The Body, the Great Forgotten? Exploring Embodied Epistemologies

29-31 mai 2025

Andrea Mathez, Unil

Soufiane Guerraoui, Théâtre de Compiègne

Leila Chakroun, independent researcher

Lise Landrin, University of Bern

 « Le corps n'est ni une chose ni une somme d'organes, mais un réseau de liens, ouvert au monde et aux autres. Le monde est le lieu où se nouent la corporéité et l'altérité. » Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The way we inhabit our bodies influences our thinking.” Claire Marine

The persistent myth of a disembodied independent analytical mind is increasingly challenged in anthropology and geography research. Yu-Fu Tuan (1977) discussed already forty years ago how emotions tint all human experience, including high flights of thought. Csordas (1990) reflects on how embodiment challenges some of the dualities (mind-body, self-other, cognition-emotion, subjectivity-objectivity) that underlie much of anthropological thought. Kleinman and Copp (1993) criticise how emotions are considered as suspect in fieldwork, contaminating research by impeding objectivity and therefore to be removed. Davies and Spencer (2010) looking at the psychology and anthropology of fieldwork experience, explore how methods do not purify subjectivity, but mould subjectivity not into patterns that efface all emotion but into ones that produce emotions of a different order. They criticise the attitudes prone to privilege learning as a purely cognitive process in social research. Yet, they advance no practical tools to reverse these attitudes. Moreover, the feminist scholar Ahmed (2014) discusses the cultural politics of emotions and bodies. The Political Ecology Conference in 2022, Emotional Political Ecologies - Methods, Insights and Potential, explored how embodied research accounts can open up new possibilities, whether for imagining new types of ‘human-non-human’ relationships or for theorising power and resistance more deeply.

After years of neglecting the body in research, a shift has been beginning to take place that recognises the centrality of our bodies, emotions and sensations as researchers. Yet, while there are some tools (cf. Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers), there is a scarcity of time to think and experiment with what this really means. Rather than approaching the body-mind connection once again on a purely intellectual level and with a purely cognitive learning process, this module proposes an immersive, participatory and experimental approach combining physical and intellectual exploration.

In this workshop, participants will be led to explore different dimensions of their bodies (movement, senses and sensations, emotions, speech and silence, play and interaction) through an introduction into improvisation and body theatre techniques. This exploration aims to: i) (re)discover the simplicity and power of a conscious body in the formulation of thought, creation of ideas and in the understanding and interaction with one’s environment and to ii) provide and experiment with tools to accompany the theoretical inquiry.

Furthermore, through different reflexive and theoretical moments participants will be guided in the inquiry of what it means to be an “embodied researcher” for our epistemologies. Namely through collective reading cercles, discussions, theoretical inputs on the politics and emotions of bodies and the heuristic interactions of mind and body in research.

Participants in this workshop will be asked in advance:

1) To send us a reading which inspired you in (re)thinking:

• the politics and emotions of bodies or

• the heuristic interactions of mind and body in their research

and to choose a section no longer than 2 pages which we will integrate into a collective reading booklet.

2) To prepare a text answering one or several of these questions with regard to how you account for your body in note taking, data collection, analysis and writing up:

• What do you do with the information you sense through your body in note taking, data collection, analysis and writing up?

• What bodily impressions helped you to understand your research/field? And how do you account for them in the writing process?

• How did your emotions play a part in the data collection and analysis of your research? And how do you account for them in the writing process?

• What feelings do you accept or not/where do you ‘self-police’ yourself according to what you consider the correct feelings/correct relations with your ‘research participants’? And what does this reveal about yourself and your research context?

• How is your body affected in the field (i.e., other diet, other physical activity, temperature and landscapes) and what does this mean for your research?

• When do you feel betrayed by your body during the research process/ethnographic fieldwork?

è You do not need to have a solution to these questions, you may also write about your difficulties in dealing with the issues these questions raise…

Hof zur Kirschblüte, Lüsslingen (Solothurn)

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