these contexts of creative play and scene making. Also placed into question has been the when and how of the actors’ bodies and voices and how they interact with classroom space and objects, becoming ensembles of storytelling that have equal or in some instances greater significance than the spoken word. The aforementioned scenes, with their rich array of narrative tool use and TA facilitation, illustrate the power of creativity and play for student-initiated critical literacy, especially when that play involves using classroom space and objects and their voices and bodies in new ways. Although students were

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often given specific directives for theatre games and scenes, these moments of creative play provided multiple opportunities, both with and without TA guidance, to experiment with a broad range of tools for storytelling. In the previously mentioned scenes, the critical enactments often took the form of body movements, voice enhancements, or object placement, all tactics that served to grab the audience’s attention through repurposing the classroom space. Seeing the classroom space in new ways disrupts commonplace notions of schooling, which may influence how students see themselves and how they interact with others at school, including the teacher and/or peers. It also may impact how students interact with the common objects that shape school routines, such as the desks, books, and texts that define the work of school. Through playful experimentation, the students broaden their repertoires of narrative expression and, ultimately, storytelling. This expanded tool set makes possible the imagination and critical thinking skills necessary for critical storytelling. It was within these moments of playful experimentation and classroom shift that we observed the TA as paramount in developing the students’ capacity for critical literacy. It is the TAs, with their knowledge not only of larger social constructs but also of the potentials of the body, voice, and space as tools of storytelling, who were able to identify, highlight, model, and encourage student experimentation with a broad range of storytelling tools. Whether the tools are the embodied practices discussed in this chapter or other tools that are created in the moment by the students, the TA is able to highlight the complexity of storytelling as it occurs in the students’ decisions for using or introducing new storytelling tools. The ability to highlight and maintain student engagement with the complexity of narrative is another key component to developing a critical stance, especially as it was observed through the feedback techniques discussed above, most notably the retake. In these moments, the TAs are able to highlight the ways in which the students have taken the story, knowingly or not, into new directions of plot and characterization. Whether the complexity is highlighted through the feedback techniques described earlier or others that occur naturally in the rhythm of a Neighborhood Bridges session, the notion of sustained engagement with complexity holds much potential for understanding how students are able to foster critical literacy practices through dramatic play. Through focused attention to the space and motion of play, we make visible the body and its integral role in critical storytelling. NOTE 1. The program was founded in 1997 by Peter Brosius, Artistic Director of The Children’s Theatre Company (CTC), and Jack Zipes, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

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REFERENCES Behrman, E. (2006). Teaching about language, power, and text: A review of classroom practices that support critical literacy. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 49(6), 490–498. Comber, B. (2001). Negotiating critical literacies. School Talk, 6(3), 1–2. Comber, B., & Nixon, H. (2008). Spatial literacies, design texts and emergent pedagogies in purposeful literacy curriculum. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 3(2), 221–240. Duranti, A. (1992). Language and bodies in social space: Samoan ceremonial greetings. American Anthropologist, 94, 657–691. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Glaser, B. G. (1965). The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Janks, H. (2009). Literacy and power. New York: Routledge. Jones, R., & Norris, S. (2005). Introducing practice. In S. Norris & R. Jones (Eds.), Discourse in action: Introducing mediated discourse analysis (pp. 97–99). New York: Routledge. Lankshear, C., & McLaren, P. (1993). Critical literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lewis, C., Janowiec, A., Erasmus, Y., Flynn, J. E., & Ingram, D. (2010). Critical literacy in neighborhood bridges: An exploratory study. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement. College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota. Lewis, C., Ketter, B., & Fabos, B. (2002). Reading race in a rural context. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14, 317–350. Luke, A. (2000). Critical literacy in Australia: A matter of context and standpoint. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 43, 448–461. New York: Routledge. Norris, S., & Jones, R. (2005). Discourse in action: Introducing mediated discourse analysis. London: Routledge. O’Loughlin, M. (2006). Embodiment and education: Exploring creatural existence. Dordrecht: Springer. Perry, M., & Medina, C. (2011). Embodiment and performance in pedagogy research: Investigating the possibility of the body in curriculum experience. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27, 62–75. Pineau, E. L. (2002). Critical performative pedagogy. In N. Stucky, & C. Wimmer (Eds.), Teaching performance studies (pp. 41–54). Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Scollon, R. (2001). Mediated discourse: The nexus of practice. London: Routledge. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the material world. London: Routledge. Strauss, A. (1987). Qualitative analysis for social scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Wohlwend, K. E. (2009). Mapping multimodal literacy practices through mediated discourse analysis: Identity revision in “What not to wear.” In K. M. Leander, D. W. Rowe, R. Jimenez, D. Compton, D. K. Dickinson, Y. Kim, & V. Risko (Eds.), Fifty-eighth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 66–81). San Antonio, TX: National Reading Conference.

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Wohlwend, K. & Lewis, C. (2011). Critical literacy, critical engagement, digital technology: Convergence and embodiment in glocal spheres. In D. Lapp & D. Fisher (Eds.), The handbook on teaching English and Language Arts, 3rd edition. New York: Taylor & Francis. Zipes, J. (n.d.). Creative and critical literacy. In Neighborhood Bridges Program, The Children’s Theatre Company. Retrieved March 18, 2013, from http://www. neighborhoodbridges.org/philosophy/critical_literacy.html

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The Disenchantment of Western Performance Training, and the Search for an Embodied Experience Toward a Methodology of the Ineffable Jane Turner

VIRAL BODIES This chapter will map a journey that engages with embodied encounters across time and space in relation to a range of critical perspectives on embodiment and embodied knowledge. The chapter focuses on my reflections on embodying a foreign culture and critically evaluates a range of methods, such as ethnography, theatre anthropology, and psychophysical approaches to performer training that all offer useful advice on processes of embodiment. The evaluation of methodologies of embodiment was triggered when I succumbed to a viral infection that meant that every centimeter of my body and the hair on my head, hurt. The process of moving from this heightened state of bodily awareness, of being an embodied subject, to consciously rationalizing the experience (I had caught a cold) highlighted the complexities of identifying the relationship between being in an embodied moment, reflecting, and textualizing that moment to generate what is then termed embodied knowledge. The journey that the chapter focuses on is an instance of my performer training in a non-Western, theatrical context. The questions that are explored here consider the effects of disenchantment on a Western sensibility and a search for embodiment that took me to the Indonesian island of Bali. Engaging in a non-Western performance practice marked out a particular set of considerations that related specifically to embodiment, notably whether embodiment was experienced and understood differently in different cultural contexts. In addition, a further consideration explored here asks how, in evaluating methodologies of embodiment, axiological factors can be acknowledged and accommodated. In the method I propose, I aim to explore four key ‘embodied practices’ that emerged from my interpretation of theatre anthropology, ethnographic reflective practices, and psychophysical approaches. Disenchantment is explored through notions of

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commensurability in embodied research and theories to articulate the different constitutions of embodiment in relation to cultural context, knowledge, and experience. Kirsten Hastrup usefully identifies embodiment as being directly connected to social action and driven by motivations. These motives, she says, “derive from a variety of sources but they share the feature of being largely implicit, unverbalized, and deeply embodied” (Hastrup, 1995, p. 4). For this reason, as a performer seeking to embody different cultural performance techniques, a key danger is that I become a cultural consumer who does not acknowledge that each practice has its own set of motivations. THEATRE ANTHROPOLOGY AND NON-WESTERN EMBODIED PRACTICES Two alternative approaches to embodiment in relation to performer training that both consciously draw on non-Western embodied practice can be found in the work of Eugenio Barba and Phillip Zarrilli. Both of these theatre practitioners have focused their explorations of theatre practice on the process of using the body to create performance materials. Eugenio Barba’s observations and writings on the aesthetic, performing body makes a distinction between a body engaged in everyday activity and what he terms extra-daily activity. Barba describes the extra-daily as techniques “which do not respect the habitual conditionings of the use of the body” (Barba, 1995, p. 15–16). Barba’s work in theatre anthropology has been driven by an intention to make visible the actor’s craft at a pre-expressive level rather than in the moment of performance. Barba observed and examined a diverse range of performance practices from around the world and identified three shared principles of pre-expressive behavior, namely: ‘alterations in balance,’ that is, a balance that is different from our everyday balance; ‘the law of opposition,’ whereby a scientific law of physics and counterpoint is refined in art; and ‘incoherent coherence,’ which identifies behavior that is incoherent with everyday life but is coherent and consistent within the frame of a performance.1 The aim is to acknowledge that actor training is not only concerned with outward appearances but is also a process of making the invisible visible in the act of theatre. The invisible is understood to be the creative materials derived from the associated cognitive and bodily activities performed by the actor at a pre-expressive level; essentially, it is the formulation of an embodied practice made visible in the act of performance. Principles of the pre-expressive allow the performer to locate the aesthetic shifts that occur in the body from a daily to an extra-daily body, and provide a way to ‘measure’ degrees of aesthetic embodiment. For Barba, the notion of embodiment implies a level of knowing that incorporates both mental and physical behavior and constitutes a level of what he refers to as ‘scenic presence’: refined behavior that transcends mere imitation. Barba was particularly concerned when the Odin actors traveled

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to countries such as Japan and Bali to learn, what to them were, alien performance practices. He thought this would lead to no more than a surface understanding rather than a level of embodiment. What occurred that is significant here is that the actors, as a consequence of their learning experience, were able to better identify ways in which energy and balance can be used in performance within their own ‘small tradition’ (Turner, 2004: 11); thus, they took their learning and incorporated it into their own performing practice. There was not an intention to imitate the cultural practices that they had acquired as though they were ‘authentic’ to their own bodies. In this sense, performer training allows the translation and adaption of foreign cultural practices because the resulting level of embodied performance is informed and enriched by the experience and challenge, but the performer is not attempting to replicate an authentic embodiment of the cultural ‘other.’ Accordingly, Barba’s notion of theatre anthropology opens up a methodology that provides concrete ideas and terms that support a process of learning and embodying a performance practice. Barba uses the term ‘sats’ to identify the impulse to move, shifts in energy and focus. Sats unites thought and action and is experienced as both entities working as one. Working with sats requires the performer to be working at a significant and detailed level rather than at a generalized level; for example, physically working with minute shifts in breathing, balance, energy, the dilation of the eye. Zarrilli’s account of ‘enactive acting’ (2009) differs from Barba’s Theatre Anthropology as it intends to articulate embodiment in the context of both the moment of acting as well as in training. His focus constitutes a psychophysical approach to acting, an approach that incorporates perception and embodiment. Like Barba, Zarrilli also uses the term ‘extra-daily body’ (ibid., p. 50) to emphasize that the object of exploration is the bodymind engaged in a refined activity. His account focuses on what he terms “an aesthetic inner bodymind discovered and shaped through long term . . . in-depth forms of psychophysical training” (ibid.). A given example of such an embodied discipline is yoga and the inner bodymind can here be ‘awakened’ in the performer using techniques that focus on the breath, such as meditation. Zarrilli’s account explores ‘four bodies’ that can each be understood as offering a different sense of embodiment; these four bodies are continually in a state of flux as they interweave creating what Zarrilli calls a ‘chiasmatic body’ (ibid. 59). The ‘four bodies’ are referred to as “the ecstatic surface, the depth/visceral recessive, the subtle inner bodies, and the fictive body of the actor’s score” (ibid.). The implication is that there is a continuum that marks different experiences of embodiment but that such a continuum is not rationally ordered, is not progressive and does not imply a value judgment or hierarchy of experience. The ‘chiasmatic body’ is experienced from the perspective of the performer and creates an aesthetic outer body that can be judged, echoing the earlier account of the four criteria used for judging the quality of Balinese performance. Zarrilli argues that embodiment is a process of encounters: that our body is never singular but represents

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the multiple bodies we embody each day. Zarrilli’s enactive approach to performer training calls for the performer to become more acutely aware of not only what he calls the first body, the surface body, but the second and third body described as the recessive and aesthetic inner bodymind; the fourth body is an amalgam of the previous three embodiments and is the body that is fictive and offered for the gaze of the audience. Zarrilli is particularly interested in the absent body, which he describes, citing Drew Leder’s 1990 book, The Absent Body, as characterized by forgetfulness. When engaged in activity, our focus is most frequently elsewhere and hence we are unaware of our own bodies. When engaged in a process of learning or embodying a bodily technique, Zarrilli identifies two stages to the learning process: The first is extrinsic and self-conscious; the second is intrinsic and occurs when behavior becomes intuitive, and at this point Zarrilli says “the body disappears” (Zarrilli, 2009, p. 54). The specific challenge being explored in this chapter is one where the behavior has been acculturated, or has become intrinsic, but the embodied knowledge remains corporeal and not psychospiritual. Therefore, although both practitioners offer us methods for embodying performance practice that are inherently useful, a gap remains in the process of embodiment being explored here. What is evident in the work of both of these theatre practitioners is the importance of self-reflection as a pivotal point in the relationship between embodiment and knowing. Both practitioners, in developing their methodologies, have engaged in, and been significantly influenced by, non-Western practices that they have then incorporated and made their own. However, the notion of self-reflection implies a sense of individualism that is not significant in all cultures. COMMENSURABILITY Alphonzo Lingis says in Foreign Bodies that in essence our bodies seek equivalence, a postural schema that is constructed through recognition and adaptability to a local environment. He says: In the contagion of schemas of posture and movement, corporeality becomes one, common; each of us is for himself or herself and for others a variant on sentient corporeality (1994, p. 12). However, what is incorporated by such an understanding of a living, physical body changes across time and space; and while a performer such as myself might seek commonality, this may be at the cost of condensing or displacing unfamiliar aspects of behavior into that which is recognizable and in some way knowable within my own personal history. In recent years, there has been a proliferation in the use of the term embodiment that in turn has led to an unconditional homogenization. A generalized use of

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the term leads to assumptions in understanding rather than identifying the particularity of embodied experience. Sabu Mahmood argues that embodiment is constituted differently within particular cultures because it draws on different cultural notions of “personhood, knowledge and experience” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 16). She cites Judith Butler’s observation that the paradox of subjectivity is that while we may seek to identify our place in the world in opposition to our cultural norms, as we are a product of such norms, our sense of subjectivity is always relative to these norms (Butler, in Mahmood, 2005, p. 20). Engaging with cultural norms other than our own can lead to our own being “subject to resignification” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 20). She argues that the concept of agency and the autonomy of the subject as a universal value is driven by a Western sensibility, whereas it is situated within a web of particular political and ethical conditions, “within which such acts acquire their particular meaning” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 9). She suggests that there are alternative ways of thinking about agency, especially in relation to embodied capacities. One approach that might usefully be adopted when engaging with learning an embodied technique is to adopt, what Kirsten Hastrup calls, the position of a ‘third person,’ that is one who is both inside and outside the cultural field as well as inside and outside his or her own body (Hastrup, 1995, p. 6). DISENCHANTED BODIES The concept of a disenchantment of culture is connected to the function of art in relation to the rise of modernity and rationalism in the Western world, a state whereby all activities and experiences can be rationally explained. The concept of disenchantment points to a decline in beliefs in all things magical and a corresponding rise in secularism in the West. As Partridge observes, technology advances and nature withdraws (Partridge, 2005). Disenchantment operates here as a useful framework in which to locate changes in the way theatre and dance performers in the West experience their bodies and thus embodiment.2 Philosophers and cultural critics have pointed to the effects of disenchantment to explain both the flattening out of experience and a corresponding search for experiences that offer the opportunity to transcend what appears to be a consequent “loss of authentic meaning in modern life” (Gane, 2004, p. 2). Crowther, in his account of the changes to aesthetic evaluation, disenchantment, and human experience, states that in modern industrial societies there has been an “atrophy of experience” (1993, p. 9) and a decay in aura. Lingis also notes that, as a consequence of the digital age, the body has become atrophied; it is no longer required to be agile, because of the negligible demands of everyday labor, and thus, we seek other reasons to develop our physical agility. Charting the disenchantment of Western culture in the twentieth century, Weber suggests that art, as an aesthetic sphere, has and continues to offer ‘irrational salvation’

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and has taken over from religion in creating an escape from the routines of the everyday and rationalism (in Gane, 2004, p. 105). The aesthetic sphere explored by Weber focuses on the spectator’s experience rather than the artist’s/performer’s participatory experience: the focus of my interest here. Crowther argues that, as a result of a flattening of our experiential range, reinforced by the repetitive rhythms of mechanical forms in industry, film, television, shopping, etc., we seek out shocks: “any kind of effective jolt” (Crowther, 1993, p. 15) that compensates and offers an alternate, heightened experience. The argument here goes some way to offer an explanation as to why places such as Bali that are packaged as spiritually rich, become attractive tourist resources for Westerners to replenish their experiential range and experience a kind of ‘effective jolt.’ Bali, we are led to believe, offers us spiritually impoverished beings an experience of immersive re-enchantment and heightened embodiment. Re-enchantment is linked to spirituality and a sense of being connected, both in terms of having a knowledge of the self but also in terms of being connected to nature, the universe, ancestry, etc. Whereas re-enchantment is linked with Romanticism, disenchantment is connected with progressive enlightenment, and, as Partridge describes, this state is for many now a byword for “greed, corruption, technological fascism, and alienation from nature” (Partridge, 2005, p. 47). Thus, the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century are marked by a turn toward a relational search for knowledge of the self, especially as a psychophysical and psychospiritual quest. Cultural commentators on Bali provide accounts of the ways in which Bali has been packaged as a tourist culture that sustains a strong sense of enchantment, as well as embracing modernity.3 Visitors to Bali are offered an encounter with a cultural heritage, seeped in ritual practices, that has been commodified as a tourist attraction. As tourists, we are actively encouraged to attend temple ceremonies and even learn cultural performance forms connected to temple ceremonies. It is rare that secular entertainment forms are promoted as tourist fare, although the nightly tourist shows are usually made up of secularized versions of sacred performance forms. In 2012, I visited Ubud, described in many travel guides as the cultural center of Bali. I was struck by the number of venues offering yoga classes, macrobiotic foods, and spiritual cleansing. Those running the venues and attending were not Balinese; the majority of these people were from Western countries, thus suggesting that spiritual enrichment could be attained merely by being in a geographical space. In this sense, re-enchantment becomes just another branded element of cultural consumption. So, in relation to embodiment, is there a link between the atrophied Western body, and the visibility of these bodies, and the rise in interest in Europe to train the body in physical techniques often derived from nonWestern practices such as Balinese Topeng? My argument is that there is an evident desire to transform the body into a particular ideal that resonates with a foreign tradition bound by technique, discipline, embodiedness, and

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spirituality. Perhaps, in my case, it was to satisfy my own perceived spiritual gaps or lacunae; however, having embarked on such a search to embody a culturally foreign performance technique, what sort of performer knowledge did I need to attain. Having set out a broad context examining relationships between bodies and cultural contexts and motivations to embody foreign performance practices, the following sections asses ways in which cultural experience leads to forms of embodied knowledge, asks how such knowledge can be evaluated, the importance of reflection, and, finally, question whether partial embodiment is all that can be claimed and acquired.

EMBODYING PRACTICE 1: AN EMBODIED PERSPECTIVE Perception is an accumulation of knowledge through experience, a translation of forms into an order of experience. Barba and Savarese comment in A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology that “to see with the spirit is to grasp the substance; to see with the eyes is merely to observe the effect” (1991, p. 244). My task, when I undertook ethnographic fieldwork in Bali, was to immerse myself in everyday cultural activity to develop an awareness and sensitivity that I hoped would lead to a form of cultural knowledge. I spent part of each day with a Topeng mask carver and another part of the day with a Topeng dance teacher. Studying Topeng Pajegan in Bali was part of an experiential process toward understanding and gaining participant observer knowledge of Balinese cultural performances. The experiential process was chaotic and disordered but enabled me to construct what might be described as a view from somewhere; that is, produce an embodied perspective. Although I recorded classes, took photographs, and wrote detailed descriptions, with an annotated commentary of learning situations and cultural encounters, much of my cognitive knowledge and understanding emerged on reflection and with distance from the events and activities. This aspect of knowledge also raised questions concerning what I had understood embodiment to mean. On reflection, I realized that, although I had technically learned, through a process of imitation, two of the Topeng character dances, the level of learning felt superficial. On one level, the notion of embodying might be understood at a surface level as literally giving body—or form—to an entity that has no body: to incarnate, literally give flesh to a Topeng character. Embodiment can be a transitory, temporary, and partial experience or it can necessitate a psychophysical transformation that generates a level of cognitive understanding and bodily knowing derived from intense experience that constitutes embodied knowledge. Another aspect of the knowledge attained through developing an embodied perspective was a recognition of the methodologies of behavior that I was already affected by. As a performer, I am

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not trained in a single codified performance technique and, consequently, imagined myself to be more open to learning foreign codified forms; however, as Pavis observes, “western actors . . . are impregnated by formulas, habits of work, which belong to the anthropological and sociological codifications of their milieu” (Pavis, 1992, p. 16). The experience of learning a culturally foreign performance technique enabled me to better reflect on my own inherent behaviors. EMBODYING PRACTICE 2: AXIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS An examination of the commensurability of bodies across cultural situations and practices might usefully consider embodied knowledge in relation to ethnographic frameworks of participant observation. Such an approach culminates in a sense of embodiment that crucially incorporates the importance of perception and reflection as forms of experience (see Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991, p. 27). By moving out of my home cultural context, I am able to return to it with a more critical and knowing eye, a different sense of perception. Perception is here understood as a process of textualization. It is important to resist a tendency to make assumptions about our own cultural practices in the same way that there can be a tendency, when traveling into cultural practices that are not our own, such as Bali, to make assumptions about how they construct knowledge; these tendencies constitute the basis of value judgments or axiological considerations. Marcus and Fischer point to the idea of ‘methodological naiveté,’ that is going into the field free of the assumptions and prejudices of preexisting scholarship (1989, p. 139). This practice can lead to a significant level of critical understanding when, as a result of studying another cultural practice, the ethnographer’s own self-reflection and understanding of her own cultural context is critically opened up. However, such a process is dependent on high levels of reflection and informed reflection taking place after the event. Marcus and Fischer offer two strategies for evaluating what is different within differing cultural contexts that both offer critical positions between experience and textuality, and open up the ethnographic method of participant observation. The first is “defamiliarization by cross cultural juxtaposition” (1986, p. 138); Balinese performance is a codified system that is other to my normative uncodified performance practice in the United Kingdom, thus the juxtaposition of the two practices provides me with a useful experiential perspective. The second strategy is titled “defamiliarization by epistemological critique” (ibid.); again, with this strategy in mind, the task here is to look at embodiment in relation to what constitutes knowledge in an age of disenchantment (rationalism) and postmodern re-enchantment, and in relation to questions regarding what constitutes knowledge in different cultures. The relationship being sought here is both reflective and dialogic. I need to be able to ask

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questions of my experience, and I need to acknowledge that the process of reflection is dialogic, thus changing across time (history) and space (culture) as I acquire further experience and understanding. EMBODYING PRACTICE 3: UNRULINESS AS A METHODOLOGY Embarking on a process of learning is often described as messy, idiosyncratic, and unconventional.4 This is a methodological state that should not be feared but embraced, particularly in relation to a process of knowing and acculturating an embodied practice. James Clifford (1988) describes the process of textualizing ethnographic experience as unruly, particularly in relation to the method of participant observation. For Clifford, the unruliness occurs in the process of reflecting on, examining, and writing up the data collected from the fieldwork encounters. Participant observation is a method of cultural engagement that requires the ethnographer to operate actively inside the cultural context and to simultaneously occupy a position on the margins of the cultural activities in order to observe and contemplate the activities in a wider context. Clifford describes it as “a dialectic of experience and interpretation” (1988, p. 34). In terms of advocating a methodological approach to embodiment, I would extend the notion of unruliness to include the actual experiential engagement with a cultural practice. The unruliness of cultural encounters, I would argue, should be welcomed as it can open up opportunities for us to learn a new and/or different body technique. The process of learning incorporates an aspect of interpretation that leads to an imposition of order and/ or structure on what initially might be described as a cacophonous experience. There is an important distinction that needs to be made between the body’s experience of embodying a moment and a form of embodied knowledge that may emerge from reflecting on the experience. Crowther describes the relationship between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ as being an ‘abyss’ between our ability to be in the world and our ability to express experience philosophically and/or theoretically (1993a, p. 3). My unruly experience as an ethnographer in Bali engaged with participant observation as a key strategy and thus I spent time each day for three months taking Topeng classes and learning to carve masks.5 On one level, this regime would appear ordered, and, arguably, I became quite proficient and technically accomplished performing the Topeng Pajegan roles and had begun to appreciate the relationship between the gamelan music and the physical dynamic of the character movements. As a student, who has always had a passion for theatre, I had not ever actually learned a physical disciplined approach to acting and thus had never had the experience of acquiring a disciplined, aesthetic, physical behavior, and so there was a degree of novelty in my initial encounter with Topeng. I enjoyed the experience of

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a different sense of balance and physical movement required by the form. Each class was two-hours long and initially focused on the particular body posture, location of energy, and breathing required by Topeng as a generic dance form. The contact the feet have with the ground, the bend in the knee, and the lifted position of the arms were all very alien to me, and I experienced my body as being awkward and clumsy: unruly. As the lessons progressed, my teacher identified two Topeng characters that I would learn: Tua (old man: slow moving and often comic) and Dalem (king: a refined and graceful character). Both characters had very different choreographies, although initially my untrained eye could not appreciate the nuances of the detailed differences. In addition, my untrained ear found it challenging to discern the different lines of rhythm in the gamelan music that indicated shifts in the physical behavior required by the characters’ dances. I had to consciously focus my physical and sensory attention on each potential movement, while also ensuring that the rest of my body was maintaining the required core position. The strategy for teaching involved Pak Tutur performing and me following behind and trying to imagine what was happening at the front. Repetition led to a surface level of familiarity with the dance, and then technical detail could follow. At this point, Pak Tutur observed me and would draw attention to a wrongly positioned wrist, finger, or eye movements; sometimes he used a long stick to highlight a misplaced limb, sometimes he would stand behind me, shadowing my body and lifting me into the correct stance. It might be considered that, at the end of my period of learning, I had attained the first level of accomplishment, what Rubin and Sedana identify as a level judged in Bali as Wirama, that is: the stage when a performer masters the musical accompaniment in accordance with the vocabulary of movement and the whole choreography of a given dramatic character (2007, p. 125). However, in order to achieve Wibawa, the highest performance level, a term that translates as having spiritual aura and value, I would need to have: internalised a certain dramatic character and possess the spiritual aura in line with the vocabulary of movement and choreography of a given dramatic character. The Wibawa is the internal power/values that are known as Taksu (ibid.). Topeng Pajegan is a solo, masked performance form in Bali that is standard diet for Western students to learn. The form occupies a status that embraces both the sacred and secular, that is Bebali,6 so it is considered both a form of entertainment and also devotional; thus, it is imperative for the performer to have an understanding and embodied knowledge of the underlying belief system that is fundamental to Balinese cultural practice to be fully effective. Embodiment in this context implies that while the

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performer provides a corporeal form that activates the dramatic character, the performer’s body is merely a vessel for the gods to channel energy to ensure the efficacy of the performance and ceremony or event in which it is performed. Prior to performance, the performer will pray and recite a mantra calling on Dewa Taksu to bequeath energy and inhabit their body during the performance. Dewa Taksu is considered an intermediary spirit connected to Sang Hyang Taksu, a manifestation of Sanghyang Widi, who connects gods and human beings. It is not for the performer to state whether she or he was visited by the spirit of Taksu, and it is unclear whether performers who experience a heightened, more intense experience can equate the experience with Taksu. Taksu, it should be noted, is not an aspect of Indian Hindu practice: Balinese Hindu practice differs as it incorporates the possibility of gods entering the human body. Following a performance, the performer incants another mantra to ensure that Dewa Taksu safely leaves the performer’s body. On one level, it is easy as a student learning a different performance practice to make assumptions about the commensurability of ‘postural schema’—to use Lingis’s phrase. The position of the arms and the energy located solidly in the torso are more or less like something else we encountered somewhere else—we can only organize experience and sensations in relation to other parts of our lived experience. There is no neutral way of assessing whether the knowledge we have incorporated is correct. For instance, having begun to incorporate the physical gestures and posture required for Topeng, I became aware of a presence of emptiness—a consciousness—without an object; I enquired about an internal focus, and the response I received was quizzical, uncertainty; my teacher advised that I should observe carefully and I would understand. Thus, while my learning appeared on the surface to be ordered, at an embodied level there were gaps, discrepancies, misunderstandings, assumptions, displacements; what might be described as a bit of a muddle. This condition is not uncommon in any learning situation, and learning that takes place in an unruly capacity does allow the learner to make discoveries and unexpected connections with his or her own personal sense of being, reinforcing the notion that embodiment is experienced in different ways as the body becomes more familiar with a process of acculturated learning. EMBODYING PRACTICE 4: EMBODIMENT AND SPIRITUAL BELIEF A question here might be, What sort of embodiment is required in a culture where there is a holistic approach to body, mind, and spirit? In Balinese cosmology, the body occupies a pivotal position between Sekala and Niskala.7 The body coexists in both, and the spiritual aspect of existence is woven into the fabric and function of every aspect of the culture. Coming from

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a culture that has disenchanted the value of spiritual belief means that learning a performance style that is connected with a value system poses particular challenges in terms of embodiment. Embodiment without spiritual connection further exposes the questions of commensurability. Johnson suggests that when we encounter an aspect of experience that is incommensurable with our own habitual sense of lived experience we are made aware of a conflicting set of values that becomes an “occasion for inquiry” (Johnson, 2011, p. 146). The experience becomes indeterminate; and in order to reduce the indeterminacy, we must reevaluate our own cultural values and reconfigure our sense, in this instance, of what embodied knowledge might entail. The notion of embodiment, as stated earlier, is itself considered to be indeterminate, according to Csordas (1994), which in turn suggests that each experiential engagement that challenges our psychophysical sense of ourselves will result in a new occasion for inquiry. An intrinsic danger here is that in a search to reduce the indeterminacy of embodiment and produce embodied knowledge, we reduce the process of performer learning or training to a rationalized commodity by imposing a particular rationalized control over it. Johnson suggests that a counter to such a danger is to focus on knowing as a process rather than knowledge as a final product. He says that the goal of a research inquiry “is not some illusory fixed and eternal knowledge.” Instead, to call something ‘knowledge’ is simply a way to valorize certain ways of knowing—ways of transforming experience (2011, p. 147). The danger of knowledge as a goal-orientated system is that, in its attempt to contain experience, it will inevitably leave out those aspects that appear to be discrepant, unfamiliar, and disconnected from our own normative experience. However, as a means of measuring embodiment in terms of a process of knowing, there are strategies developed by theatre practitioners that identify particular physical dispositions that operate at a transcultural level. In a recent visit to Bali, I spoke with several performers about their experience of performance. Even with the help of my translator, it became evident that my questions regarding experience did not resonate with them in a meaningful way. They responded to my questions in a way that suggested that it was not individual experience but collective function and responsibility that was meaningful. They perform because they can and need to; it is their responsibility. They do not make a distinction between what they do and the religious efficacy of the performance; their bodies are a component of that efficacy, part of a collective not a separate ego. Three of the Balinese performers I spoke with in Bali also taught Western students but maintained that, although Western students’ motives to learn were different from many of their Balinese students, they used the same approach to teaching; in some instances, teaching groups of young Balinese at the same time as their Western students.8 Ida Bagus Alit stated that his Balinese students wanted to learn so that they could perform in temple ceremonies and be closer to the gods, whereas his Western students wanted

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to learn to extend their creative and artistic ability. All three teachers were clear that Western students could become good performers but would not be able to achieve Taksu or Wibawa as both these levels of embodiment entailed a spiritual aspect that was not available to Western performers. As Bourdieu said, “those who want to believe with the beliefs of others grasp neither the objective truth not the subjective experiences of belief” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 68). EMBODIMENT, DISENCHANTMENT AND RE-ENCHANTMENT: FINAL REFLECTIONS Dance in Bali primarily has a religious function, it is not tied to a modernist sense of rationalism but retains a status of being enchanted (located in the premodern), and a key aspect of the dancer’s function is to make enchantment visible through sensual experience. Lyotard uses the term ‘figure’ to describe that which “refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept” (in Gane, 2004, p. 106). For many non-Balinese from a rationalized culture, there is perhaps the allure of escape offered here in the cultural practice; an escape from rationalism that paradoxically we are drawn to intellectualize scientifically. The collective belief that reinforces forms such as Topeng is not tied to a Western sense of progress; it is considered both sacred and an art form, again, in Lyotard’s terms, a celebration of ‘figural’ form, of sensual experience. I use the term figural here as it is derived from Western critical thinking and denotes creative practice that disrupts rational discourse and identifies that notions of disenchantment and enchantment coexist within both cultures and individuals. Gane explains that Lyotard sees the process of disenchantment as stripping art of its ritual function, and, subsequently, as the repression of the figural (‘figure’): “the singular possibly sacred, form that cannot be represented in discourse” (Gane, 2004, p. 104). Figure is not understood to be in opposition to discourse but a counterbalance, so arguably not so different in conceptual form from Sekala and Niskala. The notion of figure may suggest a desire to return to a premodern state of enchantment, but the counterbalance of rational discourse suggests something different. For Baudrillard, modernity is not a “unilinear process of regression from an enchanted world . . . to a disenchanted fourth order of value” (in Gane, 2004, p. 139). Therefore, forms of re-enchantment/enchantment are never completely eliminated from any individual or culture. In fact, Baudrillard goes as far as saying that “the excluded form [the symbolic] prevails, secretly, over the dominant form . . . symbolic rituals can absorb anything” (in Gane, 2004, p. 139/140).9 This point is substantiated by all the Balinese dancers I met with, who appear to coexist in a premodern (enchanted) world as well as a modern (disenchanted) world, which itself simulates and performs itself for tourists while simultaneously being authentic.

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Gane’s discussion of rationalism and re-enchantment says that we cannot unlearn modern rationalism; there can be no return to naiveté and no rational reinvention of mythical or symbolic forms. Quoting Weber, he warns that: the spheres of the irrational, the only spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched, are . . . raised into consciousness and put under its lens. For in practice this is where the modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism leads. This method of emancipation from intellectualism may well bring about the very opposite of what those who take to it conceive as its goal. (Weber in Gane, 2004, p. 148) Reflecting retrospectively on the experiences I had in Bali continues to raise questions concerning the nature of these experiences. What did I understand and interpret from the experiences? What measure of embodiment did I achieve when I learned the Topeng dance form? What does embodiment denote from a Balinese perspective? If embodiment entails a spiritual dimension, then it is beyond my capability but, if as Varela et al. suggest, embodiment incorporates an element of reflection as experience (1991, p. 27), then does this make it a culturally specific aspect of Western subjectivity? To inhabit the body means different things to and in different cultures; thus, a continuum that accommodates culturally diverse practices is necessary. Embodiment presupposes that, on the one hand, we are finite beings who share a common world, yet, on the other hand, that we see this world from different perspectives as we occupy different points on the time/ space continuum. In terms of the original premise that a consequence of disenchantment for Western theatre training has led to a search for what might be imagined as an embodied sense of re-enchantment achievable by engaging with what is perceived to be a spiritually rich cultural practice, my search might be better described as a melancholic and nostalgic search for presence, a deep level of subjectivity, “a striving for communion with an absolute self which can be conceived as existing, but which cannot be directly encountered in perception” (in Crowther, 1993, p. 156). The task here is not to demystify and rationalize Balinese dance drama and spiritual embodiment, or to exoticize Balinese culture as a site of enchantment and spiritual embodiment, but to acknowledge that embodiment takes many different forms, from surface imitation, to an in-depth level of experience that alters an individual’s sense of being in the world. Crowther’s point embraces the dilemma posed by embodiment, and its intrinsic paradox: that when we experience ‘deep play’ the experience of significant embodiment eludes us; and the experience is often described as disembodied. Thus, a methodology here is a search to articulate that which is ineffable and invisible. What this chapter has highlighted are the problems inherent in operating with a homogenized understanding of the term embodiment. By positing a chaotic, unruly, subjective antimethod for engaging with different notions of embodiment, the

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intention is to demonstrate that each embodied subject is distinctive and each encounter and experience is contingent and requires a new strategy for engagement, or, following Johnson, “occasion for inquiry.” NOTES 1. For further details on theatre anthropology see Barba (1995), Barba and Savarese (1991), and Turner (2004). 2. The use of the term Western is a broad term and needs to be applied judiciously. While convenient, it homogenizes cultural differences. In this chapter, I am writing from the perspective of a resident of the UK, and, thus, when I use terms such as ‘we’ and ‘us,’ the terms refer to a British collective sensibility that is generalized in terms of a disposition to Western ideas and values. 3. See Picard (1996) and Vickers (1989, 1996). 4. See Marcus and Fischer (1986). 5. As part of a previous research inquiry into intercultural theatre practice, I engaged in a process of active learning with Ida Bagus Alit in Lodtunduh, who taught me Topeng mask carving and Ketut Tutur in Petulu, who taught me Topeng dance. 6. See Bandem and deBoer (1995) for details on categories of dance in Bali; also note that in bahasa Balinese there is no word for dance and/or drama. 7. See Eiseman (1989) for a comprehensive account of Balinese cosmology. Sekala is understood to be that which is visible and can be sensed directly, and Niskala is understood to equate to that which is invisible and can only be felt within. 8. The three practitioners who generously shared their expertise and experience with me on a recent visit (2012) are I Made Djimat from Batuan; his son-in-law I Wayan Bawa, also from Batuan; and Ida Bagus Alit from Lodtundhu. 9. Mark A. Schneider reaffirms that disenchantment and re-enchantment are not oppositional positions but coexistent and argues that “it is as difficult today, as ever, to separate the culturally magical from the mundane” (1993, p. x).

REFERENCES Bandem, I. M., & deBoer, F. (1995). Balinese dance in transition: Kaja and Kelod. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barba, E. (1995). The Paper Canoe. London: Routledge. Barba, E., & Savarese, N. (1991). A dictionary of theatre anthropology. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crowther, P. (1993a). Art and embodiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crowther, P. (1993b). Critical aesthetics and postmodernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Csordas, T. S. (1994). Embodiment and experience: The existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eiseman, F. B. (1989). Bali Sekala and Niskala Volume 1: Essays on religion, ritual, and art. Singapore: Periplus Editions. Gane, N. (2004). Max Weber and postmodern theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hastrup, K. (1995). Incorporated knowledge. Mime Journal, XX, 2–9. Johnson, M. (2011). Embodied knowing through art. In M. Biggs & H. Karlsson (Eds.), The Routledge companion to research in the arts (pp. XX–XX). London: Routledge. Lingis, A. (1994). Foreign bodies. London: Routledge. Mahmood, S. (2005). The politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcus, G. E., Fischer, M. M. J. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Partridge, C. (2005). The Re-enchantment of the West Volume 2: Alternative spiritualities. London: T and T Clark International. Pavis, P. (1992). Theatre at the crossroads of culture (L. Kruger, trans.). London: Routledge. Picard, M. (1996). Bali. Cultural tourism and touristic culture. Singapore: Archipelago Press. Schneider, M. A. (1993). Culture and enchantment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sedana, I. N., & Rubin, L. (2007). Performance in Bali. London: Routledge. Turner, J. (2004). Eugenio Barba. London: Routledge. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge: MIT Press. Vickers, A. (1989). Bali a paradise created. Singapore: Periplus Editions. Zarrilli, P. (2009). Psychophysical acting: An intercultural approach after Stanislavski. London: Routledge.

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Becoming Attuned Objects, Affects, and Embodied Methodology James Ash and Lesley Anne Gallacher

INTRODUCTION What if the skin were not a container? What if the skin were not a limit at which self begins and ends? What if the skin were a porous, topological surfacing of myriad potential strata that field the relation between different milieus, each of them a multiplicity of insides and outsides? (Manning, 2013, p. 1–2)

We begin with the above quotation from Erin Manning’s book Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, because in many ways it sums up the key issue that we hope to address in this chapter. Manning, like many other poststructuralist and posthumanist thinkers, argues for a new model of the body (understood as a material and visceral set of biological components and functions) and a new way of theorizing and conceptualizing embodiment (how humans experience the world through their specifically placed and located bodies). Manning emphasizes the need to overcome a model of the body, and self, as a contained entity and a notion of the human as the measure and measurer of all things. Manning’s viewpoint chimes with a broader literature on posthumanism, which argues that the body is less a determined biological entity (as in humanism) and more an open and plastic boundary whose basic condition is change, porosity, and augmentation (see, for example, Hayles, 2012; Malabou, 2008; Wolfe, 2010). To take posthuman and poststructuralist critiques of the body as a container seriously requires a shift in our methodological imaginary and the vocabularies we use to express that imaginary. If posthumanism is keen to emphasize nonhuman objects—such as technology (Hayles, 1999), microbacterial life (Bradiotti, 2013), and animals (Haraway, 2003)—as central to our sensory experiences of the world, then any vocabulary of embodied methodology should be able to describe and analyze sensory experience in ways that do not begin and end with experience as organized by an autonomous human subject. In other words, a posthuman methodology would be able to analyze how bodies engage with their environments in ways that don’t prioritize or privilege particular individual human senses or faculties

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over the vast array of nonhuman objects that shape and enable these faculties. For example, in the event of a door slamming, our senses are engaged in multiple interconnected ways. We do not see the door, then hear the door, then feel the door as a series of discrete perceptions; we see-hear-feel the door as one moment or movement of change in an environment. At the same time, to understand our experience of the door slamming also requires an understanding of how the door hits the doorframe to generate the forces that inform the embodied experience of the slamming door. The chapter develops a vocabulary to understand the multiple relations between human bodies and their environments from the language of sound, organized around the umbrella concept of attunement. Attunement can be understood as a basic way of sensing the world before we organize it through internal self-narration, the representational logics of language, or a theoretical account of the senses as a series of discrete faculties. A methodological imaginary based on sound, we argue, allows us to attend to the crossings that occur between the human and the nonhuman, while still retaining a fidelity to the intentionality or holism that characterizes phenomenological experience. With these opening thoughts in mind, the rest of the chapter is structured into three sections. In section two, we define and unpack the concept of attunement, drawing upon a variety of different philosophical sources, including Heidegger, Radcliffe, and Manning. Suggesting that these sources too readily reduce attunement to feeling, we argue that attunement can be understood in a more literal, musical sense through the notion of tuning instruments. From this perspective, attunement can be defined as the capacity to sense difference. Section three develops two ways of becoming attuned through the body in terms of vibration and tone. This section draws upon empirical vignettes from everyday situations that regularly form the basis of social science research and shows how these concepts can be used to understand and become attuned to complex embodied practices. In the final concluding section, we seek to show how the concept of attunement and the vocabulary developed in section three can be helpful to those in the Social Sciences and Humanities interested in cultivating embodied methodologies and methods. ATTUNEMENT The term “attunement” has a number of lineages within continental philosophy and social theory. Rather than attempt to provide a total summary or outline of these various, often diverging accounts, we can draw upon three different understandings of attunement from three different thinkers: Heidegger, Cavell, and Manning. Although these three thinkers utilize the term in very different ways, there are commonalities that can be drawn together to provide a strong basis to develop attunement as a way of thinking of or doing embodied methodology.

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According to Ratcliffe, Heidegger’s notion of attunement is linked to mood. Radcliffe asks: [W]hat kind of phenomenon does ‘attunement’ identify? It is used by Heidegger to convey the way in which he thinks that emotion, and more specifically mood [Stimmung], constitutes the sense of Dasein’s [Heidegger’s term for being-there or human being] inextricable entanglement with contexts of worldly significance. Moods, for Heidegger, give sense to Dasein’s world and to the manner in which Dasein finds itself relating to the world. Dasein always “be-longs” to a world, which is first disclosed by background “moods” as a significant whole in which Dasein dwells (1962, p. 174). (Ratcliffe, 2002, p. 289) Attunement suggests that the way we approach things is shaped by a fundamental mood, which acts as the condition of possibility for what appears in the world and how it appears (see also Ash (2013) on Heidegger and attunement). If a person is depressed, a situation may present itself as lacking any potential possibility, even though others are able to experience the same situation as an exciting or fertile ground for the formulation of new relationships or job opportunities. As Radcliffe suggests, these moods are often implicit and backgrounded. The depressed person does not approach a situation, see that potential, and then choose to ignore it. Rather, the depressed mood is so fundamental to that person’s perspective that the very idea of a situation containing exciting or positive potential is almost impossible to entertain. This experience is confirmed when one is simply in a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ mood. In a ‘bad mood,’ it is very difficult to remember what being in a ‘good mood’ is like; and when in a joyous mood, it is hard to imagine why we would ever enter into a bad one. At the same time, attunements are not just individual or psychological states of mind, but are also shared and collective. Egan, commenting on Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, suggests that attunement is an implicit agreement or shared understanding that makes communication possible between particular people. For Cavell attunement is: [A] matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humour and significance and of fulfillment of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanationall the whirl of organism Wittgenstien calls ‘forms of life.’ (Cavell, 1976, p. 52 as cited in Egan, 2013, p. 71) Here attunement is a social skill as much as a fundamental mood. It is the ability to pick up upon other people’s moods and respond to these moods in an appropriate way, which in turn reinforces what is understood to be appropriate behavior in that situation. For example, if one is attuned

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to a situation, then you will be able to read others’ moods. If someone looks a little down, you may try to lighten the mood with a joke; whereas if someone is very upset, you may try to comfort him or her with a hug. In this case, attunement is the capacity to sense the often subtle differences between these different moods. Here, attunement is both a fundamental disposition and a kind of social savviness that is hard to formalize or codify. For example, trying to crack a joke to a mourning mother would not be appreciated, and trying to hug a work colleague because they are not smiling may seem too intimate. In this sense of the term, attunement is a fundamentally embodied phenomenon. This is because so many of the cues that dictate what is and is not appropriate in a situation are not based upon language or discourse, but more implicit markers, such as body language, gesture, and tone of voice, which are differentiated and expressed through the somatic corporeality of the body, which operates outside of purely discursive or conscious registers. Drawing upon the work of Stern (1985), Manning develops and emphasizes the somatic and unconscious aspects of attunement in her own definition of the term, which links attunement to the concept of affect. She explains: [A]ffective attunement is a preconscious tuning-with that sparks a new set of relations that in turn affect how singular events express themselves in the time of the event. Subtle and ongoing, affective attunements ‘give much of the impression of the quality of the relationship’ (Stern, 1985, p. 141). Affective attunement makes felt the activation contours of experience, the intensity, as Suzanne Langer would say, of virtual feeling. This links affective attunement to affective tonality rather than either to empathy or to the matching of behavior. Stern defines this as a matching of feeling. (2013, p. 11) Indeed, where Heidegger and Wittgenstein consider attunement to be a fundamentally social or practical human phenomenon, Manning suggests that attunement can also be thought of as a relationship between nonhuman things. As she argues: [A]ffective attunement need not be solely located on a human scale. If conceived beyond human interaction, affective attunement might well describe the relational environment co-created by movement and sound [. . .] Affective attunement: an open field of differentiation out of which a singularity of feeling emerges and merges. A tuning not of content but of expression-with. (Manning, 2013, p. 11) Manning’s reading of the term fundamentally expands the scope and reach of the concept. Attunement is something that emerges as humans relate socially to other humans, but also as objects relate to one another.

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Manning is keen to emphasize the materiality of the environment here and, crucially, emphasizes the role of sound in how attunement is resonated or transmitted. Furthermore, rather than focus on how attunements generate imitated social behavior or enable socially appropriate responses, she points to a much more open sense of attunement as cultivating an “affective tonality” (ibid, p. 11). Here attunement becomes a broader ambience of the environment itself. As Rickert argues, “ambience [. . .] is not an impartial medium but an ensemble of variables, forces, and elements that shape things in ways difficult to quantify or specify” (2013, p. 7). Manning’s use of sonic vocabulary and her explicit invocation of sound and tone is key for developing the concept of an ambient attunement to orientate our methodological concerns as social scientists. However, while Manning develops her own implications of an account of attunement based upon sound and tone, we want to push the concept of attunement in a slightly different direction. For methodological purposes, attunement can be defined as the capacity to sense, amplify, and attend to difference. From this perspective, attunement is not just a matter of ‘feeling the vibe in a room’ and adjusting our emotional sensibilities to fit that vibe, but also sensitizing our bodies to appreciate and understand the complex material forces that structure situations beyond the envelope of human emotion. As such, attunement can be likened to the act of tuning a musical instrument. Tuning a guitar involves assigning specific pitches to each of a guitar’s six strings by either tightening or loosening those strings. In regular tuning patterns, a guitar’s strings are tuned to the pitches (from the lowest pitch to the highest pitch) E, A, D, G, B, and E. This standard tuning allows the guitar player to place his or her fingers on specific frets on the guitar’s fret board and play combinations of notes together to form chords. In turn, playing chords and notes successively generates musical melodies and rhythms. Tuning an instrument requires an ability to listen and hear that each string is tuned to the correct pitch. Only when an instrument is correctly tuned can the strings resonate in a harmonious way, which in turn allows music to be played upon that guitar. To play a guitar, each string must be tuned individually, while retaining the correct degree of difference between the pitch of each string. The pitch of each individual string only makes sense in relation to the guitar’s overall tuning structure. Developing this concept of attunement as tuning and applying it to embodied methodology, we could argue that attunement is a matter of generating connections and associations between various parts and organs of our bodies in order to increase our capacity, as researchers, to sense difference. As the guitar example above suggests, difference is both singular and relational. Difference is singular in the sense that difference is central to what makes an object what it is (the particular pitch of a guitar string, which gives it a note), while also relative to other singular differences

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(the other differently tuned strings, which allow a difference between these notes to be heard). This account of attunement as tuning develops Nast’s argument that to use the body as a tool in research requires “allowing our bodies to become places which ‘field’ difference” (1998, p. 94 as cited in Longhurst, Ho, Johnston, 2008, p. 209). For Nast, fielding difference requires attending to the body as both a corporeal and material entity, as well as a social and historical one. However, in contrast to Nast, our account of attunement concentrates on difference as it is realized in material and nonhuman objects and makes no ontological distinction between the human and the nonhuman. Latour gives a possible example of this kind of attunement in relation to the “training of noses for the perfume industry” (2004, p. 207). In his words: Before the session, odours rained on the pupils without making them act, without making them speak, without rendering them attentive, without arousing them in precise ways: any group of odours would have produced the same general undifferentiated effect or affect on the pupil. After the session, it is not in vain that odours are different, and every atomic interpolation generates differences in the pupil who is slowly becoming a ‘nose’, that is someone for whom odours in the world are not producing contrasts without in some ways affecting her. The teacher, the kit and the session are what allow differences in the odours to make the trainees do something different every time—instead of eliciting always the same crude behaviour. (ibid p. 207) Sensing difference is not simply a matter of being able to sense the difference between shifting moods, such as happiness or sadness; like Latour’s trainee perfume smellers, it is also about learning to sense the difference between a variety of states, whether these be gestures, glances, finger movements, or whatever else is pertinent to studying a particular embodied practice. The account of attunement proposed here is different from Heidegger, Cavell, and Manning’s reading of the term, because it is predicated upon understanding a particular skill, object, or gesture through the degrees of difference that make an object, skill, or gesture what it is and, in turn, what makes it different from other objects, skills, or gestures. Becoming attuned to a situation is a matter of understanding the transmission of energy between material things and how they shape the body in ways that are not reducible to the perceptions that appear through specific sensory registers. The question is: How can researchers become attuned to situations in ways that are sensitive to the often microlevel differences that separate a skilled action from an unskilled one and which can also take account of the multiple sites at which that action is experienced? As an example, we want to explore this by thinking through how qualitative researchers might explore the complex material forces—both human and nonhuman—that influence, contribute to, and even produce motor

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skills development in human babies. We want to think about what attunement might offer us in understanding the rapidly changing bodily capacities of infants as they navigate idiosyncratic paths to independent walking. Dominant models of motor skills development as a progression through a linear sequence of ‘milestones’—rolling over, sitting up, crawling, standing alone, walking unaided, etc.—that unfolds with the passing of time do not reflect the, often idiosyncratic, processes through which babies learn to move on their own (Karasik, Adolph, Tamis-LeMonda, & Bornstein, 2010). Instead, experimental research suggests that young children’s bodily capacities change and adapt as they gain experience, which allows them to perceive and adjust to the properties (or affordances) of the environment around them (e.g., Adolph & Avolio, 2000; Adolph, Joh, & Eppler, 2010; Gill, Adolph, & Vereijken, 2009). Surfaces, gradients, materials, gaps, heights, and even the clothes that they wear can affect whether and how babies are able to move around on their own (see Robinson & Adolph, 2013, for a review of this research). Yet, neither the affordances offered by a physical environment nor an infant’s bodily capacities are fixed. An environment that is unaccommodating to a creeping, commando-crawling, or bum-shuffling child may be replete with opportunities for a proficient crawler or walker. More than this, by gaining experience in interacting with different environments, children’s bodily capacities change—they learn to roll over, sit up, or cruise along the furniture—and, in doing so, they are able to perceive and adapt to the new affordances they now perceive in otherwise familiar environments. To capture the plasticity of both sides of this body-environment relationship, we could think in terms of attunement to help us to move beyond a conceptual division between environmental affordances and bodily capacities. Within developmental or biomechanical movement science, researchers have tended to approach the task through a range of experimental procedures for measuring, quantifying, and analyzing the changing relationships between young children’s bodies and the physical properties of the environment around them (see, for example, Thelen & Smith, 1996, Berger, Theuring, & Adolph, 2007). However, these experimental procedures do not necessarily reflect the ways in which infants move and develop motor skills in realworld environments (Adolph et al., 2012). Attunement might offer a useful qualitative and naturalistic approach to issues of infant embodiment, such as motor skills development. This isn’t so much an issue of designing innovative new tools for data collection, but of recalibrating and redirecting the variously mediated ways of observing and participating in social life that social scientists employ to find out what people do toward, and the analyses we perform on, the data we collect. We would direct our methods and analyses toward capturing and assessing the changing attunements within the practice of learning to walk. We would focus on the encounters between material things (including human bodies) in order to discover how, not unlike Latour’s trained perfumers, young children learn to sense the environment

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around them and the ongoing process of attunement between their increasingly mobile bodies and that environment. In the next section, we want to offer up two concepts that help us think more specifically about how researchers might become attuned to particular aspects of research situations: vibration and tone. These two concepts are illustrated through examples drawn from everyday experiences, which could potentially form (or have formed) the basis of social scientific research. Furthermore, these experiences can be observed or recorded using qualitative methods standard to social science, such as interviews, observant participation, and video ethnography. As these vignettes will show, becoming attuned to a situation is less about developing new methods with which to perform social science as it is a way of opening and honing the capacities of our own bodies to understand and analyze the social world, which we can use to supplement existing qualitative methods. TWO MODES OF ATTUNEMENT

Vibration Vibrations are a form of organized movement. From a scientific perspective, the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines vibrations as a: Periodic back-and-forth motion of the particles of an elastic body or medium, commonly resulting when almost any physical system is displaced from its equilibrium condition and allowed to respond to the forces that tend to restore equilibrium. (2013, n.p.) If attunement is about learning the capacity to sense difference between objects, skills, and states of being, then vibration can be understood as the basic unit through which to understand and compare these various forms of difference. This is because vibration is a form of movement that is common to all bodies and objects and so cuts across distinctions between the human and nonhuman and the organic and inorganic: Vibrations can be created by sound waves from speakers, from tectonic plates moving together, or the cry of an animal or a human infant. According to Parisi, vibration can be understand as a basic process that enables differences to exist between objects, because vibrations introduce breaks into what would be otherwise continuously connected matter. Referring to the work of process philosopher Alfred Whitehead, Parisi argues that: [W]ithout vibrations [. . .] there can be no possibility of measurement in the physical world. Ultimately any form of measurement [. . .] is a counting of vibrations. Similarly, no physical quantities could ever exist without the prior aggregation of physical vibrations i.e. without these discontinuous breaks in the continuity of matter. (2013, p. 165)

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That is, vibrations are forces that produce the differences between things and allow objects to appear as separate and discrete from one another. As Parisi suggests, the notion of vibration does not privilege the human body as the instigator or source of movement, and vibrations can be expressed and experienced through a variety of mediums and materials, such as liquids or solids and through a variety of senses, such as touch, hearing, and vision. Manning (2009) argues that vibration is also a particular kind of elastic movement, which emphasizes the capacity for change, but also the durability and endurance of particular states of objects and bodies. For example, an object can resonate without becoming displaced or torn apart. Focusing on vibration encourages us to turn away from objects defined via fixed boundaries and instead focus on the thresholds that constitute and separate things from one another. Here, as Abrahamsson and Simpson (2011) argue, a threshold is not absolute, but at the same time it is linked to an object or body’s capacity to act. While a threshold can be crossed, this may also mean that the object’s capacity to act also changes. In terms of attunement and embodied methodology, vibration is about changing the scale at which we attend to difference and recognizing that movement of any kind contains both a qualitative and quantitative element. Vibrations can be qualitative, barely felt experiences of intensity; but at the same time, the oscillations that give rise to vibrations are quantitative. Parisi (2013) explains that a specific number of oscillations gives rise to a specific frequency of vibration. This is not to say that social scientists should equip themselves with scientific measuring equipment to count the number of vibrations present in a particular environment or practice. Rather it is about focusing on different scales of movement in order to become attuned to what is happening in a situation in a new way. To develop a sensitivity to vibration, it is useful to recognize the fact that most humans, to some extent or another, are synesthetes. That is to say, most people experience sensory experience through more than one sense. While extreme synesthetes can smell touch or experience color when hearing words very vividly, most of us experience this in a more minor, often implicit, way. For example, when watching an image of a pillow on a film or television program, we can draw upon previous experiences of laying our heads on pillows to ‘feel’ that pillow. Marks (2002) argues that, in doing so we draw upon a kind of haptic memory in order to make a connection between two seemingly divergent senses (sight and touch). We could argue that human synesthesia is actually similar to the ways that objects interact with one another. Just as humans can take one sensory input (such as sound) and translate it into another sense (such as color), when vibrations meet objects, the vibration is not simply transmitted across or through that object, but are also actively shaped by that body or object. In Egan’s words: “vibration connects things and creates novel relations, traversing dualities [. . .] which removes any presupposition of separate domains” (Egan, 2013, p. 1564). Plucking a guitar string translates one

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input (the motion of the string) into another (the sound of a specifically tuned note). To become sensitized to vibration within social science methodology, one can begin to cultivate a synesthetic sensitivity to different forms of vibration and how they form part of particular practices or objects. This is important because it can allow us to identify when, where and how vibrations translate into different forms of sensation and force, depending on the thing involved in an encounter (on the relationship between sensation, affect, and force. (See Ash, forthcoming.) In terms of method, we can use the concept of vibration to expand upon and deepen an account of how objects and bodies move and the effects of these movements on the bodies and objects involved in a practice. For example, we can begin by identifying how objects vibrate depending on their particular deployment in a situation and analyzing the properties of these things that, in turn, shape their capacity for vibration. Once we have identified and described a thing in terms of its capacity to vibrate, we can then describe how these vibrations are organized and the possible intentions behind this organization. Then we can begin to analyze the kinds of attunement these particular kinds of vibrations encourage or discourage. For example, tactile paving is deployed in urban areas to help visually impaired people recognize when they are approaching a road or crossing point (on tactile paving see Dischinger and Filho (2012)). To understand the phenomenon of tactile paving using the concept of vibration, we could first describe and analyze the shape and spacing of the truncated domes that protrude from these forms of concrete slab. We could then analyze how the encounters between these domes and feet create a series of vibrations that are translated into haptic and auditory sensations. We might then interview urban dwellers who walk over these slabs to understand how they experience the kinds of vibrations generated when their feet encounter the protruding domes and how it shapes their experience of urban life. Finally, we might employ video methods or ethnographic walkalongs (such as Degen and Rose (2012)) to study how the difference between the vibrations from flat paving slabs and tactile paving attune the walking body to react to these vibrations in different ways. If taken seriously, the concept of vibration also asks us to retune the attitudes and principles that guide our forms of analysis as well as our methods. To elucidate how such a retuning might help us to understand embodied practice, we could think about another situation, such as how young children learn through their senses in the carefully resourced environments of preschool education. Take, for example, the water play table (a common feature of many early childhood classrooms). The water table provides science education by allowing young children to explore the physical properties of water by manipulating it in various ways and playing with a range of different toys and tools in the water (Dighe, 1992; Tu, 2006; Wood & Attfield, 2005). If we want to understand quite how and what young children learn from such play, we might employ ethnographic or video-ethnographic methods to observe and understand how their play changes over time.

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Attending to the relationships between the child, the water, the plastic tray, and the various objects placed there to facilitate water play (cups, water wheels, etc.) through the unit of vibration might help us to focus our observations on the physical interactions between all the objects involved in the play (both human and nonhuman). The vibrations within the water table—the waves of water sloshing around the table as they encounter hands and walls and funnels and boats—can help us to explore how the water play experience sensitizes the child to the differences between things. The vibrations themselves are not simply an outcome between child and water and playthings, nor does the water play simply yield knowledge represented in the sum of different sensory experiences. Instead, the vibrations themselves shape the capacities of child, water, and playthings to act and to respond to the situation at hand. We might, then, want to think of vibration as a unit of sense crossing human and nonhuman boundaries. We may use this to encourage the development of a more experimental synesthetic vocabulary to write up this account of water play. Here the vibrations produced by the water as it splashes around the play table may conjure feelings, colors, or other affects, both literally and figuratively in the child and, thus, provide an enlarged set of descriptors to communicate what it feels like to play, or how one learns to sense the qualities and capacities of substances and materials. As a concept, vibration allows us to attune to forces that both cross and unite the supposed divide between human and thing, because vibrations are common to both human and thing. Thinking in terms of vibration as a unit of sense, then, is one way that we can begin to attune ourselves differently to the world and in doing so produce new embodied accounts of our research.

Tone If vibration is understood as a unit of sense that crosses the boundaries between the human and nonhuman, then tone is a way of thinking about how vibrations are organized with particular sensory effects in mind. Tone is not an unusual term. In everyday language we often refer to an inappropriate joke as lowering the tone of a situation, for example. As we discussed earlier, for Manning, attunement is more than human forms of emotional relation that emerge within social situations. Certainly, “each occasion has a tone, a singular expressivity, an enjoyment” (Manning, 2013, p. 21), but at the same time the tone of an environment or object primes specific responses or actions to potentially occur. As Manning argues in relation to a fly and spider web: Tone . . . tunes the milieu to certain tendencies. A milieu with a springing motif tunes to air likeness, for instance. Or . . . fly likeness tunes not to fly as species but to a qualitative likeness of a fly-movement intensively in rhythm with the spider’s web. This likeness is first and foremost affectiveit is an attunement not simply to the fly in its qualitative dimensions, or

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Here the spider web and fly are separate objects, but the web itself anticipates the kinds of movement a fly makes and uses the fly’s tendency for movement against it in order to capture it and form the spider’s food. The spider web does not communicate with the fly on the level of representation or identify in the sense that the spider’s web somehow identifies the fly as a certain species or type of being and uses that information to capture it. Rather the spider web, through its material structure and placement, is tuned to the fly’s affects, its patterns, and capacities of movement and sense. Similarly, the child playing with various objects and materials available to them at the water table becomes ‘tuned’ to the patterns and physical forces at play in the water. The play does not represent these patterns and forces to the child, but allows that child to attune him or herself to the tone of the water in that particular instance of play. As social scientists, becoming aware of and attending to the tone of a situation involves recognizing the tendencies that a tone potentializes, or, in other words, recognizing that tones do not simply set moods, but also shape the kinds of possible futures that can emerge from a situation, albeit in an open and nondeterministic way. The implications of this approach can be unpacked through a method of data collection that is very familiar in the social sciences: participant observation. Atkinson and Hammerly suggest that participant observation is “a mode of being-in-the-world characteristic of researchers” (2005, p. 249), whereby life is observed through the researcher being involved, either directly or indirectly, in the practice or activity that constitutes a social situation. Manning’s account of tone could help better attune a participant observer in a number of ways. Imagine the researcher was studying a coffee shop to understand how brand awareness and loyalty were created between coffee shop and customer. The researcher could map the layout of the space to see what kind of movement it constrained and afforded, or record the perceived age, race, and gender of the coffee shop customers, the length of their visit, and so on. The researcher may begin to notice repeating tendencies of action that happen in the coffee shop, but have difficulty trying to pinpoint why these tendencies have a durability that seem to exceed particular categories or groups of people. Looking again, the researcher could focus on the particular ensemble of objects that made up the coffee shop environment, such as the particular kinds of material used on different areas of flooring or the textures of the seat covers or design of the arms of the chairs in the shop. Recognizing that the shop is part of a multinational chain, the researcher may come to appreciate that each object has been specifically designed and chosen to create a setting or atmosphere that the chain’s owners and interior designers think is most conducive to the purchasing of coffee. From this

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perspective the environment does not simply afford or constrain particular actions, but also emits a particular tone. This tone is not simply about setting a convivial or relaxed mood or emotional state in the bodies of the coffee shop, but about tuning the milieu of the coffee shop to attempt to generate particular tendencies. In the case of the coffee shop, the tendency could be the development of a form of brand awareness and loyalty between customer and brand. For example, the mugs at this multinational chain of coffee houses have an embossed logo on the cups’ sides, but also at the top of the cups’ handles, which allows one to literally feel out and be in contact with the brand through the simple act of holding the cup. The large diameter of the mug also distributes the heat of the liquid across a broader area than other coffee mugs. The heat of the liquid is therefore less intense and lowers the possibility of burning one’s lips. In doing so, the mug becomes more welcoming for the wary drinker. In a similar manner, the oversized handle on the cup distributes the weight of the mug more evenly in the hand, making it easier to hold and gesture with the mug. Again, the tone of the cup is not designed to work on a representational level, but to link the effects of the human hand (its capacity to grip, its capacity to sense the differences in surface profiles) to the effects of the cup (its capacity to distribute heat, its capacity to retain the surface protrusions embossed on it) in ways that generate associations between the customer’s body and the brands and product they are consuming. Of course, the coffee shop is made up of a huge number of objects, of which the cup is only one. Attending to the tone of the shop would therefore involve attending to all the objects that make up the shop, alongside their relationally emergent affects. Together, the tone of the cup, the floor, the tables, and so on work to tune the possibilities for the customers in the store. Just as a musical tone has a temporal extension, the tone of the shop creates a background hum of affects through which particular actions appear more or less desirable, quite independently of the people that enter and leave the shop. The tone of the coffee shop is deliberately designed to prime possible futures around returning to the shop on another day, or ordering another drink, or associating the brand with a particular sense of calm when one recalls the logo on adverts outside of the shop. A number of methods could be used to study and understand the tone of an object or practice. In relation to the coffee shop mug, if we accept that tones shape the potential of future tendencies, we could use time-lapse video or other forms of video methods (see Laurier & Philo, 2006; Simpson, 2012) to record how the mug is used within the shop and the kinds of futures that the object encourages. In turn, we could compare how different coffee shop customers deal with and use the same cup. By comparing a number of different people’s engagement with the same object, we could begin to understand how effective or ‘strong’ an object’s tone is in generating more or less uniform responses or associations. We might then interview coffee shop customers and show them the video to encourage them to reflect on the tone

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of the cup and the kinds of associations it cultivates between sensory experience and particular brand discourses and logos. Lisa Baraitser’s autoethnographic work on the experience of the encumbered “mother-plus-baby-plus-buggy-plus-stuff” who is attempting to navigate across the city to visit her mother (2009, p. 148) is also suggestive of ways in which tone might help us to develop embodied methodologies. Baraitser explains that the encumbered mother is exposed to the materiality of the landscape, and she must improvise creative responses to it on a moment-to-moment basis; she must find a way to navigate through an inhospitable landscape of too-high curbs and busy roads, stairs and barriers that conspire to prevent or prolong her journey: Though impeded and weighed down by her objects, each obstacle she encounters forces her to renegotiate her relationship with another set of objects: a kerb, stair, entrance, doorway, stranger. She can balk at it, but if she wants to move about the city she must ultimately find a way through. [. . . S]he may deliberately make light of the difficulty of her stunts, may not even consciously be aware that she navigates them on a moment-by-moment basis. She too engages with the material elements of the city; sees with fresh eyes both the broken and rude elements, and the occasional objects that reciprocate back. (2009, p. 150). Baraitser argues that experience is “both burdensome” yet “oddly generative” (2009, p. 150). Very productively, she draws upon the notion of viscosity (drawn from the properties of matter) to help to make sense of this embodied experience of motherhood. Thinking in terms of attunement might help us to further explore how mother, baby, buggy, and stuff encounter, respond to, and affect the many tones of the city, both pleasant and unpleasant. This could help us to understand, not just what the mother perceives and experiences in the environment around her, but the processes of exchange and adaptation between the many human and nonhuman objects that make up the environment. Like the concept of vibration, attuning our bodies as researchers to sense and piece together the tone of an environment is not necessarily about developing some new method of accounting for objects or things. Rather it is a matter of cultivating our bodies to become sensitive to often overlooked or ignored minor details that, while seeming inconsequential, actually matter a great deal. Attunement is a process of developing a sensitivity to notice the difference between laminate or real hardwood flooring, or the difference between different textures of plastic used in disposable cutlery. It is these details that give objects their tone. In turn, these tones work together to generate assemblages of sensation of feeling-seeing-smelling-hearing, in ways that appear unified, fixed, and given to consciousness in order to produce particular kinds of affect in an attempt to realize particular preconditioned futures. Again, this does not mean we simply exhaustively

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describe the properties of objects, but rather examine how these properties are designed to work on the level of affect, alongside the haptic and often unreflected upon somatic knowledges of the body. CONCLUSION: ATTUNEMENT AS EMBODIED METHODOLOGY Becoming attuned to a situation requires a turn away from focusing on specific sensory faculties, of understanding sense experience as constituted by the sum of our individual senses. In its place, the chapter has argued for a model of embodied methodology based on attunement. Taking the concept of attunement seriously encourages us to concentrate on relations between body and world as a process of material exchange, translation, and differentiation between a variety of human and nonhuman objects, rather than a gathering and organization of forces by something called human perception or cognition. Practically put, attunement asks us to focus on what appears to the researcher within a given situation, while at the same time speculatively inquiring about how objects and forces appear to shape each other as well. Here object-object relations are seen as equally important as human-object relations. Cultivating a sensitivity to the nonhuman and breaking down categorical distinctions between humans and nonhumans involves a modesty on the part of the researcher in the sense that one should not assume that human beings are necessarily the most important actors in shaping what happens within an event or situation. Developing new units of ‘sense’ that cross between the human and nonhuman, such as vibration, encourages researchers to focus on the points of intersection where bodies and objects meet in ways that do not reduce these encounters to brute physical or causal interactions. As we have argued, it is through these very encounters that the research field becomes sensible and intelligible to the human subject studying it. As such, the concept of attunement is an umbrella term for thinking about how to orientate ourselves toward empirical research and research methods through sensitizing our bodies to pay attention and focus on difference. Here, concepts such as tone and vibration are not ideas divorced from the world, nor are they heady abstractions. From this perspective, concepts can be used in a productive and inventive way to generate connections between seemingly disparate realms in order to open up new ways to think and understand social life. At the same time, these concepts should not be considered prescriptive. Vibration and tone are two ways to become attuned to the world in a different way, but they are certainly not the only ways. With this ethos in mind, and continuing with the sonic metaphor, how might we attune ourselves to the volume or pitch of an event, and how would those concepts enable us to experience social phenomenon

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differently? If methodology is a series of choices about what information and data we attempt to gather and how that data is analyzed, then attunement encourages a focus on the microscales of material relation, in which humans and their sense capacities are only a very small part.

REFERENCES Abrahamsson, S., & Simpson, P. (2011). The limit of the body: Boundaries, capacities, thresholds. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(4), 331–338. Adolph, K. E., & Avolio, A. M. (2000). Walking infants adapt locomotion to changing body dimensions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 1148–1166. Adolph, K. E., Cole, W. G., Komati, M., Garciaguirre, J. S., Badaly, D., Lingeman, J. M., . . . Sotsky, R. B. (2012). How do you learn to walk? Thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day. Psychological Science, 23(11), 1387–1394. Adolph, K. E., Joh, A. S., & Eppler, M. A. (2010). Infants’ perception of affordances of slopes under high- and low-friction conditions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 797–811. Adolph, K. E., & Robinson, S. R. (2013). The road to walking: What learning to walk tells us about development. In P. Zelazo (Ed.), Oxford handbook of developmental psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 403–443). New York: Oxford University Press. Ash, J. (2013). Technologies of captivation: Videogames and the attunement of affect. Body and Society, 19, 27–51. Ash, J. (2015). Sensation, affect and the GIF: Towards an allotropic account of networks. In K. Hillis & S. Paasonen (Eds.), Networked affect (pp. 119–133). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Atkinson, P., & Hammersley, M. (2005). Ethnography and participant observation. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 248–260). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publishing. Baraitser, L. (2009). Maternal encounters: The politics of interruption. London: Routledge. Berger, S. E., Theuring, C., & Adolph, K. E. (2007). How and when infants learn to climb stairs. Infant Behaviour and Development, 30, 36–47. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. London: Polity Press. Cavell, S. (1976). Must we mean what we say? A book of essays. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. Degen, M., & Rose, G. (2012). The sensory experiencing of urban design: The role of walking and perceptual memory. Urban Studies, 49(15), 3271–3287. Dighe, J. (1992). The sand/water table as a learning centre. Early Childhood Education Journal, 19(3), 14–15. Dischinger, M., & Filho, J. (2012). Can tactile tiles create accessible urban spaces? Space and Culture, 15(3), 210–223. Egan, D. (2013). The authenticity of the ordinary. In D. Egan, S. Reynolds, & A. J. Wendland, (Eds.), Wittgenstein and Heidegger: Pathways and Provocations (pp. 66–82). New York: Routledge. Egan, M. (2013). Sonic warfare: Sound, affect and the ecology of fear: A review. Organization Studies, 34(10), 1563–1571. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2013). Vibration. Retrieved December 11, 2013, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/627269/vibration Gill, S. V., Adolph, K. E., & Vereijken, B. (2009). Change in action: How infants learn to walk down slopes. Developmental Science, 12, 888–902.

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Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virutal bodies, in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayles, K. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. London: Blackwell. Karasik, L. B., Adolph, K. E., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Bornstein, M. (2010). WEIRD walking: Cross-cultural differences in motor development. Behaviour and Brain Sciences, 33, 95. Latour, B. (2004). How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies. Body and Society, 10(2–3), 205–229. Laurier, E., & Philo, C. (2006). Possible geographies: A passing encounter in a café. Area, 38(4), 353–363. Longhurst, R., Ho, L., & Johnston, L. (2008). Using ‘the body’ as an ‘instrument of research’: Kimch’i and pavlova. Area, 40, 208–217. Malabou, C. (2008). What should we do with our brain? New York: Fordham University Press. Manning, E. (2009). Relationscapes: Movement, art, philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham: Duke University Press. Marks, L. (2002). The skin of the film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment and the senses. Durham: Duke University Press. Parisi, L. (2013). Computation, aesthetics, and space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ratcliffe, M. (2002). Heidegger’s attunement and the neuropsychology of emotion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 287–312. Rickert, T. (2013). Ambient thetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh. Simpson, P. (2012). Apprehending everyday rhythms: Rhythm analysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance. Cultural Geographies, 19(4), 423–445. Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books. Thelen, E., & Smith, L. B. (1996). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tu, T. (2006). Preschool science environment: What is available in a preschool classroom? Early Childhood Education Journal, 33(4), 245–251. Wolfe, C. (2010). What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wood, E., & Attfield, J. (2005). Play, learning and the early childhood curriculum. London: Sage.

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Embodied Multimodality Framework Examining Language and Literacy Practices of English Language Learners in Drama Classrooms Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores embodied multimodality framework as it is used in a multisite ethnographic study that examines the experiences of English language learners (ELLs) in three urban high school drama classrooms. Embodied multimodality is a term I coined to refer to both my methodological framework and theoretical framework. Embodied multimodality puts the body at the center of this inquiry and takes into account postphenomenologist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and third world feminist frameworks in order to critically examine language and literacy experiences of linguistically diverse students in urban high schools in Toronto. Using multimodal data (field notes, individual and focus group interviews, video recordings of everyday life in the three drama classrooms, and student artifacts), this study draws on the three distinct fields of literacy education, second language education, and drama education, with a particular focus on embodied and multimodal meaning making and language learning in drama classrooms. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on two of my sites: the Drama-ESL class in the adult high school program at Braeburn High School1, and the Grade 10/11 drama class in the ‘at-risk’ program offered to youth at the same school.

EMBODIED MULTIMODALITY AS A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Before I describe the concept of embodied multimodality as a theoretical framework, it is important to briefly discuss the history and context of the idea of multimodality in literacy education/multimodal literacies. Multimodality is an area that has received considerable attention in the field of literacy education. In a 2012 address, Brian Street outlines the connections between New Literacy Studies and multimodality that began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. He writes: “Research that merges New Literacy Studies

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with multimodality takes equal account of where, how, and by whom a text is made as it does of the physical features of a text as signifiers of contextual meanings” (p. 2). Brian Street explains that during the 1980s and 1990s, two distinct and parallel movements were gaining strength within research in literacy, language, and linguistics. The first began with the impact of Michael Halliday’s argument that “we need to situate language within its social context and apply the understanding that text could be understood as a sign” in his seminal work Language as Social Semiotic. This notion of text as sign was further developed by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001), with their move away from monomodalities to explore the common principles behind meaning making in multiple modes of communication. They explain that there have been efforts by scholars who attempted to devise different grammars for each and every semiotic mode, such as the semiotics of images and the semiotics of sound. These were all more or less based on the semiotic theories of Halliday (1978, 1985) and Hodge and Kress (1988), all cited in Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001). However, instead of these ‘silos’ of theory, Kress and Van Leeuwen, in their seminal work Multimodal Discourse (2001), try to outline the common principles behind multimodal communication in this age of interactive multimedia: The traditional linguistic account is one in which meaning is made once, so to speak. By contrast, we see the multimodal resources which are available in a culture used to make meanings in any and every sign, at every level, and in any mode. Where traditional linguistics had defined language as a system that worked through double articulation, where a message was an articulation as a form and as meaning, we see multimodal texts as making meaning in multiple articulations. [emphasis in the original] (p. 4) As mapped out by Street (2012), the second theoretical thread, New Literacy Studies [so named by Gee (1996)], was developing at the same time in the field of literacy, based on the seminal works Ways with Words by Shirley Bryce Heath (1983) and Literacy in Theory and Practice by Brian Street (1984). While Heath examined the multiple literacy practices of children in their homes and communities and explored whether the children brought these out-of-school literacy practices into their classrooms, Street looked at the multiple literacy practices in rural villages in Iran, both making it explicit that literacy is a social practice, and that literacies are multiple, and not just limited to print-based text. Carey Jewitt (2008) explains that “multimodality attends to meaning as it is made through the situated configurations across image, gesture, gaze, body posture, sound, writing, music, speech, and so on” (p. 246). It is important to note that the modes are conceptualized as fluid and dynamic sources of meaning, not static and repetitive. Jewitt explains that “new modes are created, and existing modes are transformed” (p. 247) based on the needs of communities in the larger society and the needs and interests of the learners in the classroom.

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Researchers in education have explored the use of digital technologies as multimodal texts (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Jewitt, 2008; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Kress, 2003, 2004; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), picture books as multimodal texts (Early & Yeung, 2009; Evans, 2011; Unsworth, 2007), the use of video and films in the classroom as multimodal texts (Ajayi, 2012), and artifacts as multimodal texts (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010a, b; Rowsell, 2011). As seen from this list, the majority of the work on multimodality in language and literacy education focuses on digital technologies, illustrating that “digital technologies create the movement of images and ideas across geographical and social spaces in ways that affect how young people learn and interact” (Jewitt, 2008, p. 242). Also seen from the list is a focus on the visual aspects of multimodal text creation in language and literacy education. The works mentioned above explore picture books, video, film, computer screens, blogs, computer games, Internet, and social media. These works have made significant contributions to the field of language and literacy education in showing that different modes have different affordances. What still remains largely unexamined, however, is research on multimodality that puts the body at the center theoretically and methodologically. The data provided in this chapter illustrates how an embodied multimodality framework, that puts body knowledge at the center of inquiry, generated meaning-making opportunities that not only attended to the multiple modes of expression, but also illustrated the hybrid, dynamic, and intertextual, as well as the affective, sensory and social, relational and ideological nature of these embodied experiences in drama classrooms. FOCUSING ON BODY KNOWLEDGE: EMBODIED MULTIMODALITY AND DRAMA I would like to begin this section with a quote from a teacher from one of my research sites, because the concern raised in this quote explains why it is, in fact, not easy to put the body at the center of inquiry or at the center of pedagogy. School is traditionally centred around . . . academic learning, cerebral learning . . . so I think we tend to separate . . . our heads from our bodies. (Ms. N., teacher interview, Braeburn ‘At-Risk’ Program, 8 May 2009) This concern about the privileging of the mind that Ms. N. expresses reminds us of the fundamental philosophical problem of the body/mind separation (“Cartesian cogito”), the call for “reclaiming the centrality of the lived body (Leib),” and the need for an account of the “actual body I call mine” that Maurice Merleau-Ponty raised in the 1950s (as cited in Zarrilli, 2004, p. 655). As expressed by this teacher, in drama the embodied experience is multimodal, simultaneously interweaving many modes of meaning making, such as the written script, sets, props, images, sounds, or music. The attention to

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the body and embodied is more than a kinaesthetic/biological notion. Drawing from the feminist educational philosopher Judith Butler’s work (1990a, b, 1993), drama education researcher Anton Franks (1996) describes bodies as “simultaneously biological, social, cultural and thinking beings—beings who are not only, or simply, situated in time and space, but who create history and geography by the presence, co-presence and action of their bodies” (p. 106). It is very important to note here that even though, for theatre and drama education, the body is central, as Franks notes below, there is very little attention paid to the theorizing of the body and embodied learning in both the theatre and the drama education world: Despite the fact that drama education relies on bodies, and the body as the main means and form of mediation, there is very little in theories and ideas around drama in education which raises the body as an object of study and as a problem. (Franks, 1996, p. 105) Theatre scholars (Riley, 2004; Zarrilli, 2004) also write about the absence of focus on the body and truly embodied practice within theatre and actor training. Using what he calls “a post-Merleau-Ponty phenomenology,” Zarrilli problematizes the lack of centrality of the lived body and the embodied experience in the theatre world. I would like to elaborate on this critique. For example, in the drama classrooms that I observed, the teachers would encourage the students to think about the physicality of their characters by prompting them to think about how their characters would talk, walk, sit, or interact with other characters. Although the goal is using the body and physicalization to understand the character, one might see instructions like “imagine the way your character walks” as a theatre of the mind (like the “mind’s eye” (Riley, 2004, p. 445)). In her article on embodied practices and their use in rehearsal and production in professional theatre, Riley argues that this kind of “image-screen of the mind represents a positivist Western metaphysics of the mind over matter, brain over body, and intellectual transcendence over crude materiality” (p. 445). She adds that, “within this model, the images on the screen, or in the mind, can directly affect the body, but rarely are affected by the body” (p. 445). She raises the important issue of “whether the actor’s emotion is motivated internally or externally,” explaining that this question parallels the question of “whether the image is inside or out” (p. 446). Drawing on the work of Samuels and Samuels (1990), Riley argues that, “within the Cartesian model of the mind/body split, it is nearly impossible to talk about different relationships between image, mind, and body or to think of images as anything more than visual representations” (p. 446). From this argument, she concludes that, “in the West we often continue to describe visualization as a kind of mind over matter.” She gives an example, from instructions in her own practice in theatre, of trying to get away from this privileging of the mind (see below), but explains that, although her goal here was to move beyond

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the mind/body dualism, her “polarization of mind and body simply restated the split from the other direction—body over mind” (p. 446). She recognizes that this was equally problematic and argues for an “embrained and embodied” model of mind for actor training and rehearsal: I have often found myself left with unsuitable metaphors and descriptions, such as “let the image emerge from your body rather than your mind,” or “insert the image into your body and let the movement come from this place;” or, perhaps worse, “become the _____,” or “be the _____.” (Riley, 2004, p. 446) Acknowledging Riley’s two important arguments—(i) the privileging of mind is prevalent, even in the drama and theatre world, where the body is relied upon, and (ii) if we continue to see the body and mind in dualistic terms, the Cartesian split will continue to exist whether the mind is privileged over the body or the body is privileged over the mind, and therefore these two approaches are equally problematic—I propose that an embodied multimodal framework that respects all modes of meaning making and representation might be a first step in attaining the kind of embrained and embodied practice that Riley calls for. This kind of embodied multimodality not only pays attention to the fundamental philosophical problem that Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962; 1964) raises, that of “reclaiming the centrality of the lived body (Leib),” but also moves beyond it. In The Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1964) refers to the body itself as “not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine, but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and acts” (p. 161). Merleau-Ponty’s work opens up this important discussion. However, in order to do justice to my data and the experiences of ELLs and their teachers, I needed to deepen this understanding of the body and the embodied beyond Merleau-Ponty’s theorizing. Merleau-Ponty’s theorizing of the body was viewed as the universal white male experience of embodiment in the world, through the work of, for example, poststructuralist feminist scholars such as Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Elizabeth Grosz, or the work of poststructural scholars such as Foucault and postcolonial and third world feminist scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Chela Sandoval, and Sara Ahmed, who have added a more nuanced understanding of the gendered body, the classed body, the raced body, the inscribed body. Like Mirza (2009), I believe that “the purpose of the focus on the embodied experience is not to privilege the experience,” which is different from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and his focus on the ‘lived experience.’ As Mirza explains, ‘experience’ is a problematic epistemological concept: [its] appeals to experience risk obscuring regimes of power by naturalising some experiences as normative, and others as not, leaving the processes that structure dominance intact. Thus experience should not be an explanation or justification in itself, but be seen as an interpretation of the social world that needs explaining. (p. 3)

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Embodied multimodality not only puts the body at the center of this inquiry, but also takes account of the concerns raised by postcolonial and third world feminist frameworks that pay attention to issues of power and multiple subject positions. Returning to the research study, in order to fully understand the experiences of ELLs as language learners in a drama course, it was important to situate these learners, and their understandings and meaning making in drama classrooms, through an embodied intersectional analysis (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Mirza, 2009)2. This kind of embodied analysis focuses on the lived experience of the body, taking into account their multiple social locations, analyzing how these students’ experiences have been influenced by factors such as social, economic, and cultural contexts, as well as factors such as power, hegemony, and subjectivity. EMBODIED MULTIMODALITY AS A METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK My methodology grew out of the embodied multimodality theoretical framework. This framework impacted the research methods I employed, the ways in which I observed embodied drama activities, and my analysis of the multimodal data. Multimodal research methods acknowledge that data collected and analyzed using different modes and media provide different lenses for the researcher. Connecting ethnography with multimodal research methods (Gallagher & Kim, 2008; Royce, 2007; Street, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2009), the data for my larger study comes from individual student interviews, student focus groups, teacher interviews, observation field notes, video recordings, photographs, and drama artifacts. ATLAS.ti (2011) software3 afforded multimodal data analysis by allowing me to hyperlink multiple modes of data and not simply break down the data and their analyses into segregated parts, such as the audio data analysis, the video data analysis, the textual data analysis, etc. While the embodied lived experience cannot be captured in its entirety, this software did allow me to analyze the data multimodally. This multimodal analysis that was afforded by the ATLAS.ti software changed entirely how I worked through my analysis. Being able to see the written transcript and the audio document and/or the video document of a specific coded moment together on the screen meant that I could look at all the related pieces of data at once. Despite some technical limitations of this software, hyperlinking these multiple modes allowed my analysis to move beyond discussing “simply the juxtaposition of image, text, and sound, but the creation of multiple interconnections and pathways (or traversals) among them, both potential and explicit” (Lemke, 2002, as cited in Coffey, Renold, Dicks, Soyinka, & Mason, 2006, p. 24). The ethnographer’s work as observer of multiple modes in the field may come closest among the various qualitative methodologies to the form of multimodal analysis I am describing here. However, the use of technology in analysis adds another dimension, the

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ability to revisit a moment in a multimodal way. In the past, different modes such as documents, visuals, and artifacts might have been laid out in a physical space and links drawn, but researchers could never go back to the precise moment when these links and multisensory connections were made. What ATLAS.ti software allows, in a sense, is to recreate mediated by the screen, wherein different modes not only seem significant to one another, but can also be hyperlinked, in a permanent way, to one another so that the work of the analyst can also be documented and captured for subsequent revisiting, or in fact ‘undoing’/recoding later, as the analysis unfolds. This kind of embodied multimodal coding and analysis (in addition to multimodal data collection) was a central feature of this ethnographic research.

Revisiting a Pedagogical Moment in the Drama-ESL Classroom through the Embodied Multimodality Framework In this section, I present data from the Drama-ESL class that brings to life the notion of embodied multimodality as I theorized it above. This specific data is especially helpful for understanding the analysis process informed by embodied multimodality. Students in the Drama-ESL class moved among different modes of meaning making and expression (verbal, spatial, audio, visual, print based, etc.). For example, as one of the projects in this class, students performed a script that they wrote in groups portraying their choice of a holiday celebration, paying attention to the elements of a story (setting, plot, conflict, and character) as well as conventions of script writing, such as dialogue and stage directions, creating costumes, stage decoration and props, and incorporating songs, dance, etc. into their performances. This pedagogy provided a space for embodied multimodal representations of meaning and, in addition, drew on students’ lived experiences and felt knowledge in the creation of dramatic performances. Since embodied multimodality framework pushes beyond Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the attention to the ‘lived experience of the body,’ this kind of embodied analysis (see Table 6.1 below), in addition to taking account of the physical and multisensory body (with movement, gesture, facial expression, emotions, etc.), goes beyond to include the students’ identities and their multiple subject positions as gendered bodies, classed bodies, dis/abled bodies, and racialized bodies, as deemed important by postcolonial and third world feminist scholars. This kind of post-phenomenological view of embodied analysis conceptualizes the ‘lived experience’ as not devoid of the social, political, cultural, and ideological. The examples provided in Table 6.1 illustrate the affordances of analysis through embodied multimodality. This kind of analysis, as mentioned earlier, pays attention to the ‘lived experiences of the bodies’: both by examining the embodied performances on stage and examining how these embodied

Table 6.1

Analysis of performance data using embodied multimodality framework

Example 1: Performance about the consequences of getting drunk during a New Year’s celebration.

• physical sensory aspects of the body (movement, gesture, facial expression, etc.) • some portraying destructive drunk bodies and other bodies portraying disapproval • critical portrayal of cultural overemphasis on alcohol in the society and media that creates associations between New Year’s celebrations and drinking. • critical portrayal of identification of youth with drinking culture • critical portrayal of identification of youth as irresponsible

Example 2: Performance about a man distributing poisoned candies to kids during Halloween.

• physical sensory aspects of the body (movement, gesture, facial expression, etc.) • one male body portraying insincere hospitality and parents’ bodies portraying fear • reflection of current societal suspicion of men interacting with young children • reflection of urban identity that includes mistrust of strangers, even neighbors • students’ portrayal of themselves in the role as immigrants negotiating safety for their children in their new country, Canada • portrayal of themselves in roles as immigrants questioning the customs of their new country, Canada

Example 3: Performance about the challenge of preserving a holiday celebration that relies on financial abilities when a father loses his job in the face of economic crisis.

• physical sensory aspects of the body (movement, gesture, facial expression, emotions, etc.) • portraying tensions between parents and different affective responses to the same financial problem • portrayal of 2008 economic crisis • portrayal of microlevel economic crisis within a family • portrayal of disagreement between parents • portrayal of gender-based interpretation of mother trying to protect the children from the reality and the father’s concern with economic survival • portrayal of one student’s own lived experience when he lost his job in 2008 (Continued)

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Table 6.1

(Continued)

*In all three examples above, the physical narratives of performers’ bodies, gestures, and facial expressions were in line with the linguistic narratives. In contrast, in the example below that is described in more detail, the physical narrative of performers’ bodies, gestures, and facial expressions contradicted the linguistic narrative. Example 4: Performance about a dysfunctional family with a father, Pedro, who is consistently absent from holiday celebrations and once again chooses to work instead of celebrating Christmas with the larger family. At the end of the celebration, he joins the others at his wife’s parents’ home.

• physical sensory aspects of the body (movement, gesture, facial expression, emotions, etc.) • husband portrays complex interactions of irresponsibility, hostility to in-laws, lack of sympathy with family/social customs, outsider status, asking for forgiveness • daughters’ physical body language portrays disapproval and sadness • grandparents’ physical body language portrays rejection—their physical narrative supports their linguistic narrative • wife’s physical body language of hugging contradicts her facial expression of a forced smile mixed with concern • portrayal of emotional tensions by all players • portrayal of intergenerational family dysfunction • portray of the heightened emotional currency of holidays • portrayal of shifting power relations between husband, wife, and in-laws • critical analysis of the need to portray forced happiness during holiday celebrations • double portrayal of nongenuine actions contradicting the felt experience, depicting hypocrisy

performances connect to students’ real-life experiences and identities beyond the classroom walls. It requires paying close attention to the representation of meaning through the physical body (movement, gesture, facial expression, etc.), as well as attention to the identities, power dynamics, multiple subject positions, and lived experiences of the participants through critical analysis as suggested by ‘intersectional analysis framework,’ as well as postcolonial, third world feminist theories. In the Drama-ESL class, students not only portrayed the celebratory aspects of these holidays, but they also looked at these practices critically. They performed the consequences of getting drunk during a New Year’s celebration because of the cultural overemphasis on alcohol in the society and media that creates associations between

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New Year’s celebrations and drinking. They performed the distribution of poisoned candies to children during Halloween. One group explored what it feels like to try to preserve a holiday celebration that relies on financial abilities when a father loses his job in the face of economic crisis. Students wrote original scripts for this role-play about holiday celebrations. Tarek was in the role as the father for this role-play. In his journal entry, he wrote about how the mother and the father respond differently to this overwhelming situation in this role-play: The father lost his job in 2008 economy problem. The father doesn’t want to spend the money for every thing, just he thinks how to management his life without job. Lea my wife wants to make her child happy and keep the life normal. We worked hard to sent a small message to everybody ‘How to deal with your children in troubled times’ . . . (Tarek, journal entry, Braeburn Drama-ESL, 1 June 2009). The embodied gains even more significance when the physical narrative of performers’ bodies, gestures, and facial expressions contradict the linguistic narrative. For example, another group (see Table 6.1, Example 4) explored a dysfunctional family with a father, Pedro, who is consistently absent from holiday celebrations and once again chooses to work instead of celebrating Christmas with the larger family. However, the dynamics are not that simple. The role-play also portrays that part of this resistance comes from his negative feelings toward his in-laws, who, according to him, disrespect him and do not trust him. The mother-in-law’s response when she hears that he is not coming is: “I really don’t trust this guy. My daughter doesn’t deserve a man like him.” The role-play ends with the father deciding to show up at the Christmas party to surprise his two daughters and his wife. The mother-in-law immediately yells at him and gives the message that he is not welcome: PEDRO: Hey guys, surprise!!! MOTHER-IN-LAW: Surprise for what? You think you can show up any time you want? The party is over. PEDRO: I can explain. Don’t make it difficult. I am here now. MOTHER-IN-LAW: No, it is too late. The party is over. PEDRO: Meron, Indush, come on my sweet daughters, don’t you want to give a hug to your dad? Aren’t you happy to see me? WIFE: Yes, thanks for coming . . . (and she gives a hug) (Holiday Celebration, excerpt from original script created by the students in one group, Braeburn Drama-ESL)

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They chose to end the scene with these seemingly happy words from the wife, but the visuals/the body language in the scene told us another story. As the wife thanked the husband and was giving him a hug, the two daughters’ facial expressions and body language was disapproving and distant toward their dad, and the wife’s facial expression pictured a forced smile mixed with concern. The power relations shifted at different points in the performance (drama role-play). The wife’s social performance (performing ‘happy’ as a wife to her audience of family members) was almost a performance within a performance. It was, perhaps, an ‘I am in control’ performance of trying to make things work but not truly believing it herself, and a social performance that tries to signal to others that everything is OK and resolved. Yet, as the two audiences—both us the real theatre viewers (those of us watching in our seats) and the other audience, which was the other characters in the play, the daughters, the mother-in-law, the father-in-law, etc.—we were all made aware through the body language that nothing was really resolved or OK. This example clearly illustrates the importance of putting the embodied at the center of inquiry. The analysis of this embodied performance required going beyond the linguistic/verbal mode and paying attention to multiple modes of meaning making with particular attention on the physical body language. It also required attention to critical analysis of the identities, multiple subject positions, and power relations portrayed in the embodied narratives. CONCLUSION In this conclusion, before I bring the threads of arguments with reference to methodology presented in this chapter together, it is important to understand that the search for an embodied multimodal theoretical and methodological framework emerged during the data collection stage, as the primary goal of this research was to examine the meaning-making processes and language and literacy learning in drama classrooms in search for pedagogies that best support linguistically and culturally diverse students who are considered ‘at-risk.’ The pedagogical practices in the drama classes that I observed (as described in the previous section), and my interviews with the students and teachers helped me to better understand the significance of embodied practice and its multimodal nature in drama classrooms. I would like to return to Ms. N’s observations below about the need to challenge the privileging of the mind: School is traditionally centred around . . . academic learning, cerebral learning . . . so I think we tend to separate . . . our heads from our bodies . . . If you engage the body, with anything physical that gets you out of your head . . . it opens people up, takes away the intimidation, brings out their confidence so that they can explore . . . new aspects of

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themselves or new ways of thinking, new perspectives. I guess the body just opens up the mind, in a way. (Ms. N., teacher interview, Braeburn ‘At-Risk’ Program, 8 May 2009) By putting the embodied at the center of pedagogy, we move beyond the focus on the cognitive to a focus on the complex relationships among the affective, the relational, the social, the ideological, and the physical in addition to the cognitive. The embodied multimodal nature of the drama class, as Ms. N. explains above, energized some students who were most disenfranchised by traditional schooling and traditional literacy practices. In the interview that I did with Nezzer, a student in the Braeburn ‘At-Risk’ Program, he explained why he had initially left school and later how this particular drama class brought him back to this alternative high school program. So I just decided to drop out, I was failing all my courses cause I wouldn’t go to class, once or twice a week. I had no motivation. I didn’t wanna be there. (Nezzer, student interview, Braeburn ‘At-Risk’ Program, 20 April 2009) Nezzer explained that the drama course drew him back to school because of the different form of engagement that it afforded. The embodied engagement in drama was significant in Nezzer’s decision to come back to school after having left for a year: My friend, Tim, said . . . “Why don’t you come to my performance—my teacher would probably allow you to join us as long as you do the work and actually put energy to do it.” . . . So I came, just joined it. I may not have gotten a credit out of it but I enjoyed myself doing the coursework and just doing . . . That got people in the class to enjoy it more . . . You are supposed to be energetic. The people who think “I am just here for the credit” should really just join philosophy or English, something [a course where] you can sit and talk cause that’s what they do anyways— just sit and talk—which is irritating . . . So that performance really went well and because of it I decided to come back to school. (Nezzer, student interview, Braeburn ‘At-Risk’ Program, 20 April 2009) I include this quote from Nezzer because it illuminates what Ms. N. argued earlier about how the body is engaged differently during drama by activating meaning-making channels in language and literacy learning that are not restricted to traditional sitting, speaking, reading, and writing, thereby better reaching some students like Nezzer, who would be considered disengaged from the traditional practices of schooling.

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In this chapter I argued for the significance of embodied multimodality as a methodological and theoretical framework. Attention to the multimodal and the embodied in education, especially in relation to drama education and language and literacy learning is significant, especially since, as Medina and Campano (2006) write, “in the current educational and political climate, our strongest caveat is that drama itself avoids conforming to dominant understandings of literacy . . .” (p. 339). Putting the body at the center of inquiry in pedagogy and theory provides a strong framework that challenges the binary of body and mind that is deeply engraved in us. Arguing that the privileging of the mind has its roots in classical Greek philosophy, and with Plato, Peters (2004) writes that: “Perhaps the most culturally deeply embedded dualism with which educational theory and practice must come to terms is the mind/body separation” (p. 14). O’Loughlin (1995) asserts that “bringing bodies back into the picture has been crucial for education” (para. 4). Similarly, Giroux and McLaren (1991), as cited in O’Loughlin (1995) contend that “students react to information viscerally. Knowledge is not something to be ‘understood’; it is always felt and responded to somatically—that is, in its corporeal materiality. What matters is what is felt knowledge—knowledge as a ‘lived engagement’ ” (para. 22) as was the case for Nezzer. I included his experience and the discussion about pedagogy here not to romanticize the successes of drama pedagogy, but to draw attention to the connection between embodied pedagogy and embodied methodology. The methodological attention to embodied multimodality framework is necessary to respond to the need to capture a more complete, embodied picture of our participants’ multisensory experiences in the classroom, drawing from a number of complex semiotic resources. This is especially important when students are engaged in the kind of embodied multimodal pedagogies such as the drama pedagogies described in this paper. Of course, translating the lived sensory embodied experiences in the field to print-based text is limiting. Even though it is impossible to fully capture the embodied experience of the lived moment, hyperlinking the performance video, my field notes, students’ journal entries, photographs, interviews, and the written script using ATLAS.ti software allowed me to identify and analyze the multiple layers of meaning making and communication described in this chapter. However, it is important to note that even though, in my data collection, coding, and analysis, the multiple modes of data including photographs and video recordings were essential to the study, and despite my initial plan of including video recordings in the dissemination of this research, after my extended time in the field with the students, I took a different position. Because of the complex and vulnerable situations that some of these ELLs, who are immigrants and refugees, are leaving behind, even with full ethical consent that I was given by the students in the dissemination of this work, I decided not to use any visuals. This is because, despite my efforts to anonymize through pseudonyms, I did not want to take the

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risk of inadvertently publishing any clues about the identities of the students with whom I was working. As researchers interested in examining embodied classroom pedagogies, we need to continue to seek out new tools, methods, and innovative digital analysis software technologies that make data collection, analysis, and dissemination less linear and cerebral and more multisensory, multimodal, and embodied.

Acknowledgments I would like to express my appreciation to the editors of this book for their valuable feedback. Financial support for the project was provided by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS). This research project, which examined language and literacy learning and engagement in Toronto classrooms, was part of a larger international research project that ran from 2008 to 2013, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) USP (Urban School Performances). The larger project, led by Professor Gallagher, examined how the relationships among culture, identity, multicultural/equity policies, and student engagement have an impact on the lives of youth in schools and communities traditionally labeled ‘disadvantaged’ in the cities of Toronto (Canada), Taipei (Taiwan), Lucknow (India), and Boston (USA). NOTES 1. All names, including the name of the school, are pseudonyms. 2. Embodied intersectionality theory and analysis originated from Black feminism and was first coined in 1989 by Kimberle Crenshaw, a scholar working in the field of law, as “she was attempting to get at the ways in which nobody is ever located in only one category. We are always multiply located, and the different categories to which we belong decentre each other, but always operate together” (Ali, Mirza, Phoenix, & Ringrose, 2010, p. 650). 3. ATLAS.ti software is an analysis package used to analyze a variety of qualitative data, including PDFs, Word documents, field notes, and audio and video recordings.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1962). Phenomenology of perception (Colin Smith, Trans.). New York: Humanities Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The primacy of perception: And other essays on phenomenology, psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics (J. Edie, Ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Mirza, H. S. (2009). Race, gender and educational desire: Why black women succeed and fail. New York: Routledge. O’Loughlin, M. (1995). Intelligent bodies and ecological subjectivities: MerleauPonty’s corrective to postmodernism’s ‘subjects’ of education. Philosophy of Education. Retrieved from http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/ o’loughlin.html Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2010a). Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story. New York: Teachers College Press. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2010b). Artifactual critical literacies: A new perspective for literacy education. Berkeley Review of Education, 2(2), 129–151. Peters, M. (2004). Education and philosophy of the body: Bodies of knowledge and knowledges of the body. In L. Bresler (Ed.), Knowing bodies, moving minds (pp. 13–28). London: Kluwer. Riley, S. R. (2004). Embodied perceptual practices: Towards an embrained and embodied model of mind for use in actor training and rehearsal. Theatre Topics, 14(2), 445–471. Rowsell, J. (2011). Carrying my family with me: Artifacts as emic perspectives. Qualitative Research, 11(3), 331–346. Royce, T. (2007). Multimodal communicative competence in second language contexts. In T. Royce & W. L. Bowcher (Eds.), New directions in the analysis of multimodal discourse (pp. 361–390). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Samuels, M. & Samuels, N. (1990). Seeing with the mind’s eye: The history, technique and uses of visualization (2nd ed.). New York: Random House and The Bookworks. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. (2012, March). Literacy and multimodality: STIS Lecture. Faculdade de Letras, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Street, B., Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2009). Multimodality and new literacy studies. In C. Jewitt (Ed.), The handbook on multimodality (Chapter 15). London: Routledge. Unsworth, L. (2007). Multiliteracies and multimodal text analysis in classroom work with children’s literature. In T. Royce & W. Bowcher (Eds.), Perspectives on the analysis of multimodal discourse (pp. 331–360). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zarilli, P. (2004). Towards a phenomenological model of the actor’s embodied modes of experience. Theatre Journal, 56(4), 653–666.

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Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodologies of Embodiment Testimonios in the Young Adult Novel, Before We Were Free Carol Brochin and Carmen Liliana Medina

Latina feminist writers of fiction for young audiences problematize notions that represent Latinas as a homogenous group and instead acknowledge diverse cultural and gender experiences that result in a deeper reflection of Latinas’ identity (Alvarez, 2002, 2004; Cisneros, 1983; Cofer, 1995, 2003; Mohr, 1990). Latina writers, as Torres (1996) pointed out, “address the question of the politics of multiple identities from a position that seeks to integrate ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and language” (p. 128). These experiences, often contested, are explored through the construction of literary narratives where identities are grounded in the authors’ diasporic imaginations but also embedded in complex gender constructs (see Medina, 2002, 2006). One significant aspect of Latina writers’ work is the way in which, embedded in larger sociopolitical and ideological accounts, women’s bodies are written and represented as part of complex narratives of becoming (Kaminsky, 1992), including in the work in children and young adult literature by Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Nicholasa Mohr, and Julia Alvarez. As part of their literary explorations, Latinas make the female bodies visible, disrupting traditional Latino views of the female body as taboo and invisible (see, for example, the work of Anzaldúa & Moraga, 1981/1983; Cisneros, 1992; Cofer, 2003). The explorations of making female bodies visible also suggest what Davies (2000) described as “the embodied nature of writing” as writers engage in “using language to break open the old certainties and generate new ways of speaking/writing, new forms, new images that give life to previously unimagined possibilities” (p. 180). In this way, new literary discourses emerge where Latina feminist writers reinvent and produce new ways of knowing, speaking, and writing, reaffirming their complex gender identities. This chapter explores the politics of physical and ideological liberation and how those are inscribed in the young adult novel Before We Were Free by Dominican/Latina writer Julia Alvarez (2002). It focuses on the analysis of how the body is written as a site where the intersections of gender, politics, and identity are made visible. More specifically, this chapter will offer

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questions and a methodology for using a Chicana/Latina feminist analysis for examining texts. Like Anzaldúa (2002), we hope to provide useful tools so that other researchers interested in exploring similar themes in their analysis can: turn the established narrative on its head, seeing through, resisting, and subverting its assumptions. Again, it’s not enough to denounce the culture’s old account—you must provide new narratives embodying alternative potentials . . . Beliefs and values from the wisdom of past spiritual traditions of diverse cultures coupled with current scientific knowledge is the basis of the new synthesis. (Anzaldúa, 2002, pp. 561–562) As Calderón, Delgado Bernal, Pérez Huber, Malagón, and Vélez (2012), write, “She [Anzaldúa] reveals not only that doing such work represents a critique of dominant research paradigms but, more importantly, that such work, being both spiritual and intellectual, also requires deep introspection and a vision for something different” (p. 514). It is a vision for something different that this paper hopes to explore. We build on the work of Chicana/Latina scholars who have articulated feminist perspectives that contribute to a decolonization of the research process and methodologies (Ayala, 2008; Delgado Bernal, 1998; Elenes, 1997; Pérez, 1999; Villenas, 1996). We aim to foreground “ways of knowing to unsettle dominant modes of analysis, create decolonizing methodologies” (Cruz, 2006, p. 513) building on an embodied Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology. As we developed the following questions for analytic categories, we considered what Elenes (2001) reminds readers about decolonizing research methods. She writes that this process, “is not to recover the silenced voices by using hegemonic categories of analysis, but to change the methodological tools and categories to reclaim those neglected voices” (p. 60). Therefore, in this chapter we developed a methodology for examining embodiment through a Chicana/Latina feminist lens to disrupt hegemonic categories of analysis. It is through this chapter that we hope to show how one can use this framework as a method of analysis. We argue for a need to disrupt Western science as “the best” knowledge system and move toward a decolonizing research practice. We work at the intersection of body-mind-spirit and foreground the body as a new way to reclaim neglected voices in our history as Latinas. For our analysis, we build on the work of Chicana education scholar Cindy Cruz (2006) who in her research of queer street youth argues that the body must be integrated into research. Cruz (2006, 2011) found that Latina/o queer street youth use their bodies to challenge heteronormative framings of sexual and gender roles. She locates these disruptions within the testimonios of the youth, concluding: For the educational researcher, the inclusion of the body holds the beginning of charting new territories in epistemic approaches, where

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We also draw from the work by Delgado Bernal, Elenes, Godinez, and Villenas (2006), which finds that Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies are inextricably connected to the bodies and agency of mujeres. This is in addition to Moraga’s work (2000), which speaks of the ways in which women of color inherit histories that are stored in physical bodies. She asks women of color to consider “the home-grown language of cuento and canto and a philosophy that resides within the physical body of history” (p. 174). Furthermore, Chicana/Latina feminist thought is also informed by Moraga’s (1983) “theories in the flesh.” These theories in the flesh are “where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (p. 23). Given the repositioning of the body in Chicana/Latina Feminist Thought, we consider the following questions to help us guide our analysis. It is important to consider that we share our methodological approach not as a “fix model” or unproblematic interpretation of Chicana/Latina Feminist Thought. On the contrary, by sharing our experiences in research, we hope that readers expand, problematize, and provide new perspectives to the work that we perceive as partial and always unfinished. Our goal with these questions is to help readers find a possible starting point in engaging in this type of analysis. • Embodiment and political liberation: What are the embodied histories of oppression inscribed and reinscribed on this text? How does the body work within and against the oppressive systems that we are trying to resist? How does the body speak in relation to new forms of liberation? • Embodied testimonies: According to Cruz (2001) “The body prompts memory and language, builds community and coalition. The body is a pedagogical devise, a location of recentering and recontextualizing the self and the stories that emanate from that self” (p. 668). As we looked at Alvarez’s work we asked, how does the body narrate memories and stories of the self? What gets recentered and recontextualized through embodied practices? BEFORE WE WERE FREE In the novel, Alvarez tells a fictional story based on her family’s persecution while living in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s dictatorship. The protagonist family, who was committed to the country’s liberation, is in danger of being caught by Trujillo’s military forces (the SIM). Written representing multiple narration styles through the eyes of the young protagonist

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Anita, it combines a first person narrative with a diary form. The author writes a novel, “imagining the life of those who stayed behind, fighting for freedom” (Alvarez, 2002, p. 166). Inspired by her family’s experiences in the liberation movement and political exile, Alvarez reimagines powerful images and identities to create a historical and political reality from a feminist perspective. This is a fictional, but personal narrative about women’s identities, political repression, justice, the search for democracy, and the power of the imagination as a tool for liberation. It is situated as a testimonio of Anita’s physical and ideological transformations. This kind of testimonio is characteristic of Alvarez’s writing and is described by McCracken (1999) as “physical and psychological rites of passage” situating an adolescent female character’s political awakening simultaneously with physical transformation into womanhood. Using elements of testimonios as presented in the new Latina narrative (Anzaldúa, 1987; The Latina Feminist Group, 2001; López, 2000; McCracken, 1999; Stefanko, 1996) we examine Before We Were Free as a testimonio as one interpretation of how Latina authors construct the body as an ideological site situated in a multiplicity of often contested discourses. Among the categories explored are notions of how adolescent female identities are constructed through dynamics connecting the physical-political/ physical-gender, silencing/invisibility, voicing/visibility, and public/personal. EMBODIED TESTIMONIOS IN NEW LATINA NARRATIVES In Latino/a literary studies, a narrative account of testimonios or testimonies is a literary space that narrators use as a “denunciation of violence, especially state violence and as a demonstration of subaltern resistance” (González, Plata, García, Torres, & Urriesta, 2003, p. 234). According to Alvarez (2002), “It is the responsibility of those who survive the struggle for freedom to give testimony. To tell the story in order to keep alive the memory of those who died” (p. 166). Testimonios have played a critical role in the movement toward political liberation in Latin America and as part of the Latino/a diaspora to the United States. They provides an “artistic form and methodology to create politicized understandings of identity and community” (The Latina feminist group, 2001, p. 3). They also represent a way for Latina feminist writers to invent and reinvent their own social and discursive spaces as exiled writers. This is a way of recreating forms of witnessing in life experiences and sharing those with larger communities. Each telling of a testimonial experience represents a space that as Cantú (1995) describes “mirror how we live life in our memories, with our past and our present juxtaposed and bleeding, seeping back and forth, one to another in a recursive dance” (p. xii). Through embodied testimonies we are putting ourselves back together through narrative retellings and acknowledging the history of the silenced body in Latino/a culture.

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Alvarez’s young adult novels such as Before We Were Free (2002) and Finding Miracles (2004) are examples of young adult texts that explore and reconstruct the history of political repression in Latin American countries, such as Pinochet in Chile, Somosa in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, Douvalier in Haiti, and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic among others. Few texts for young audiences in English consider this reality as part of a history of the America’s continent that in many ways represents a holocaust characterized by persecution, torture, missing people, and massive killings. It is the limited availability of texts in this genre that urged Alvarez to begin writing for young audiences. As Alvarez (2004) articulated in describing the urgency to write Before We Were Free: I found many wonderful books on the Holocaust (beginning, of course, with the diary of Anne Frank. She was a big influence on my character, Anita), wonderful books on slavery, on Native Americans, but I found very few titles . . . that addressed what were the “holocausts” on our side of the Atlantic in the second half of the last century. (p. 14) Also, as an exiled Dominican writer, Alvarez crosses the border back to the Dominican Republic to revisit and reconstruct the past grounded in family testimonios transformed into new and fictional tales, such as in her works In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and her young adult novel Finding Miracles (2004c). Claiming a space for women’s experiences in larger discourses of political oppression and empowerment, she writes a novel out of gratitude—Before We Were Free—dedicated to the ones who stayed and continued to fight for the Dominica Republic’s liberation: In 1960, when my family escaped from the Dominican Republic to the United States, we left behind cousins, tías, tíos, friends and their families, in fact a whole country bearing the brunt of that last brutal year of a thirty-one-year dictatorship. (2004c, p. 14) Similar to In the Time of the Butterflies, she engaged in what McCallum (2002) describes as “a strong critique of the postcolonial situation of the Dominican Republic where dictators like Trujillo, the Dominican ruling class and the United States replace the original colonizers” (p. 97). In In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, code name Las Mariposas, who began the subversive and revolutionary movement against Trujillo. Their brutal assassination served as a motivation for others to join the antidictatorship revolutionary movement. “Telling their story was a debt of gratitude I owed to them, to las Mariposas, and to all the Dominican freedom fighters who gave their lives for the liberation of their country” (2004c, p. 14). Puleo (1998) describes Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies as “a record of patriarchy and the repercussions of its exercise of dismemberment upon the female body/bodies as physiology, as

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political institutions, as history, as language, and as an act of remembering” (p. 15). Female characters and their bodies play an integral role in Alvarez’s writing where it is inscribed by multiple ideological discourses making visible the connections between gender and politics. Alvarez’s constructions of the female body are similar to Easton’s (1994) theorization of writing history and writing the body for black feminist writers: “[if the] body and history are bound together: the route into a new space must be through both that body and that history, because one cannot write one without the other” (p. 57). These history/body dynamics are also embedded in reinventing the body in “ways which are both new and yet related to culture and history” (p. 60). This relationship between body, history, and culture is part of the trajectory of work by feminist scholars who enunciate how the erasure of the body is embedded in larger power and marginalization dynamics, and an advocacy for making bodies visible emerges in interesting ways (see Davies, 2002). In the next sections of this piece, we engage in the process of analyzing how bodies are present in Alvarez’s novel, making visible ways to engage in the embodied aspects of the novel. AN ANALYSIS OF EMBODIMENT IN BEFORE WE WERE FREE

Writing Bodies and Political Repression Similar to her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, in Before We Were Free, female bodies are also constructed in a way that represents political discourses, particularly through Anita, the young adolescent protagonist. Anita lives in a compound built by her grandparents many years ago and that becomes the place where all the tios, tias y primos/as (uncles, aunts, and cousins) built their houses and live. The compound is the center of Anita and her family’s life but also the place where much of the planning to overthrow El Jefe (Trujillo) from power takes place. Her father, uncles, friends, and other relatives are actively involved in planning a revolution. The story is characterized by the constant tension the family lives with as they speak in secret codes, coordinate secret meetings, fear the SIM’s (military police) persecution, and the imminent possibility of having to leave the country at any moment. Anita has been largely protected and kept naive about the reality of Trujillo’s government and the family’s involvement in revolutionary actions. The reader gets a sense of Anita’s development of an awareness and consciousness of what is going on around her life. As the story unfolds, Anita witnesses the brutality and consequences of living in oppressive regimes through the death of family members, persecution, and political exile. Simultaneously, her body also manifests an awakening, establishing a relationship between the physical and ideological locations. Here we focus on the relationship between body and politics constructed in Before We Were Free, mainly on the construction of Anita’s ideologies

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and embodiment but also included other influential characters in Anita’s life, such as Lucinda, her sister. We developed four overlapping categories in relation to our key questions in which the body is made visible or constructed in ways that contribute interesting perspectives to the narrative: 1) bodies, movement, and spatial locations; 2) bodies, rapes, and political domination, 3) bodies and consciousness, 4) body, voice, and silence. While we concentrate our analysis on these categories, we must clarify that there are other body and ideological connections that are left out due to space limitations, such as body and spirituality through Anita’s relationship with a housemaid from Haiti who centers her religious practices on non-Western spiritual beliefs.

Bodies, Movements, and Spatial Locations In the first pages of the novel, Alvarez provides the reader with two important maps to locate particular events and movements throughout the book. The first map is the compound where the family lives, and the second is the Mancini’s house where Anita and her mother hide from the SIM’s—Trujillo’s secret police—persecution. An analysis of both maps helps us understand the connections between bodies—absence and presence—within particular geopolitical locations. The compound map includes a drawing of all the family members’ houses and each house is labeled with the family’s last names. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the story the reader witnesses the exile of the only remaining family in the compound other than Anita’s family. Little by little the family has been migrating to New York City in fear of persecution. The map adds to the narrative a representation of the family’s spatial location characterized by physical presence and absence, placement and displacement. Daily, Anita navigates throughout the compound that has become desolated and deteriorated. She constructs the past memory of a location that was once inhabited by multiple bodies and that now signifies the embodied absence of political exile. Anita lives hoping all the family will return; but at the same time, the absence of bodies in the compound marks her awareness around the question of why her immediate family is the one that stayed. “Why don’t we leave too . . .?” (p. 20), she asks as she learns from her sister that they are staying to protect those family members who have been captured or are hiding from the Trujillo’s authority. While this is an example of absence and presence of bodies embedded in political repression and the disappearance of bodies, it is also a mark for Anita’s beginning to understand her role in the process of liberation and the development of her critical consciousness. There is an embodiment of loneliness and displacement but also the understanding of a larger political commitment from Anita and her family. As the story unfolds and Anita’s family members are either captured— father and uncle—or hidden—Anita, mother and brother—all are forced to leave the compound. A second map at the beginning of the story represents the Mancini family, the place where Anita and her mother spent 55 days

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confined in a closet, hiding from the dictatorship’s searches for the families of those involved in subverting Trujillo’s government. During these 55 days, Anita and her mom make a life in the closet by making their bodies invisible. Furthermore, as we will discuss later in the chapter, they learn that their compound once inhabited by the family is transformed into an interrogation and torture site for the SIM, Trujillo’s secret police. Anita, while hiding, wonders what kind of physical horrors go on in her old house. The presence of the SIM marks a shift in a site where the family’s presence once embodied a liberatory political ideology that turned into a geopolitical site for the physical abuse that represents the oppressive ideology they have been fighting against. The family’s private physical space becomes a public physically and politically oppressive space.

Bodies, Rapes, and Political Domination Throughout the novel Trujillo is presented as constantly courting and looking for girls to rape them and keep them in confinement. Alvarez shares a woman’s perspective on the dictatorship that shows the multiple physical atrocities during this period in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo does not only control the politics and the nation, but he also controls the bodies of young girls. These are intersecting forms of political and gender oppressions that are made explicit in various events in the text. At the beginning of the story, as a result of the father’s leadership in the anti-Trujillo movement, the SIM search Anita’s house. At this particular moment, Anita is somehow unaware of her father’s deep involvement in the movement and is somehow clueless and surprised by the SIM’s unexpected visit to the house to do a “routine search.” The search includes Anita’s room as a first indicator of the connections between political and physical brutality, rape, and abuse: In my room, one guy lifts the baby-doll pajamas I left lying on the floor as if a secret weapon is hidden underneath. Another yanks the cover back from my bed. I hold on tight to Mami’s ice cold hand and she tightens her hold on mine. (p. 14) In this scene, Alvarez begins situating the girl’s body in relationship to power and domination, constructing a connection between intimacy, rape, and power through elements such as pajamas, beds, and secret weapons. The scene continues as the SIM searches her sister’s, Lucinda’s, room who is sleeping at the moment and wakes up with the sound of the bayonet’s movement searching underneath the bed. At that point Anita is terrified and Lucinda has developed a terrible rash on her neck that will be recurring at different moments in the novel whenever she feels physically threatened by the SIM or Trujillo. Throughout the novel, Alvarez creates an embodied discourse as the body responds, “speaks,” and signifies in the different situations the women encounter.

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As the story unfolds, this physical threat becomes even more evident when later in the novel “El Jefe”—Trujillo—makes an unexpected visit to a family party and meets Lucinda. El Jefe has been known for taking girls to his country mansion and raping them. Once he meets Lucinda, he begins making attempts to have her and make her his possession. The result is Lucinda’s emergency exile and Anita’s prohibition from going outside the house, including to school. Trujillo’s power has a direct impact on Anita’s reality that ends up in physical confinement and seclusion. In addition, in a moment of reflection after the party where Trujillo approaches Lucinda but also the boy Anita likes gets drunk, Anita begins to desire a transformation of her physical appearance into a male disguise—like Joan of Arc or “even better” to stop growing: Overnight, all boys . . . have become totally gross. Here is an old lech flirting with my sister. Here are Oscar and Sam drinking liquor and throwing up. If only I could be Joan of Arc, cut off my hair and dress like a boy, just to be on the safe side. Or even better if only I could go backward to eleven, instead of forward to thirteen. (p. 71) This passage situates Anita’s transformations in competing embodied discourses, such as the connection between gender, power, and sexuality. The accumulation of experiences for Anita becomes a reflection to reevaluate perceptions of man, woman, and sexuality in general. Anita’s idealized perceptions of men, both the one in power (Trujillo) and the ones she feels some attraction for (Oscar and Sam), are disrupted in this scene. The male public and private figures become contested. This is exhibited in her disgust for men but also her desire for a gender/male disguise that shows her critical awareness that in society it is safer to be a man. Furthermore, within this multiplicity of discourses there is a mark or sign of resistance to grow up as a woman and a desire to go back “to eleven instead of forward to thirteen” (p. 71). Anita becomes consciously aware of the political and oppressive reality lived by her family and country but also of her physical growth as a woman. Very similar to Stefanko’s (1996) literary analysis of the woman characters in Alvarez’s The Time of the Butterflies, Anita is becoming aware of “the enmeshing of sexuality with issues of knowledge, power, and politics . . .” (p. 63). These complex contested relationships are represented in the novel, not just in terms of oppression and domination, but also working along with Anita’s growing awareness of a social consciousness—a topic we will discuss in the next section.

Bodies, Fears, and Consciousness: (Resisting) Becoming a Mariposa According to Davies (2000), “the discovery of one’s body as an instrument that speaks a language beyond words, is partially generated by a desire to escape from oppressive discourse. The oppressive discourse cannot be

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ignored, therefore, as a generative force” (p. 190). This generative force of oppressive discourses is present in Anita’s development of critical awareness and empowerment to know and actively contribute to fight the oppressive situation in relation to gender and politics. This becomes clear toward the beginning of the novel by the way the story of the Mirabal sisters or “Las Mariposas” is brought into the story and interpreted by Anita. Understanding and embodying “Las Mariposas” testimonios and the role they played in the Dominican Republic’s liberation becomes central to Anita’s gender and political awareness. After Las Mariposas’s death in the story, Anita engages in a dialogue with her sister, Lucinda, and begins to make sense of the immediate political reality: Suddenly, I understand. These women were murdered in a pretend accident! I shiver, imagining myself on the way to school, tumbling down a cliff, my parrot skirt flying around me. Now I feel scared of leaving the compound. (p. 28) It is at this moment of fear that Anita has another realization of the larger political situation through the murder of the Mirabal sisters as Mariposas. As she makes sense of the events in her imagination, she embodies their identities and imagines herself in the accident. The result is fear but also a deeper commitment to her family’s struggle for liberation. As the novel moves forward, we see Anita acting with an awareness of the larger implications of her “moves” and taking an active role in supporting the family. For example, in the scene when Trujillo arrives to the party to meet and approach Lucinda, the father and uncle have been conducting a secret meeting in the backyard. Once the mother realizes Trujillo’s arrival, she sends Anita to warn them. Anita runs to the place they are holding the meeting while thinking: “I’ve been wanting to hear a voice like the one Joan of Arc heard, and here it is!” (p. 63). She embodies Joan of Arc to act and not to hide like in her later embodiment of this character that I described in the previous section. Through the embodiment of Joan of Arc’s identity, the reader witnesses a multiplicity of discursive transformations into action, feelings of disguise, and confinement. Physical and political growth is received once again with fear and resistance in other ways. The discovery for Anita of the body as an instrument that speaks a language reflecting particular constructions of reality signifies her physical growth and awareness of the immediate state of violence in order to save the country. The body speaks and reality is clear, but Anita resists both the body language and political violence. In the scene where the family says good-bye to Lucinda before flying her out to the US, the house has become tense as the result of the family’s, particularly the father’s and uncle’s, realization that Trujillo’s assassination is the only option toward the country’s liberation, and they have to take leadership in the murder. Anita witnesses a conversation on this matter, and out of fear she decides to spend

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her last night with Lucinda. That night Anita has a dream of: “El Jefe lying in a puddle of disgusting blood, and Papi and Tío Toni, standing beside the body . . .” (p. 72). Her dream reveals her realization that both her father and uncle are involved in planning Trujillo’s assassination and that this is the only choice for the country’s liberation. That night Anita menstruates for the first time. In the morning as she looks at the blood on her nightgown, confusion and fear takes over her as she believe the SIM “snuck into our house in the middle of the night and stabbed” (p. 72) her sister for not responding to El Jefe, Trujillo’s calls. Body, politics, and violence intersect to create confusion and fear. Menstruation becomes a way for the body to signify the brutal and violent moment of realization for Anita that, as in the moment when she is repulsed by male domination, is embedded in resistance: “I don’t feel like a señorita. I feel more like a baby in wet diapers. And I don’t want to be a señorita now that I know what El Jefe does to señorita” (p. 73).

Body, Voice & Silence: Secrets of the Body, Secrets of the Revolution In the last chapters of the book, we witness Anita’s move to the Mancini family house where she and her mom spend 55 days hiding in a closet in Mr. and Mrs. Mancini’s bedroom. Nobody else in the house, except Mr. and Mrs. Mancini, knows they are staying there to avoid being captured by the SIM. At this point in the narrative, the father and uncle have been captured by Trujillo’s son for being responsible for the assassination of his father. The only choice for the mother and Anita is to hide in the Mancini’s house, which is located in the Italian embassy where there is less of a threat of a search. This section is characterized by an interesting shift in Anita’s narrative voice. The story, once told in first person narrative, shifts to a first person diary, creating a polyphony of narrative forms. Anita cannot move or talk much, and the reader comes closer to her “voice” through her diary, which at this point is one of the ways of keeping her sanity while in confinement. Her diary is an important tool for Anita throughout the story to write mostly about personal matters. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the story the mother asks her to stop writing, fearing the SIM might come to do one of their “routine searches” and take it while looking for secret information. Once they move to the closet, she is allowed to write in the diary again, and it becomes a way for her to leave a record of what they live through during that time in case something happens to them. The reader becomes the witness of her life in the closet, a small space that becomes her new house. In this closet located in the Mancini’s bedroom, they sleep, read, and pass their time most of the day and night. Their bodies become invisible as they have to coordinate all their moves with the Mancini couple so “Our sounds have to sound like their sound” (p. 108) writes Anita in her diary. For

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example, one night as Anita and her mother are sleeping in the closet, Mrs. Mancini “shook us awake and whispered, I don’t know which one of you is doing it, but I’m afraid you don’t have the luxury of snoring in this house” (p. 108). Their bodies’ needs are constrained to this new reality. Once the Mancinis leave the bedroom to do their everyday jobs, Anita and her mom have to stay quietly inside the closet and “can’t move or use the bathroom” (p. 110). When the Mancini couple are in their room in the evenings, Anita and her mother are allowed to listen to the radio in the bedroom and use the bathroom together with Mrs. Mancini to avoid extra noise. They also have an emergency plan in case the SIM or a stranger goes into the house. If they hear someone coming, Anita and her mom are to “slip into the bathroom, where there are two narrow closets; Mami goes in one and I go in the other, all the way to the crawl space” (p. 110) where they will wait and pray not to be discovered. During these days, Anita’s voice becomes the diary; but it also becomes, as she describes, a part of her body. Like her, the diary has to be “hidden at all times.” To find the diary according to Anita will be “like finding me”; therefore, “it’s got to be a diary in hiding” (p. 124). The diary is not just a part of her body in the present, it is also a place to escape and fly away from her situation. FINAL THOUGHTS Analyzing and making bodies visible for Latina feminist writers is an important tool and cultural site to examine gender politics. Through the analysis in this chapter, one can see the multiple and complex ways the body is written about within a narrative of oppression, adding literary richness but more so adding layers of critical awareness. Alvarez provides young audiences with a rich text and literary experience that provokes multiple reflections that go beyond the written word and move into an embodied experience that opens up a space to consider complex gender dynamics in relation to power and politics. By drawing on the frameworks of Chicana/Latina feminist studies, and through the analysis of one text for young adults, this study illustrates the utility of these frameworks by demonstrating how this text is inextricably connected to the bodies of mujeres (Bernal et al., 2006) and their ability to collectively survive and thrive. The analysis indicates that the embodied histories of oppression and suffering are inscribed and reinscribed in their bodies and in the narration of the protagonist Anita. Alvarez positions the bodies of women as textual signifiers employed within and against the oppressive systems that they resist. The body becomes a vehicle to articulate agency toward new forms of liberation. It prompts memory and language and activates community and coalition (Cruz, 2001).

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It is a pedagogical device, a location of recentering and recontextualizing the self in order to reconstitute it and the stories that emanate from that revitalized self. Given the repositioning of the body in Chicana Feminist Thought, we hope to help readers find a possible starting point in engaging in this type of analysis.

REFERENCES Alvarez, J. (2004). The woman I kept to myself. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, G. (2002). Now let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts. In G. Anzaldúa & A. L. Keating (Eds.) This bridge we call home: Radical visions for transformation (pp. 540–580). New York: Routledge. Anzaldúa, G., & Moraga, C. (1981). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical woman of color. Pittsburgh, PA: Persephone Press. Ayala, J. (2008). What is our work in the academy? In K. P. González & R. V. Padilla (Eds.), Doing the public good: Latina/o scholars engage civic participation (pp. 25–37). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Calderón, D., Delgado Bernal, D., Pérez Huber, L., Malagón, M., & Vélez, V. (2012). A Chicana feminist epistemology revisited: Cultivating ideas a generation later. Harvard Educational Review, 82(4), 513–539. Cantú, N. (1995). Canícula: Snapshots of a girlhood en la frontera. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. Cisneros, S. (1992). Woman hollering creek: And other stories. New York: Vintage. Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14, 657–669. doi:10.1080/095183901100 59874 Cruz, C. (2006). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. In D. Delgado Bernal, C. Alejandra Elenes, F. E. Godinez & S. Villenas (Eds.), Chicana/Latina education in everyday life: Feminist perspectives on pedagogy and epistemology (pp. 59–75). Albany: State University of New York Press. Davies, B. (2000). Eclipsing the constitutive power of discourse: The writing of Janette Turner Hospital. In E. A. Pierre & W.A. Pillow (Eds.), Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education (pp. 179–198). New York: Routledge. Davies, B. (2002). (In)scribing body/landscape relations. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Delgado Bernal, D. (1998). Using a Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Harvard Educational Review, 68(4), 555–579. Delgado Bernal, D., & Elenes, C. A. (2011). Chicana feminist theorizing: Methodologies, pedagogies, and practices. In R. R. Valencia (Ed.), Chicano school failure and success: Present, past, and future (3rd ed., pp. 99–119). New York: Routledge. Easton, A. (1994). The body as history and ‘writing the body’: The example of Grace Nichols. Journal of Gender Studies, 3(1), 55–67. Elenes, C. A. (2001). Transformando fronteras: Chicana feminist transformative pedagogies. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14, 689–702. doi:10.1080/ 09518390110059865 González, M., Plata, O., Gracía, E., Torres, M., & Urrieta, L. (2003). Testimonios de inmigrantes: Students educating future teachers. Journal of Latinos and Education, 2(4), 233–243.

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Kaminsky, A. (1992). Reading the body politic: Feminist criticism and Latin American women writers. St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota. The Latina Feminist Group (2001). Telling to live: Latina feminist testimonios. London: Duke University Press. Medina, C. (2006). Interpreting Latino/a children’s literature as critical fictions. ALAN Review, 33(2), 71–77. Medina, C., & Enciso, P. (2002). “Some words are messengers/Hay palabras mensajeras”: Interpreting sociopolitical themes in Latino/a children’s literature. The New Advocate, 15(1), 35–47. Moraga, C. (1981/1983). Preface. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writing by radical women of color (2nd ed., pp. xiii–xix). New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press. Moraga, C. (1983). Loving in the War Years. Boston, MA: South End Press. Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.). (1981/1983). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (2nd ed.). New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press. Moraga, C. (2000). Loving in the war years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: South End Press. McCallum, S. (2002). Reclaiming Julia Alvarez: In the time of the butterflies. Woman Studies, 29, 93–117. McCracken, E. (1999). New Latina narrative: The feminine space of postmodern ethnicity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Pérez, E. (1999). The decolonial imaginary: Writing Chicanas into history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Puleo, G. (1998). Remembering and reconstructing the Mirabal Sisters in Julia Alvarez’s In the time of the butterflies. Bilingual Review, 23(1), 11–21. Stefanko, J. (1996). New ways of telling: Latinas’ narrative of exile. A Journal of Woman Studies, 17(2), 50–69. Torres, L. (1996). The construction of the self in U.S. Latina autobiographies. In A. Garry & M. Pearsall (Eds.), Women, knowledge, and reality: Explorations in feminist philosophy (pp. 127–143). New York: Routledge. Villenas, S. (1996). The colonizer/colonized Chicana ethnographer: Identity, marginalization, and co-optation in the field. Harvard Educational Review, 66(4), 711–731.

Young Adults and Children’s Literature Alvarez, J. (1994). In the time of the butterflies. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Alvarez, J. (2004). Finding miracles. New York: Knopf. Alvarez, J. (2002). Before we were free. New York, NY: Knopf. Cisneros, S. (1983). The house on Mango Street. Texas: Arte Público Press. Mohr, N. (1990). Felita (2nd ed.). New York: Bantam. Ortíz-Cofer, J. (1995). An island like you: Stories from el barrio. New York: Orchard. Ortíz-Cofer, J. (2003). The Meaning of Consuelo. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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Behind the Body-Filled Scenes Methodologies at Work on the Body in Graphica Stephanie Jones and James F. Woglom

The body is fascinating to consider in both everyday life and in the work of research and scholarship. It is simultaneously physical and affective, social and individual, produced and producing, reproductive and innovative. The body’s role in theories and practices of education is not yet fully realized, but we believe it is crucial for work that aims to create change. About halfway through my (Stephanie’s) three-year study of feminist pedagogy in teacher education, I noticed I was paying more attention to the ways bodies were referenced in the data, including informal conversations among the undergraduate students, forcing me to consider the ways in which bodies were explicitly engaged in teacher education pedagogy broadly speaking, as well as in my pedagogy within the course that was under study. In other words, I didn’t set out to conduct a study on the role of bodies in teacher education, rather I was interested in the ways in which students experienced a teacher education course that was informed by feminist commitments. But, perhaps in reflecting on some of those commitments, I recognized a material and discursive gap between our class readings, assignments, and discussions and the kinds of body-talk going on in the unsanctioned fissures of the course. Body-talk: talk about one’s own body, others’ bodies, bodies seen in media, bodies perceived in local schools, and bodies perceived on campus saturated those unsanctioned spaces, so I decided to make bodies an important part of our regular class in a variety of ways. And, not surprisingly, interesting things happened, and I have written about some of those in other places (Jones, 2010, 2012, in press; Jones & Hughes-Decatur, 2012; Jones & Woglom, 2012, 2013, 2014). This chapter offers a glimpse into some of the ways we (Jim and I together) made sense of and produced the body in graphica scholarship, hoping to transcend histories of constraint and oppression. Moving the boundaries of traditional print-based scholarly publishing continues to be a challenge that we don’t explicitly address here, but it might suffice to say that this opening text you are reading was not a part of our chapter until the publisher informed Mia and Carmen that they had extended beyond their allowance for “images” in the book. So you are reading an insufficient orientation to the chapter, not to mention experiencing a very different aesthetic experience

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than we anticipated for you, as a result of the inability and/or unwillingness of academic publishers to reach beyond what has been in the past. There will be some disjointed parts of the chapter, as well, where we had to cut the “images” and replace them with the traditional alphanumeric print text carrying your eyes line by line across a white page. To illustrate our methodology, we use excerpts from our graphica article “Teaching Bodies in Place” in Teachers College Record (Jones & Woglom, 2013) and provide commentary about the excerpts as a way to make some of our “behind the scenes” decisions regarding analysis and graphic presentation more apparent to the readers. Because the story line of fear was so prevalent in the data, I wanted us to convey and stretch out a pedagogical moment when I (as the professor) responded to a story of fear in the classroom setting. Here you see the midpoint of the pedagogical moment after I had engaged in a question-answer, table-tennis-like elicitation of more information from the student. At no time did she, a white woman student, tell me what color skin the boy on the bus had (who had participated, most likely unknowingly, in the production of fear). When I asked the question outright, the entire class stopped; it was as if no one was breathing, and definitely no one was moving. Bodies were frozen in time and the student responded with a quiet voice and shameful shrug as her body shrunk into her knowledge that she realized the way she might be implicated in the answer: He was black. Even after analyzing, writing about, and publishing these kinds of pedagogical moments in the study, my response never did “sit” well in my “gut.” I continued to ask questions of the data: How else might this have gone? Why did I focus on the race of the boy on the bus rather than the gendered nature of the experience, or both? Who am I to subside fear in a society where one in four women are sexually violated? Why did my pedagogical analysis move toward the woman’s (social) production of the boy as potentially criminal instead of toward the multiple ways women experience vulnerability in public and private spaces and what teachers might make of this? The shrunk-in body depicted in the bottom panel indicates that it is at least possible that I inflicted bodily harm in this pedagogical interaction, a psychosocial wound that could live on in her embodied ways of being when she moves beyond her teacher education program. My in-the-moment pedagogical response only took into consideration one way of interpreting how bodies are perceived and why fear might manifest itself inside a body. This is why we need many more tools for considering these things with much more complexity. Yes, the race (and gender) of the boy on the bus was playing a role in the young woman’s bodily response to him, but place was also playing a role, and the available story lines she had to make sense of this young boy on the bus were playing a role, and her already-feeling-inadequate sense of herself given her limited literacies of bus riding was playing a role, and her embodied and psychosocial knowledge of

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misogyny was playing a role, and her struggle to not let racist perceptions take hold of her when she knows—intellectually at least—that doing so might position her as racist. In this depiction of the same “bodies” moving across different “spaces” and how that might impact one’s spatial imagination, we tried to capture the power of place in one’s physical and psychosocial comfort and confidence. I have come to the conclusion that my response to this woman’s (and other women’s) fear on the bus and in various other public spaces was informed by a tendency in the discursive practice of social justice teacher education to foreground race over gender, and to emphasize the future teacher as the subject who will dismiss her embodied knowledge that does not provide resources to act in service of others. In other words, even in my “feminist” stance, I still positioned the woman teacher to educate students as needed, to sacrifice the self in order to meet the needs of marginalized youth and families with whom she would work in the future. In hindsight, of course, I don’t believe in either/or propositions. We can tend to the lived realities of women teachers being positioned in a society where patriarchy and misogyny are normalized without doing a disservice to the many other groups that are positioned as vulnerable in our society and schools. Indeed, facing the many complex and even contradictory vulnerabilities of all groups without equitable social, political, and economic power might encourage more solidarity across such groups. REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. (2009). Rabelais and his world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (2000). Reproduction in education, society and culture (2nd ed.). London, UK: Sage. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Davies, B. (2010). The implications for qualitative research methodology of the struggle between the individualised subject of phenomenology and the emergent multiplicities of the poststructuralist subject: The problem of agency. Reconceptualizing educational research methodology, 1(1), 54–67. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Peregrine Books. Hanh, T. N. (2009). You are here: Discovering the magic of the present moment. Boston: Shambhala. Jones, S. (2010). Bodies before me. In L. Scherff & K. Spector (Eds.), Culturally relevant pedagogy: Clashes and confrontations (pp. 165–179). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Jones, S. (2012). Trauma narratives and nomos in teacher education. Teaching Education, 23(2), 131–152.

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Jones, S. (2016). When the body acquires pedagogy and it hurts: Discursive practices and material effects of round robin reading. In G. Enriquez, E. Johnson, S. Kontovourki, & C. Mallozzi (Eds.), Literacies. learning, and the body: Bringing research and theory into pedagogical practice. New York: Routledge. Jones, S., & Hughes-Decatur, H. (2012). Speaking of bodies in justice-oriented, feminist teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 63, 51–61. Jones, S., & Woglom, J. (2012). Overcoming nomos. Graphic chapter in P. Gorski, N. Osei-Kofi, J. Sapp, & K. Zenkov (Eds.), Cultivating social justice teachers: How teacher educators have helped students overcome cognitive bottlenecks and learn critical social justice concepts (pp. 27–48). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Jones, S., & Woglom, J. (2013). Teaching bodies in place. Teachers College Record, 115(8), 1–29. Jones, S., & Woglom, J. (2014). Dangerous conversations: Persistent tensions in teacher education. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(6), 47–56. MacLure, M. (2012). Language and materiality in qualitative methodology. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver, BC. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage. Reay, D. (1998). Class work: Mother’s involvement in children’s schooling. London, UK: University College Press. Reay, D. (2005). On the wild side: Identifications and disidentifications in the research field. Paper presented at the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. New York: Verso. Taguchi, H. L. (2013). Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: ontological divergences and the production of researcher in subjectivities. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 706–716. Taylor, C., & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and Education, 25(6), 665–670. Thomas, M. (2011). Multicultural girlhood: Racism, sexuality and the conflicted spaces of urban education. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H., & Melody, J. (2001). Growing up girl: Psycho–social explorations of class and gender. New York: New York University Press.

Afterword Troubles with Embodiment Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre

I was very happy to be invited to write the final chapter of this lovely book because, I confess, I’ve never quite understood embodiment. I hoped that after reading and rereading the smart set of essays collected here, which represent a variety of interpretations and uses of embodiment in qualitative research, I might finally get it, but I didn’t. Frustrated, I began to suspect that my troubles with embodiment point to my resistance to the “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 1976/1978, p. 93), the structure in which it is typically thought—that everlasting mind/body binary enables other violent binaries including rational/emotional, objective/subjective, value free/value laden, man/woman, culture/nature, and, of course, Science/Not-Science. Rather than responding to individual papers here, I’ve decided to use them as a provocation to explore my ongoing troubles with embodiment, my resistance to it, and—as I’ve learned in the writing of this essay—my exasperation with our continuing need to point out that we are bodies and are completely entangled with the world. Who told us we could, and should, separate our messy bodies from our pure minds lest they contaminate rational thought? When did we begin to believe our bodies were, indeed, absent from research and scholarship? Why did it become necessary to think embodiment? Why have feminists and other Others been so concerned with the supposed absence of the body in Science? And, always thinking with Foucault, I ask how does power function in the discourse and materiality of a structure that enables the concept embodiment? These are some of the questions that came to me as I read the earlier chapters in this book that I will continue to work on long after I’ve submitted this essay. Embodiment, to me, seems thinkable only in relation to what is not embodied: The body is embodied; the mind is not. The body is either present or absent. Some, especially those soft social scientists trying hard to be hard (this is scientism) argue that the body not only can but should be separate from the mind. Others—say, women, who’ve been condemned to the wrong side of the binary and are assumed to be subjective, emotional, too close to nature (e.g., their bodies bleed and leak) and so are unlikely to be rational enough to be scientists—assume the body can be absent but that it shouldn’t be. No doubt we women have been co-opted by Science’s

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mind/body distinction, and who wouldn’t be given that it structures Western culture, especially Western Science. In sum, it seems to me that one can believe the body must be reinserted only if one believes it was missing in the first place. At this point in this logic, we can think embodiment. Then we want to add the body to everything, especially, if we’re researchers to “knowledge,” which, after all, is the goal of science. And, voilà, we now have “embodied knowledge” and “embodied learning,” embodied this and that, embodied everything. The body is back. But, of course, the body was never missing. And this is why I think I’ve never understood embodiment. For some reason, I never believed my body was missing from anything. Somehow I escaped that binary—perhaps because I studied Literature before I studied Science (see Snow, 1959; van der Tuin, 2014). DESCARTES So where did this mind/body distinction come from? We know, of course, that Descartes invented it when he was 23 years old. Quite ambitious, Descartes (1641/1993) wanted his system of knowledge to supplant Aristotle’s, and in his Discourse on Method, he developed a method a man could “follow in order to conduct his reason well” (p. 2). He wrote that, since his childhood, he’d been convinced that “one could acquire a clear and assured knowledge of everything that is useful in life. I had a tremendous desire to master them” (p. 3). In his search for true knowledge, Descartes invented a method that involved accepting only “what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt” (p. 11). Rorty (1979) called this “turning inward . . . to find ineluctable truth” (p. 9) “methodological solipsism” (p. 61). Descartes (1637/1993) believed that the body distracts the mind from the pursuit of true knowledge—“our senses deceive us” (p. 18). In Meditation II, he defined himself as a “thing that thinks,” as “a mind or soul or an understanding, or a reason” (Descartes, 1641/1993, p. 66). This is the Cartesian cogito. A few paragraphs after stating the first principle of his method, “I think, therefore I am,” (p. 18) in his Discourse on Method (1637/1993), he elaborated as follows: I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is simply to think, and which, in order to exist, has no need of any place nor depends on any material thing. Thus this “I,” that is to say, the soul through which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is even easier to know than the body, and even if there were no body at all, it would not cease to be all that it is. (p. 19) In these two sentences, Descartes grounded thinking, the mind (soul), in essentialism and transcendence, and instituted foundationalism. He also stated, “I saw clearly that it is a greater perfection to know than to doubt”

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(p. 19). In that statement and others like it, he instituted science as philosophy’s goal with epistemology at its center. In his view, we must free our minds of the contamination of the materiality of the body that tricks and deludes us, a body subject to the vagaries of the physical world that changes over time and place, so we can use our reason to push through uncertainty, doubt, and contingency and finally know. And, for Descartes, it was the rigor of mathematics that produced true knowledge—mathematics, the perfect language, uncontaminated by the body, a language that doesn’t even have to be spoken by the body. I believe it is critical for us to study Descartes’ texts today in all the research methods classes we teach to see how, out of thin air, this ambitious, arrogant young man whose goals were perfection and mastery created the mind/body dualism that haunts us three centuries later. If his work had never been published, what would modern science look like? Are we so desirous of certainty, of the final, indisputable truth, (e.g., see Dewey, 1929) that we would have spawned another Descartes to protect us from contingency and doubt? Perhaps. After briefly describing the Cartesian epistemology and methodology some believe have been disastrous for many people—I discuss ontology shortly— I close this section with a long quote from Foucault, who identified the very serious ethical problem with Descartes’ method. Foucault (1983/1984) explained that until the sixteenth century, the European understood that “truth has a price” (p. 371), that goodness and truth are linked. Descartes, however, broke with this when he said, “To accede to truth, it suffices that I be any subject which can see what is evident.” Evidence is substituted for ascesis at the point where the relationship to the self intersects the relationship to others and the world. The relationship to the self no longer needs to be ascetic to get into relation to the truth. It suffices that the relationship to the self reveals to me the obvious truth of what I see for me to apprehend that truth definitively. Thus, I can be immoral and know the truth. I believe that this is an idea which, more or less explicitly, was rejected by all previous culture. Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. With Descartes, direct evidence is enough. After Descartes, we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge. This change makes possible the institutionalization of modern science (pp. 371–372). And I would argue that modern science has sanctioned knowledge for knowledge’s sake much too often. POSITIVISM If we move forward several centuries, we find in logical positivism or logical empiricism a continuation of the epistemological tradition that began with

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Descartes. I have written about positivism elsewhere and so will not repeat that discussion here (St. Pierre, 2012). Haack (2007), echoing Foucault’s concerns about ethics when philosophy is reduced to philosophy of science, explained this social science approach as follows: According to the earliest formulations of Logical Positivism, there are only two kinds of meaningful statements: the analytic, including the statements of logic and mathematics, and the empirically verifiable, including the statements of empirical science. Anything else is, cognitively speaking, nonsense, an expression of emotion at best. Much of traditional philosophy—metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics—was discarded, along with theology, as meaningless verbiage, or bad poetry. If philosophy was not to be abandoned altogether, it had to be re-invented; and so it was, as the “logic of science.” (p. 32) There were many disagreements among the Vienna Circle’s logical positivists, who included Hans Han, Phillip Frank, Otto Neurath, Ernst Mach, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and others, some of whom met as early as 1907 to discuss philosophy of science and epistemology and continued to meet after World War I. Some of the logical positivists fled Europe before World War II and settled in England and the United States where logical positivism flourished until the 1960s when it went out of favor for a time. Of course, we’ve seen a resurgence of positivism, a neopositivism, in the United States in the form of “scientifically based research” (SBR) mandated into federal law in 2002 by the No Child Left Behind Act. Hawkesworth (2014) noted that Most of the research strategies developed within social science in the twentieth century draw upon either positivist or Popperian conceptions of the scientific method [Popper was much concerned with the demarcation problem, that is, distinguishing science from pseudoscience using his falsifiability principle.] The legacy of positivism is apparent in behaviorialist definitions of the field that emphasize data collection, hypothesis formulation and testing, and other formal aspects of systematic empirical enterprise, as well as in approaches that stress scientific, inductive methods, statistical models, and quantitative research designs. (pp. 33–34). There were many disagreements among the logical positivists, though, following Comte who reinstated a Baconian idea of science as the chief arbiter of human life—they shared the following ideas: the rejection of metaphysics (nonobservable, nonmeasurable, speculative, critical ideas such as those of Freud and Marx); that methodology should demarcate scientific reasoning (positive, context of justification) from nonscientific reasoning (normative, context of discovery); the use of unambiguous language; the use of prescribed, exact, formal methods, preferably mathematical; a belief in a unified theory

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of science that rejects a division between the natural and social sciences (logical positivism posits that the methodological procedures of natural science may be directly applied to the social sciences); the idea that the purpose of science is to provide new laws that help make new predictions; that observability entails objective, reproducible experiments; a belief in incrementalism, the idea that knowledge steadily “accumulates”; and the verifiability principle of meaning (the idea that only that which can be seen and measured is valuable—e.g., a sense datum, a brute datum that is not subject to further interpretation, judgment, or contingency). Many of these ideas illustrate an age-old desire to get below the messy, contingent surface of human existence to a pristine, originary foundation, the bedrock of certitude. A belief in the power of science as a “cure” is, of course, a belief and not the truth. Nonetheless, in logical positivism we find the repetition of Descartes’ desire for clarity, a value-free scientific method, mastery through prediction and control, and true knowledge through the right use of reason. Anything that intrudes on such a pristine science of the mind, such as the impure body, would be considered a threat to eliminate. AN ONTOLOGICAL GAP AND THE ONTOLOGICAL TURN It should be clear by now that the social science we practice today is grounded in theories produced by both Descartes and the logical positivists who were much concerned with epistemology and methodology. Discussions of knowledge and methods for producing knowledge have certainly superseded discussions of ontology—being, reality—in most qualitative methodology textbooks, university courses, and conferences. We seem almost obsessed with what we can learn, what we can know, and with producing better methods for producing better knowledge. We’re stuck in the left, privileged side of that mind/body dualism. Why is it so difficult to deconstruct that opposition, to reverse the binary, and then overthrow the structure in which it can be thought? Rorty (1979) helped us understand this dilemma. He explained that the “mind” is an invention but that the philosophy of mind retains the intuitive distinction between the mind and the body and so keeps the Cartesian dualism alive. For example, Rorty wrote that we believe some things “flash before the mind” (p. 17) and that other things, like a stomachache, clearly happen in the body. One could argue that this distinction is perpetuated by our language, a language so infected by the dualism that it is possible to think and write something like “flash before the mind.” In other words, if we hadn’t invented the concept mind and set it in opposition to the body, our language would be different, and we wouldn’t be able to make that distinction and think/write that statement. Nonetheless, we incessantly make the distinction between the mental and the physical; it’s common sense. We support and maintain that “ontological gap” (p. 18).

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But Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) have given us concepts—assemblage, rhizome, bodies-without-organs—that refuse the mind/body distinction, as have feminists such as Barad (2007)—entanglement, agential realism, spacetimemattering—and Bennett (2010)—vibrant matter, thing power. A body of literature called variously the new empiricism (see Clough, 2009) and the new materialism (see Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphin & van der Tuin, 2012) shifts our attention from epistemology to ontology. The argument is that the discovery model of science put into place centuries ago that spawned a multitude of knowledge projects has been exhausted to some extent and that it’s time to turn to the ontological. Thus, the ontological turn. But this turn overturns not just the mind/body distinction but also the human/nonhuman distinction. Clearly, we’ve come a long way from Descartes who believed the human was separate from and master of the universe. In the new empiricism/new materialism, the human and nonhuman are completely entangled. As Barad (2007) explained, To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (p. ix) Further, the nonhuman is not considered passive, waiting to be acted upon by a human agent. The nonhuman is an actant (Latour, 1999), and matter has thing power (Bennett, 2010). “The world kicks back” (Barad, 1999, p. 2). In addition, this ontoepistemology does not avoid the ethical as did Descartes. Barad (2007) argued that it demands an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being—since each intra-action matters, since the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter. (p. 185) A sea change in how we think of ourselves and the world is evident now in the humanities and social sciences, not just in the new empiricisms/new materialisms, but also in affect theory (see Clough & Halley, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010), thing theory (see Brown, 2001), complexity theory (see Byrne, 1998; Waldrop, 1992), theories of disorder and disunity (see Dupré, 1993; Galison & Stump, 1996), and posthuman theory (see Braidotti, 2013). Following Deleuze, Braidotti (2013) wrote that “we need a vision of the subject that is ‘worthy of the present’ ” (p. 52). The Cartesian knowing subject, that master of the universe, has destroyed the planet, and we now live in the age of the Anthropocene, the new geologic period marked by clear evidence that human activities have damaged the earth beyond

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repair. Our thirst for knowledge, our science for science’s sake, our clever technologies—Science devoid of ethics—has produced despair and a longing for another way of being and living. It occurred to me one afternoon when I went to the movies to see the latest disaster film, that I am now living in a disaster movie. The end of the earth has become real. We have destroyed—in all our mastery projects— the body of our planet. With Braidotti, I believe we do, indeed, need a different subject who cannot think or live the mind/body binary. And yet, we continue to teach and do social science using that binary. We perpetuate Descartes’ mind/body distinction in our research methodologies and our projects. And, as Steinmetz (2005) noted, positivism is the “epistemological unconscious” of the social sciences. Some social science disciplines, such as economics, are “paradigms behind” (Patton, 2008) and cannot make the turn to interpretive or critical social science that other disciplines made 50 or 60 years ago, even though their elegant statistical models using big data failed and produced a devastating recession in 2008. Economists seemed surprised to learn that there is no such thing as a “rational consumer.” EMBODIMENT AND POST QUALITATIVE INQUIRY In the early 1990s, some of us studied poststructural theories and what I’ve called “conventional humanist qualitative methodology” (St. Pierre, 2011) at the same time. It became clear to us that the epistemologies and ontologies of these two bodies of knowledge were incommensurable, and we deconstructed concepts that organize that methodology’s structure: validity (Lather, 1993; Scheurich, 1993), the interview (Scheurich, 1995), ethnography (Britzman, 1995), data (St. Pierre, 1997), reflexivity (Pillow, 2003), and voice (Jackson, 2003). Our aim in that deconstructive work was to make qualitative methodology unintelligible to itself, to overturn the structure in which it could be thought so that we could think and live something different. But, not surprisingly, things had become too loose for some powerful educational researchers who influenced educational policy. (One of my colleagues recently asked, “Why are people still so afraid of postmodernism?”) Among others, Grover Whitehurst, the first director of the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences (2002–2008), was determined to tighten things up and make education a science. To that end, he championed that phenomenon I mentioned earlier, “scientifically based research,” which is grounded in positivist social science. In his last report to the U.S. Congress, Whitehurst (Institute of Education Sciences, 2008) finally revealed in print what his agenda for the IES had been: ESRA, in keeping with its title and its intent, provided a definition of scientific research that was to guide the work of IES and distinguish it from what had become the dominant forms of education research in the

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latter half of the 20th century: qualitative research grounded in postmodern philosophy and methodologically weak qualitative research. The historical trend in education research away from the canons of quantitative science has been multiply documented. (p. 5) Whitehurst’s goal of reintroducing positivism by controlling federal funding of educational research worked to some extent, and qualitative researchers soon learned there was almost no federal money for their projects. That odd duck, mixed methods, appeared so that researchers could “tack on” a small qualitative component to a positivist quantitative study, and we began to see positivist qualitative methodology as well. It was clear that whatever had loosened up was being tightened up. Of course, qualitative methodology had been invented in the 1980s (e.g., Erickson, 1986; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) as a critique of positivist social science, and its methods were taken from interpretive anthropology (e.g., Geertz, 1973). But even in its infancy, qualitative methodology, trying to make the interpretive and critical turns, retained the positivism that pervades the social sciences by adopting positivist concepts like validity, bias, inter-rater reliability, audit trails, triangulation, and systematicity. Some of us spent almost a decade resisting scientifically based research using many of the arguments mounted against positivism provided decades earlier by those who had invented qualitative methodology. One thing I learned during that decade of resistance was that “dialogue” cannot enable people to “talk across differences” when their epistemological and ontological commitments are incommensurable. Once one makes the interpretive or cultural or critical or poststructural turn, she can’t go back. I also learned how difficult it is to escape one’s training. When I returned to my own work and surveyed qualitative methodology after too many years of fighting positivism, I was disenchanted with what I found. In too many textbooks, handbooks, and journal articles, it had been reduced to a recipe, to technique, to low-level method. At that point, I began writing about “post qualitative methodology” (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011, 2013), which provides both a critique of conventional humanist qualitative inquiry and an opening for what might come next (e.g., inquiry that puts to work not only postmodernism but also the new empiricisms and new materialisms). My deep disappointment with a qualitative methodology that had early radical possibilities but has become increasingly positivist and methods-driven has forced me to conclude that it cannot accommodate either the postmodern or the ontological turn because, for one thing, it is grounded in a realist ontology. For example, even after social constructionism, we teach that data are out there somewhere and that we must “collect” them—that language indicates that data are separate from the human. More fundamentally, conventional humanist qualitative methodology is grounded in the human being of humanism, especially in the Cartesian knowing subject, the cogito.

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For that reason, I have begun to recommend that those who wish to do post qualitative inquiry try to forget the conventional humanist qualitative inquiry they were taught and leave it behind (St. Pierre, 2014). If they use even one concept from that structure (e.g., data, interview, validity), they bring all its interlocking concepts with it—all the concepts that organize the structure—and they’ll be unable to escape it. It’s very important to understand that qualitative methodology is not “real.” We invented it; we made it up. Surely, we can think something else that does not perpetuate all those binary oppositions introduced by Descartes and lauded by logical positivists. As I explained earlier, the ontological turn offers us new concepts for thinking and being differently, and scholars who are reading that literature are already putting it to work in their lives and their inquiry. But they do not begin with qualitative methodology. They begin with concepts. I hope my brief discussions of Descartes, logical positivism, the ontological turn, and post qualitative inquiry have helped explain my difficulty with the concept, embodiment. For me, it is, indeed, trouble, because it throws me right back into the mind/body distinction. As I explained at the beginning, I believe embodiment is thinkable only if one believes the body is absent and must be reintroduced. To begin in that Cartesian structure is fatal. I prefer to begin with the understanding that mind and body have never been distinct, separate; that the body can never be absent; that it is entangled with everything else in the world. Then we won’t need the concept embodiment. I suggest we begin with that idea and see where it takes us. This is the lure, the inquiry that beckons in post qualitative inquiry. REFERENCES Barad, K. (1999). Agential realism: Feminist interventions in understanding scientific practices. In Mario Biagioli (Ed.), The Science studies reader (pp. 1–11). New York: Routledge. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Britzman, D. P. (1995). “The question of belief”: Writing poststructural ethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(3), 229–238. Brown, B. (2001). Thing theory. Critical Inquiry, 28(1), 1–22. Byrne, D. (1998). Complexity theory and the social sciences: An introduction. London: Routledge. Clough, P. T. (2009). The new empiricism: Affect and sociological method. European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1): 43–61. Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) Descartes, R. (1993). Discourse on method and meditations on first philosophy (4th ed., D. A. Cress, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. (Discourse on Method first published 1637 and Meditations on First Philosophy first published 1641) Dewey, J. (1929). The quest for certainty: A study of the relation of knowledge and action. New York: Minto, Balch & Company. Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialisms: Interviews and cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Dupré, J. (1993). The disorder of things: Metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed., pp. 119–161). New York: Macmillan. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality Volume 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1976) Foucault, M. (1984). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 340–372). New York: Pantheon Books. (Interview conducted 1983) Galison, P., & Stump, D. J. (Eds.). (1996). The disunity of science: Boundaries, contexts, and power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haack, S. (2007). Defending science—within reason: Between scientism and cynicism (paperback edition with new preface). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Hawkesworth, M. E. (2014). Contending conceptions of science and politics. In D. Yanow & P. Schwartz-Shea (Eds.), Interpretation and method: Empirical research methods and the interpretive turn (2nd ed., pp. 27–49). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Institute of Education Sciences. U.S. Department of Education. (2008). Rigor and relevance redux: Director’s biennial report to congress (IES 2009–6010). Washington, DC: Author. Jackson, A. Y. (2003). Rhizovocality. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(5), 693–710. Lather, P. A. (1993). Fertile obsession: Validity after poststructuralism. Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 673–693. Lather, P. A., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Nast, H. (1998). “The body as ‘place’: reflexivity and fieldwork in Kano, Nigeria.” In H. Nast & S. Pile, S. (Eds.), Places through the body. London: Routledge. Patton, C. (2008). Finding “fields” in the field: Normalcy, risk, and ethnographic inquiry. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(2): 255–274. Pillow, W. S. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196.

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Rorty, R. M. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scheurich, J. J. (1993). The masks of validity: A deconstructive investigation. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 9(11), 49–60. Scheurich, J. J. (1995). A postmodernist critique of research interviewing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(3), 239–252. Snow, C. P. (1959). The two cultures and the scientific revolution. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Steinmetz, G. (2005). The epistemological unconscious of U.S. sociology and the transition to post-Fordism: The case of historical sociology. In J. Adams, E. S. Clemens, & A. S. Orloff (Eds.), Remaking modernity: Politics, history, sociology (pp. 109–157). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2), 175–189. St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative inquiry (4th ed., pp. 611–635). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. St. Pierre, E. A. (2012). Another postmodern report on knowledge: Positivism and its others. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 15(4), 483–503. St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). The posts continue: Becoming. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 646–657. St. Pierre, E. A. (2014, May). Practices for the “new” in the new empiricisms, the new materialisms, and post qualitative inquiry. Paper presented at the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, Champaign/Urbana, IL. van der Tuin, I. (2014). “Without an analytical divorce from the total environment”: Advancing a philosophy of the humanities by reading Snow and Whitehead diffractively. Humanities, 3, 244–263. Waldrop, M. M. (1992). Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Contributors

James Ash is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University. Trained as a geographer, his research is concerned with the relationship between technology, embodiment, and space. James has published work on video game design, technology, and affect and mobile media in a range of journals including, Theory, Culture and Society, Body & Society, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. He is also author of The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power, which will be published by Bloomsbury Press in 2015. Maria Asp is the Program Director and lead teaching artist for the Children’s Theatre Company’s Neighborhood Bridges program where she partners with area teachers to use storytelling and theatre to teach critical literacy to inner city public school students. As an actor, Maria has appeared in 22 productions At Frank Theatre. As a writer/performer/musician/singer, she most recently appeared in The Mother Project and the I’m Telling productions. She also plays and sings with the band The Baptism River Ramblers. Carol Brochin is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual/Multicultural Education in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include LGBTQ literature for youth, digital, and multimodal literacies, culturally relevant professional development, and bilingual teacher preparation. Prior to joining the UA, she was an Assistant Professor of Literacy and English Education at the University of Texas at El Paso where she also directed the West Texas Writing Project (2012–2014). She received her Ph.D. (2010) in Culture, Literacy, and Language from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Candance Doerr-Stevens is Assistant Professor of reading at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where she teaches courses on digital and disciplinary literacies. Her research focuses on the emergent literacy practices of digital media composition, in particular the rhetorical affordances and identity work of sound composition, digital storytelling, and documentary filmmaking.

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Lesley Anne Gallacher is a Senior Lecturer in Youth and Childhood studies at Northumbria University. Her background is in cultural and children’s geographies. She has published on the sociomaterial organization of young children’s spaces, youth and media cultures, and methodological issues surrounding embodiment in a range of journals, such as Cultural Geographies and Childhood. Debra Ingram, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement. She has designed and directed a wide variety of large-scale, multiyear research and evaluation studies focused on reforming K–16 education and closing the achievement gap, such as arts-integrated instruction, technology integration, and the link between professional development and student achievement. Stephanie Jones is a Professor at the University of Georgia in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice where she teaches courses on ethnography and place-based teaching, feminist theory and pedagogy, social class and poverty, early childhood education, and literacy. Her print-based scholarship on the intersections of literacy, social class, gender, and pedagogy has been published in journals such as Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Educational Researcher, Gender and Education, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Journal of Teacher Education, Language Arts, Reading Research Quarterly, and Teaching Education. Pieces from her four-year collaborative graphica project with James F. Woglom have been published in Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Kappan as well as in an edited volume on justice-oriented teacher education. Stephanie is the author of Girls, Social Class and Literacy: What Teachers Can Do to Make a Difference, coauthor of The Reading Turn-Around: A Five-Part Framework for Differentiated Instruction, and editor of Writing and Teaching to Change the World: Connecting With Our Most Vulnerable Students. Cynthia Lewis is Professor and Chair of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota where she holds the Emma M. Birkmaier Professorship in Educational Leadership. Her current research examines the role of emotion in urban classrooms focused on critical media analysis and production. She has published widely on the intersection of social identities and literacy practices in and out of school and is coeditor of the Routlege book series Expanding Literacies in Education. Carmen Liliana Medina is an Associate Professor in Literacy Culture and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on literacy and biliteracy as social, critical, and performative practices. She is coauthor with Dr. Karen Wohlwend of the book Literacy, Play

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and Globalization: Converging Imaginaries in Children’s Critical and Cultural Performances (Routledge, 2014). She has published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Language Arts, Journal of Teacher Education, Research in Drama in Education, and Youth Theatre Journal. Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brandon University, Canada. Her research and teaching focus on the education of linguistically and culturally diverse students, language and literacy education, multiliteracies, multimodality, multilingualism, applied drama/theatre, and the use of collaborative, participatory, and digital methodologies in research. Mia Perry is the Research Director for the eclFoundation. Her work is positioned in the intersections of performance, philosophy, and pedagogy. Mia’s background ranges from community theatre in rural Ireland to training and scholarship in Dublin, Moscow, London, and Vancouver, and theatre practice, teaching, and research in varied contexts in Ireland, Canada, and Scotland. Previous to her current position, Mia was an Assistant Professor in applied theatre and arts education at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. She has published widely in academic journals, such as Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and Qualitative Research. Jane Turner is a Principal Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Eugenio Barba published by Routledge in their series on performance practitioners. She continues to be involved in research that engages with aspects of theatre anthropology, Balinese theatre, embodiment, as well as contemporary UK-based theatre. James F. Woglom is a multimedia artist and educator. He works as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Cochair of the art education department at the University of Georgia, where he recently received a Ph.D. His work has appeared on the cover of New South, in Unsplendid, The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, The Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Teacher’s College Record, Harvard Education Review, Haiku Journal, and Hot Metal Bridge, and in an anthology by Stylus Press.

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Index

Abrahamsson, S. 77 Ahmed, Sara 90 Alit, Ida Bagus 64, 67n5 alterations in balance 54 Alvarez, Julia: Before We Were Free 102, 104–13; Before We Were Free: analysis of embodiment 107–13; Finding Miracles 106; In the Time of the Butterflies 106–7 Anzaldúa, Gloria 102, 103 Ash, James: “Becoming Attuned” 69–85 Atkinson, P. 80 Asp, Maria: “Making the Body Visible through Dramatic and Creative Play” 28–52 ATLAS.ti 91–2, 98, 99n3 attunement 69–85; definition 70–6; tone 79–83; vibration 76–9 audience priming 44–5 authentic embodiment 55, 57, 65 axiological considerations 60–1 Bali 10, 53, 58–9, 60, 62, 63–6, 67n6–7 Balinese cosmology 63, 67n7 Balinese Topeng Pajagen 10, 58, 59, 61–3, 65, 66, 67n5 Baraitser, Lisa 82 Barba, Eugenio 10, 54–5; A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology 59 Baudrillard, J. 65 Brochin, Carol: “Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodologies of Embodiment” 102–15 Butler, Judith 6, 57, 89, 90 Calderón, D. 103 Campano, G. 98

Cavell, S. 70, 71, 74 chiasmatic body 55 Chicana Feminist Thought 114 Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodologies of Embodiment 102–15; analysis of embodiment in Before We Were Free 107–13; see also Alvarez, Julia Clifford, James 61 commensurability 54, 56–7, 60, 63, 64 consensus and dissensus in classroom 18–25; improvisation 20–3; performing 20–3; preparing/ establishing the scene 19–20; regaining common ground 23–5; spectatorship 23–5 critical literacy in Neighborhood Bridges 28–52; data collection and analysis 32–5; embodied 35–49; Neighborhood Bridges description 29–31; theoretical frameworks 31–2 Crowther, P. 57, 58, 61, 66 Cruz, Cindy 103–4 Csordas, T. S. 64 Dalem, 62 dance 57, 65, 66, 67n6; see also Topeng Pajagen Davies, B. 102, 110 Delgado Bernal, D. 103, 104 Descartes, René 139–40 devised theatre 17–18 digital technologies 88 disenchanted bodies 57–9 disenchantment of Western performance training and an embodied experience 53–68; commensurability 56–7; disenchanted bodies 57–9; embodying

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practice 1: an embodied perspective 59–60; embodying practice 2: axiological considerations 60–1; embodying practice 3: unruliness as a methodology 61–3; embodying practice 4: embodiment and spiritual belief 63–5; theatre anthropology and non-Western embodied practices 54–6; viral bodies 53–4 Doerr-Stevens, Candance: “Making the Body Visible through Dramatic and Creative Play” 28–52 drama and embodied multimodality 88–91

Halliday, Michael: Language as Social Semiotic 87 Hammersley, M. 80 Hashtrup, Kirsten 54, 57 Heath, Shirley Bryce: Ways with Words 87 Heidegger, M. 70, 71, 72, 74 Hodge, R. 87

Easton, A. 107 Eiseman, F. B. 67 Elenes, C. A. 103, 104 embodied critical literacy 35–49; facilitation 41–7; narration tools 37–41 embodied intersectionality theory 91, 99n2 embodied multimodality framework 86–101; drama 88–91; Drama-ESL classroom 92–6; methodological framework 91–6; theoretical 86–8 embodied performance in social, public, and pedagogical spaces 5–11 embodied perspective 59–60 embodiment and spiritual belief 63–5 emergence 15 enactive acting 55 establishing/preparing the scene 19–20 extra-daily activity 54, 55

Jewitt, Carey 87, 88 Johnson, M. 64, 67 Jones, Stephanie: “Behind the BodyFilled Scenes” 116–37

facilitation of embodied critical literacy 41–7; audience priming 44–5; pre- and post-scene direction 44; retake 45–7; role-play 41–4 Fischer, M. M. 60 Franks, Anton 89 Gallacher, Lesley Anne: “Becoming Attuned” 69–85 Gallagher, Kathleen: “Foreword” xiii–xvi Gane, N. 65, 66 Giroux, H. A. 98 Godinez, F. E. 104 graphica 116–37 Grosz, Elizabeth 14, 90

improvisation 20–3 incoherent coherence 54 Ingram, Deb: “Making the Body Visible through Dramatic and Creative Play” 28–52 Irigaray, Luce 90

Kress, Gunther: Multimodal Discourse 87 Lankshear, C. 30 Leder, Drew: The Absent Body 56 Lewis, Cynthia: “Making the Body Visible through Dramatic and Creative Play” 28–52 Lingis, Alphonzo 57; Foreign Bodies 56; postural schema 63 Lyotard, J-F. 65 Mahmood, Sabu 57 Malagón, M. 103 Manning, Erin 70, 72–3, 74, 77, 79, 70; Always More Than One 69 Marcus, G. E. 60 Marks, L. 77, 85 McCallum, S. 106 McCracken, E. 105 McLaren, P. 30, 98 Medina, Carmen Liliana 98; “Chicana/ Latina Feminist Methodologies of Embodiment” 102–15; “Introduction” 1–13 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 88, 89, 92; The Primacy of Perception 90 methodological framework and embodied multimodality 91–6; Drama-ESL classroom 92–6 Mirza, H. S. 90 mood 39–40, 71, 72, 74, 80, 81

Index narration tools 37–41, 47–9; animated staging 39; body 39–41; purposeful enunciation 38–9; repurposing space and objects 37–8 Nast, H. 74 Neighborhood Bridges 28–52; critical literacy 30–1; data collection and analysis 32–5; description 29–31; theoretical frameworks 31–2 New Literacy Studies 86–7 Niskala 63, 65, 67n7 non-Western embodied practices 54–6 Ntelioglou, Burcu Yaman: “Embodied Multimodality Framework” 86–101 O’Loughlin, M. 32, 98 ontological gap and the ontological turn 142–4 Parisi, L. 76–7 Patridge, C. 57, 58 Pavis, P. 60 Pérez Huber, L. 103 Perry, Mia: “Devising in the Rhizome” 14–27; “Introduction” 1–13 Peters, M. 98 posthumanism 3, 10, 69, 143 positivism 140–2 post-qualitative inquiry 144–6 poststructuralism 3, 7, 10, 14, 15, 69, 90, 144, 145 pre- and post-scene direction 44 preparing/establishing the scene 19–20 Puleo, G. 106–7 Radcliffe, 70, 71 rationalism 57, 58, 60, 65, 66 re-enchantment 58, 60, 65, 66, 67n9 retake 45–7 Rickert, T. 73 Riley, S. R. 89, 90 role-play 41–4 Rubin, L. 62 Sandoval, Chela 90 sats 55 Savarese, N.: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology 59 Schneider, Mark A. 67n9 Sedana, I. N. 62 Sekala 63, 65, 67n7

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sensational body in research in applied arts 14–27; consensus and dissensus in classroom 18–25; devised theatre 17–18; examples of analysis 18–25; methodological framework 15–18 Simpson, P. 77 spectatorship 23–5 spiritual belief and embodiment 63–5 Spivak, Gayatri 90 Stern, D. N. 72 St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams: “Afterword” 138–48 Street, Brian 86–7; Literacy in Theory and Practice 87 Taksu 62, 65; Dewa 63; Sang Hyang 63 testimonios 103, 105, 106, 111 theatre anthropology and non-Western embodied practices 2, 53, 54–6 tone 79–83 Topeng Pajagen 10, 58, 59, 61–3, 65, 66, 67n5 troubles with embodiment 138–46; Descartes 139–40; ontological gap and the ontological turn 142–4; positivism 140–2; post-qualitative inquiry 144–6 Tua 62 Turner, Jane: “The Disenchantment of Western Performance Training, and the Search for an Embodied Experience” 53–68 unruliness as a methodology 61–3 Van Leeuwen, Theo: Multimodal Discourse 87 Vélez, V. 103 vibration 76–9 Villenas, S. 104 viral bodies 53–4 Weber, M. 57–8, 66 Western performance training 53–68 Whitehead, Alfred 76 Wibawa 62, 65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 71, 72 Woglom, James F.: “Behind the Body-Filled Scenes” 116–37 Zarilli, Phillip 10, 54–6, 89; A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology 59