The Body, the Great Forgotten? Exploring Embodied Epistemologies

29-31 mai 2025

Mme Andrea Mathez, UNIL

M. Soufiane Guerraoui, Théâtre de Compiègne Mme Leila Chakroun, UN

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. 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 epistemo

Hof zur Kirschblüte, Lüsslingen (Solothurn)