Introduction

This volume considers embodiment and embodied learning in relationship to pedagogical and decolonization theories and practices. Writing from a variety of experiential standpoints, the contributors participate in an ongoing critique of Western liberal education and colonialism by investigating how to develop and use embodied and decolonizing ways of learning and teaching. Contemporary theories of embodiment and embodied learning foreground the relationship between sentient and social lived experience—how we experience ourselves and the world around us in terms of material and discursive aspects of mind-body-spirit and social relations of power. Attention to the material aspects of pedagogy and decolonization coincides with a key concern in embodiment scholarship: that is, the importance of addressing more than solely discursive approaches to experience and knowledge production. Just as knowing and learning involves more than cognitive thinking (Ng 2012), and decolonization requires more than theorizing (Tuck and Yang 2012), the contributors to this collection address the symbiotic relationship between discursive-material and sentient-social observation, meaning making, and action.

Among social and cultural theorists, the body has been a topic of interest for several decades, a trend somewhat inaugurated in the West by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977). The first edition of Bryan Turner’s The Body and Society appeared in 1984, and the following decade saw the publication of studies such as Drew Leder’s The Absent Body (1990), Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight, Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, and Chris Shilling’s The Body and Social Theory (all three published in 1993), and Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies (1994). Writing in the preface to the second edition of The Body and Social Theory, Shilling (2003, viii) was able to declare that “the body has moved to the very centre of academic analysis,” serving as “an important stimulus for interdisciplinary work.”

While, in keeping with their interdisciplinary character, academic investigations of embodiment spanned a wide array of perspectives. However, the emphasis in these studies tended to fall on the body as signifier—on the social construction of the body through discourse and the representation of the body in word and image. Attention was also given to the body as an object capable of manipulation, whether through medical procedures and other technological interventions or as a vehicle for the expression of a particular self-identity. Visible in at least some of this scholarship, however, was an emerging focus on embodiment itself—on our experience of our bodies and the ways in which that experience influences our relationship to the surrounding world. Examples include Simon Williams and Gillian Bendelow’s The Lived Body (1998), and John Tambornino’s The Corporeal Turn (2002), as well as collections edited by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1992) and by Thomas Csordas (1994). All the same, the dominant influence of the discursive turn prompted Karen Barad to complain, in 2003, that “language has been granted too much power”—that even materiality itself had been transformed into “a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation” (2003, 801).

The purpose of this volume is to address embodiment and embodied learning as an important counter-hegemonic aspect of critical pedagogical and decolonization theory and practice. Authors in this collection ask: How are lived experiences shaped by social relations of power? Studies of embodiment address many of the same social and cultural issues raised in poststructural and postmodern theorizing. However, this collection also challenges the ways in which the sentient, material body was, for the most part, dismissed in the linguistic turn. At the same time, this collection questions theories of embodied learning, such as those grounded in the concept of transformative learning or in holistic approaches to education, as sometimes ambiguous when it comes to examining both socially constructed and materially embodied experience in terms of power relations. Even as they write the body back into learning, such theories are apt to write out the social and political forces that impinge both on individual perception and on the ideological frameworks that at once structure and are reinforced by normative approaches to education.

The contributors to the collection understand embodied learning as a process of becoming attuned to sentient-social experience—that is, of learning to be aware of, and responsive to, our lived experience as jointly constituted through sentient and social relations. In so doing, they theorize bodies as knowledgeable in ways that are not solely cognitive, and furthermore, how cognition itself is affected by other aspects of perception. While recognizing the value of discursive analyses that question existing power constellations and encourage the inculcating of critical consciousness among students, the essays in this collection also point to the profound divisions that such analytic approaches can reproduce: the separation of the mind-intellect from the body-spirit, as well as the isolation of discourse from material realities. In other words, this collection addresses the body-mind-spirit in pedagogical and decolonization projects from critical discursive and materialist perspectives.

Inevitably, of course, this volume is a contribution to discourse. Although the essays in it challenge conventional understandings of knowledge construction and emphasize practice, the book itself is a printed text and is thus limited to describing material contexts and actions. With respect to decolonization, this limitation must be acknowledged. Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012) caution against the substitution of abstract, discursive readings of the term decolonization for its concrete meaning: the repatriation of land and life. In acknowledging the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations we identify the Indigenous and settler relationship in territories, now called Toronto, in which we write, work, and live our lives.1 This recognition of land theft, while important, is discursive and thus remains limited. Indeed, our determination, as non-Indigenous inhabitants of the northern part of Turtle Island, to respect treaty relationships and acknowledge settler responsibility for the historical appropriation of Indigenous land is inescapably compromised, given that, in Canada, land can evidently be stolen and not returned provided you admit to wrongdoing, say you’re sorry, speak solemnly about the need for reconciliation, and continue to make promises that, in fact, have never materialized. Settlers are, as Christi Belcourt (2013) aptly puts it, in a stolen truck that has yet to be returned, with damages paid.

As a discursive move, the acknowledgement of the historical and legal relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples may hold the potential for material effects. Yet material inequities are obviously not remedied by discourse alone. Acknowledging Indigenous territory is a beginning, not an end. Nor, of course, is it possible for a book to do the material work of decolonization. The contributors to this collection respond to the reality of colonialism in a variety of specific ways, but all use their gifts as researchers and writers in an attempt to resist and disrupt what Tuck and Wang (2012, 9) identify as “settler moves to innocence” and what Sherene Razack (2015, 210) calls the “fantasy of settler civility.” To the extent that dominant educational frameworks are complicit in settler colonialism, they, too, demand disruption.

In summary, this volume pursues embodied and decolonizing ways of teaching, learning and knowing in academic contexts. It presents challenges to Western educational frameworks and colonialism from within and beyond academic settings by way of addressing the symbiotic relationship between the discursive and material; investigating embodiment and embodied learning as a practice of sentient-social attunement; and highlighting embodiment and embodied learning in pedagogical and decolonization processes. What sets this collection apart from the bulk of embodiment scholarship is that embodiment and embodied learning are addressed with attention to decolonization, discursive and material social relations of power, and lived experiences of mind, body and spirit.

Embodied Learning: The Work of Roxana Ng

Over the past several decades, Canadian scholars working from feminist antiracist and Indigenous feminist perspectives have made important contributions to research on embodiment, not only in relation to the representation of the body but also from the standpoint of lived experience and social relations of power. The work of these scholars—published, for example, in collections edited by Himani Bannerji (1993) and by Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson (1999), as well as, more recently, in States of Race (Razack, Smith, and Thobani 2010)—collectively constitutes a critical intervention into universalist assumptions and liberal individualist frameworks, one that has exposed dominant and subordinate social positioning, population surveillance and regulation, and the history of Canada as a colonial settler state engaged in a white supremacist project of nation building. One of the early contributors in this critical undertaking was the late Roxana Ng, whose work has been a central source of inspiration for the present collection.

A forerunner in antiracist feminist scholarship and activism in the 1980s and 1990s, Ng is recognized for her early work on immigrant women and on the sexism and racism embedded in the Canadian state (see Ng 1988, 1990, 1992, 1993a, 1993b; Ng and Estable 1987; Ng and Ramirez 1981; Ng, Walker, and Muller 1990). But Ng was also among the first to develop an embodied pedagogy that aims to disrupt the Eurocentric ontological and epistemological assumptions that undergird knowledge construction in the academy (see Ng 1993c, 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2004, 2005, 2011; Ng, Staton, and Scane 1995). Ng began this work in the early 1990s, at a time when relatively few scholars explicitly linked embodied or holistic teaching and learning to issues of inequity and colonization.

Ng was the first woman of colour hired to the faculty at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE), where she began teaching in 1988. As she later recalled, once she arrived at OISE, she became “the lightning rod for everything having to do with the politics of racism, anti-racism, sexism and feminism in the institution,” owing in part to her innovative approaches in the classroom. “What was most painful,” she observed, “was that the attacks did not only come from the conservative elements of the institution, but from faculty and students who claimed to be feminist and anti-racist.” In reflecting on her academic life, while also dealing with illness, Ng went through a period of contemplation that led her to ask: “How is it that the oppressor and oppressed co-participate in the acts of oppression?” She became, she said, “acutely aware of the inadequacy of feminism and anti-racism, in fact any kind of progressive, ideology and politic, that takes up issues only intellectually without attention to emotion, body and spirit” (2004, 2). This insight led her to explore new ways to integrate embodied experience into her pedagogical practice.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ng “(re)discovered” traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and qigong. In the British colony of Hong Kong, where she grew up, TCM and qigong were known as “folk medicine” and, similar to other colonized territories, Western medicine held a privileged status over Indigenous healing systems. Practicing TCM and qigong significantly improved her health, and she became increasingly conscious of “the colonizing effects of Eurocentric, male-stream thoughts,” as well as the extent to which these thoughts had contributed to the bifurcation of her own consciousness (2000a, 178). “Studying TCM,” she wrote, “made me more fully appreciate the disembodiment of scientific knowledge and how feminist and postcolonial scholarship participate in the privileging of the mind over the body. TCM’s philosophy of the unity of mind and body allowed me to explore ways of re-embodying the knower as subject in scholarly pursuit” (179). Ng’s experiences with TCM and qigong marked the beginning of her work on embodied pedagogy and decolonization.

Ng became interested in how we know and make sense of the world. Like other embodiment scholars trained in historical materialism, she began to integrate her understanding of the material world with a focus on embodied experience and on how our interpretation of the knowledge that comes to us through our bodies shapes our actions—our way of being in the world. With respect to the practice of teaching, she commented:

My major interest is to disrupt the body/mind binary and to explore what a pedagogy of integrating body-spirit in critical education may look like and what it may be capable of in interrogating and challenging dominant forms of knowledge, including critical knowledges. I want to encourage self and collective reflections, not only through discourse, but more crucially through an exploration of how experience, in this case, bodily experience, participates in enabling, limiting, and mediating the production of knowledge—what I call the inside-out approach. (1998, 3)

Ng thus positioned the body at the forefront of knowledge construction—and, she centred this in her investigation of decolonization.

In seeking to integrate the body into learning, Ng was concerned in part with the way in which oppression is housed in our bodies. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon (1967) draws our attention to territorial and political colonization as well as the colonization of our psyches. To this, Ng insists on the place of the body in processes of colonization and decolonization. As she observes in “Decolonizing Teaching and Learning Through Embodied Learning” (reprinted as chapter 1 in this volume), “relationships of power are never enacted merely in the form of intellectual encounters”: they also have embodied consequences. “Most intellectual encounters,” she writes, “entail a confrontation of bodies, which are differently inscribed. Power plays are both enacted and absorbed by people physically, as they assert or challenge authority, and the marks of such confrontations are stored in the body” (2011, 346). As she had earlier put it, “although we have learned to think critically, dominant ways of being are so normalized that we are ‘programmed’ to act in ways that reproduce and sustain oppression” (2004, 3). Though there had been attempts to bring the body in social theory and cultural theory, most of the writings focus on how the body is represented and what is being done to the body in postmodernity, which Ng called the “outside-in approach” (Ng 1998). Rather than limit her investigation to discourse, Ng urged us to dive into the visceral experience of our bodies as a source of knowing. This approach can be threatening not only to the colonizer but also to the colonized. The internal legacies of colonization—the histories of pain and oppression, as well as the guilt-ridden memories of the perpetration of injustice—have been stored up in the body, and the process of recovering and releasing them can be overwhelming and can often take a tremendous toll despite the potential benefits of remedy and repair.

In insisting on moving from the inside out, Ng also reclaimed a system of knowledge from her own cultural roots—TCM, as well as the related physical and meditative practice of qigong—the epistemological and ontological foundations of which differ from those of the Eurocentric world view. She brought this system of knowledge from the margins to the academy, placing it at the centre of her teaching on embodied learning, health, and healing. In so doing, she issued a fundamental challenge to the Eurocentric construction of knowledge so integral to the Western academy. Similar to other contributors to this collection, who draw from knowledge systems that not only contrast with Western knowledges but contest their hegemonic dominance, Ng asserted the integrity, coherence, and validity of TCM and qigong, while at the same time acknowledging their imbrication in relationships of power in periods prior to colonization, as well as exploring the impact of colonialism on these knowledges and their practice. Ng did not privilege TCM and qigong over other systems of knowledge. For her, the decision to position them at the centre of her pedagogy was based on teaching what she knew. In addition, her focus on a unified system of knowledge, such as TCM, was a declaration of resistance to a “boutique approach” (Ng 2000, 177) that can be found in much New Age knowledge production that aims to conflate non-Western knowledges in the pursuit of commercialization, enabled through cultural appropriations of traditional and Indigenous knowledges.

Embodiment Scholarship

As Lisa Blackman (2008, 8) points out, the challenge of “thinking through the body” is inevitably concerned with the problem of separation—not only that between mind and body but also with a host of related dualisms. People who are marginalized and oppressed have sometimes reacted to their objectification and inferiorization by deconstructing discourses that relegate them to the “body” side of the mind/body divide, together with its various permutations such as rational/irrational, modern/primitive, cultural/natural, and social/biological. However, while the “relocation of the body to the culture side of the nature/culture dualism” (Bordo 1993, 34) has produced important disruptions of sexist and racist discourse, it has also served to denature the body, placing the material, lived body on the subordinate side of another divide, that between discourse and matter. In their introduction to Material Feminisms, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008a, 6) rightly call attention to the need for “a new way of understanding the relationship between discourse and matter that does not privilege the former to the exclusion of the latter.”

This challenge echoes one of the key concerns in Roxana Ng’s work, namely, how the socially constructed body—the body as constituted through discourse, or what Ng called the “outside-in” view of the body—intertwines with an “inside-out” experience of our bodies as more than merely a creation of discourse. Foregrounding the material body does not imply that concerns surrounding the body as discursive construct have been dismissed. Rather, as do the contributors to this collection, relatively recent work on embodiment (see, for example, the essays in Alaimo and Hekman 2008b; Alexander and Knowles 2005; and Shilling 2007) integrates the two perspectives, seeking to demonstrate how sentient experience and social relations are inextricably bound up with each other, as well as in the complexities of knowledge production.

In relation to pedagogy, embodiment has been a topic of interest not only among educators but also in social work and Indigenous studies—fields that share a concern with concrete action, be it counselling, community building, or political activism. In the field of education, collections edited by John Jack Miller and Yoshiharu Nakagawa (2002) and by John P. Miller (2005) challenge mind-body dualisms through pedagogical approaches termed transformative learning and holistic learning, while Roxana Ng’s work on embodied learning challenged the field to address both socially constructed and materially embodied experiences in terms of power relations. In social work, Narda Razack (2002) and many others (Gates 2011; Mensinga 2011; Peile 1998; Tangenberg and Kemp 2002; Wong 2004, 2013, 2014) examine how classroom teaching and experiential learning are embodied and mediated through race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. In Indigenous studies, numerous scholars (see, for example, Battiste 2000; Battiste and Henderson 2000; Dei, Hall, and Rosenberg 2000; Graveline 1998; Lattas 1993; Monture-Angus 1995, 1999; Oyĕwùmí 1997; Sunseri 2011; Simpson 2011) have critiqued the fracturing of knowledge that results from Western dualisms, which mistakenly assign science, spirituality, medicine, the natural environment, animal life, storytelling, social relationships, and so on to separate compartments. For these scholars, and others, embodiment is necessarily both discursive and material: the two are inextricable.

Especially among feminist scholars, many writing from a critical antiracist standpoint, embodiment has similarly been understood as a phenomenon co-constituted through physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social experience. Some have focused attention on bodies as the site of both physical health and emotional and spiritual well-being (see, for example, Davis 2007; Dua et al. 1994; Harding 2005; White 1994). Some, such as Jacqui Alexander (2005), Ruth Frankenberg (2004), and Traci West (1999), explicitly stress the transformative potential of spirituality and the sacred. Yet others have worked to develop anti-oppressive pedagogies that seek to heal the mind-body split by incorporating soul and emotion into education (see hooks 1993; Nadeau and Young 2006; Ng 2000a, 2000b, 2005, 2011; Orr 2002, 2005; Piran 2001; Rice and Russell 1995a, 1995b). And yet the study of embodiment still hovers on the margins of mainstream academic knowledge production, including critical scholarship.

This tendency to hold embodiment scholarship at arm’s length is itself reflective of Eurocentric bias. In the West, the “rational turn” (commonly known as the Enlightenment) entailed the rejection of spiritual knowledge and practice. As Jacqui Alexander (2005, 15) observes, “There is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with a category such as the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition.” Our system of education teaches us to hold those who talk in terms of spirituality in pity if not explicit disdain, while inculcating what Susan Bordo (1993, 40) described as “masculinist, Eurocentric norms of ‘professional’ behavior and accomplishment.” Rather than recoil from spirituality, however, we could instead, as Alexander (2005, 15) suggests, “engage the Sacred as an ever-changing yet permanent condition of the universe, and not as an embarrassingly unfortunate by-product of tradition in which women are disproportionately caught.”

Clearly, focusing our attention on embodiment does not necessarily imply a conversion to some form of spiritual belief, nor do embodied approaches to learning seek to encourage narcissistic self-absorption, of the sort often associated with New Age spirituality. Rather, the focus falls on the knowledge gained through critical reflection on our experience of embodiment, in an effort to understand how our perceptions and the meanings we attach to them reflect the position we occupy within social relations of power. Meditative practices, of the sort found in many spiritual traditions, broaden our range of perceptions, opening us up to what might be called an epistemology of the body—that is, to sources of information that are not mediated exclusively by our intellect. In this way, embodied approaches to learning offer “a means for knowledge construction that does not negate the materiality of our being” (Ng 2000a, 186–87). When our intellect operates within a Eurocentric positivist paradigm, it will instruct us to reject perceptions that cannot be aligned with rational frameworks of explanation. Yet, in repudiating portions of our experience as essentially irrelevant to knowledge, we cooperate in perpetuating dominant configurations of power.

Bodies are not ahistorical. Immersion in sentient experience grounds our consciousness in a specific time and place, serving to remind us that “thought processes are inevitably historically and spatially specific” and hence open to change (Ng 2011, 354). As Ann Mathew and her colleagues (2008, 61) observe, “there is an intimate and necessary relationship between individual change and social change. . . . Without self-reflection and self-interrogation, we run the risk of reproducing conditioned patterns of behaviour and social arrangements.” Embodied approaches to learning necessitate engagement with the material foundations of our experience and encourage us to engage critically with our own consciousness—to examine our perceptions and our reactions to them and thus begin to unsettle responses conditioned by colonial frameworks.

Embodiment and Decolonization

In 2005, in an article titled “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua offered a compelling critique of antiracist and postcolonial theory for its tendency either to ignore the continuing colonization of Indigenous peoples in North America entirely or else to situate Indigenous struggles for decolonization within a liberal-pluralist framework, as one social justice pursuit among many. But, as Lawrence and Dua recognize, fundamental to decolonization is the restoration of sovereignty and territory. “To speak of Indigenous nationhood,” they write, “is to speak of land as Indigenous, in ways that are neither rhetorical nor metaphorical” (2005, 124). By failing to confront the ongoing occupation of land and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty, they argue, antiracist and postcolonial theorizing participates in the perpetuation of colonial power.

In the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its ninety-four calls to action (2015), such critiques might too easily be dismissed as no longer relevant. Much like Duncan Campbell Scott, nearly a century ago, settler Canadians would like to be “rid of the Indian problem,” and one senses the hope that, at long last, adequate reparations have been made.2 But the decolonization struggles of Indigenous people in Canada require more than a discursive admission that the country’s continued complicity in colonialism is the primary source of political, social, economic and cultural injustice. As Lawrence and Dua (2005, 123) point out, settler states are “founded on, and maintained through, policies of direct extermination, displacement, or assimilation.” For several centuries now, the oppression of Indigenous peoples has remained central to relations of power in Canada, including racial, religious, gender and sexual hierarchies. While this fact is now more widely acknowledged than it once was, calling for action is not equivalent to taking action.

In the words of Chandra Mohanty (2003, 7), decolonization is “a historical and collective process” that “involves profound transformations of self, community, and governance structures” and “can only be engaged through active withdrawal of consent and resistance to structures of psychic and social domination.” Decolonization seeks the final eradication of colonial power—the overthrow of relations of power understood to be “not simply foreign or alien, but rather as imposed and dominating” (Dei and Asgharzadeh 2001, 300). Although decolonization is an explicitly anti-imperial and anticolonial project (Duara 2004, 2), it is not purely oppositional. Decolonization includes revitalization, resurgence, creativity, and Indigenous knowledge production that together decentre colonialism as a determining and all-encompassing force (Simpson 2011; Sunseri 2011).

In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012) take aim at the recent trend, especially within the discourse of education, toward the appropriation of the term decolonization to refer to any struggle against oppression. This discursive theft, they argue—this “too-easy adoption of decolonizing discourse” (3)—effaces the material truth of colonization, namely, the ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples and the refusal to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty. As they explain, the transformation of decolonization into a metaphor, as “an approximation of other experiences of oppression,” collaborates in what Tuck and Yang call “settler moves to innocence,” tactics designed to perpetuate existing social relations while allowing settlers to relieve themselves of guilt over historical injustices and deny their complicity in present-day colonial relations. “When metaphor invades decolonization,” they write, “it kills the very possibility of decolonization: it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (2012, 3).

In Red Skin, White Masks, Glen Coulthard (2014, 25) reminds us of Fanon’s insight into the psychological dimensions of colonization: “In situations where colonial rule does not depend solely on the exercise of state violence, its reproduction instead rests on the ability to entice Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society.” Building on this insight, Coulthard exposes another discursive move, namely, the shift of colonial power relations in Canada “from a more or less unconcealed structure of domination to a form of colonial governance that works through the medium of state recognition and accommodation” (25). Yet, despite the emergence of this “seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices,” he argues, “the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation” (6). Coulthard rejects the fiction that colonial power will be undone through a discursive politics of recognition that aims at reconciliation while ignoring the continued occupation of Indigenous land by settlers and the ongoing denial of Indigenous rights to self-determination.

Like Coulthard, Tuck and Yang insist that discourse cannot substitute for material processes of decolonization that seek to overturn colonial relations of power in specific and concrete form. These scholars recognize, in other words, that doing decolonization, as opposed to simply thinking it or talking about it, requires actions that will be deeply and necessarily uncomfortable for settlers. As Tuck and Wang (2012, 35) make very clear, decolonization is not concerned with questions about what the result will “look like” for the settler: “Decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity.” They argue for an “ethics of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence,” in place of the “aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence” (35). The repatriation of land and the restoration of Indigenous political, economic, and cultural sovereignty are the indispensable material goals of decolonization, for which no words can substitute.

Relations of power are at once discursive and material. No discussion of decolonization can therefore proceed without directly confronting the impact of colonization on the body—the ways in which colonial relations of power have shaped not only the discursive construction of a hierarchy of bodies but also the lived experience of embodiment. Tuck and Yang (2012, 19–20) note that, in their appropriation of decolonization as a metaphor for the pursuit of social justice more generally, educators have been encouraged by progressive philosophies of education that derive in particular from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). As they point out, in contrast to Fanon, who “always positioned the work of liberation in the particularities of colonization” (2012, 20), Freire “situates the work of liberation in the minds of the oppressed” (19), thereby reducing “internal colonization” to “mental colonization.” This, in turn, leads to the conclusion that if the mind is decolonized, “the rest will follow” (20). In this respect, the distinction between mental experience (that is, thought) and internal experience is significant. Citing comments made by Audre Lorde, Tuck and Yang note that “freedom is a possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt” (20). It is, in other words, a matter as much of sensation and emotion as of thought. Decolonizing the body, we would argue, is not a metaphor: it is a material entry point to the dislodging of colonial power, which has been imprinted not merely on minds but on the body-spirit that is inseparable from the lands we are dependent on for life.

As noted earlier, embodied learning is a mental process as well as a body-spirit one. In insisting that the body is a site of knowledge, embodied approaches to learning also demand that we reflect on that knowledge—that, in addition to becoming aware of sentient experience, we interrogate it, particularly from the standpoint of social relations of power. This process can, of course, help us to become more sensitive to oppression of all sorts. In relation to decolonization, however, the objective is not merely to expand the scope of our conscience but to allow us to critically examine how colonization emerges in our emotions and our felt relationship to our bodies. As Lorde (1984, 38) famously stated, “I feel, therefore I can be free.” Decolonization is not some sort of abstract freedom from oppression but a liberation specifically from the material consequences of colonial configurations of power, consequences that are, in some measure, present in our bodies.

Author Conversations

This collection is in many ways an excursion into disruption. By exploring the possibilities that arise when connections among embodiment, pedagogy, and decolonization are not simply identified but critically engaged, it both complicates and enriches histories of knowledge production. A number of themes weave through the chapters, some of which cluster around Indigenous knowledges: the decolonizing potential of reclaiming Indigenous epistemologies and ways of being that connect the individual to the relational collective and to the land; decolonization as a process that does not simply stand in opposition to Western colonization but that also promotes healing and the restoration of inner wholeness; and the pursuit of critical dialogues among Indigenous knowledges drawn from a variety of traditions. In addition, the collection explores the relationship between embodied writing and decolonizing knowledge production; the ethics of undoing or unsettling privileged subjectivities; and the implications of the intertwinement of colonialism with capitalism.

Roxana Ng was involved in this volume at its inception, as one of its editors. Not long after initial submissions were reviewed, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer that, in January 2013, took her life. Her death was a grave loss. In recognition of the formative influence of her ideas, we open the collection with her essay “Decolonizing Teaching and Learning Through Embodied Learning: Toward an Integrated Approach,” which first appeared in a volume titled Valences of Interdisciplinarity (Foshay 2011), published not long before her death. In it, Ng develops what she calls an “integrative critical embodied pedagogy,” bringing together key concerns and observations from her long and distinguished career as a researcher and teacher. As she explains, over the course of that career, she came to view embodied learning “as a form of decolonizing pedagogy.” For Ng, the process of decolonization entails integration: it requires that we free ourselves from sources of separation. Decolonization, she writes, “dissolves the boundaries between self and collectivity, between the individual and the system,” while it also asks how “we, as individuals living within and being part of collectivities, reproduce and sustain systems of oppression.” In her essay, we find the interrelated themes of embodiment, pedagogy, and decolonization that are the focus of this collection.

Much as Ng reclaimed Indigenous knowledges of her own heritage in her teaching, in “Embodying Indigenous Resurgence,” Alannah Young Leon and Denise Nadeau draw on the epistemological insights embedded in the Indigenous teaching of “all my relations” to develop an embodied pedagogy centred on rebuilding relationships, a process vital to Indigenous resurgence. “In retraining our senses to remember how we are related to the rest of creation,” they write, “we provide both an intervention that seeks to decolonize the body’s sense of disconnection and an entry point into the principle of nindinawemagnidog—all our relations.” Young Leon and Nadeau move the discussion of embodiment and decolonization beyond the individual integration of mind, spirit, and body to highlight the collective unity of mind, spirit, and land as it exists in relation to the Canadian settler state. Cautioning against settler forms of “spiritual bypass”—that is, appropriating Indigenous spiritual practices as a way to avoid acknowledging one’s complicity in dispossession—they insist that doing embodied work requires engagement with the reality of one’s historical and psychological relationship to colonialism.

Three other chapters, by Devi Mucina, Sheila Batacharya, and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong, also address decolonization as a process that, through the reclaiming of Indigenous knowledges, methodologies, and/or practices, connects the individual to the relational collective. In “The Journey to You, Baba,” Mucina illustrates the pedagogical power of African oral narrative. As he tells his story about how colonialism has fragmented his family, he reveals the impact of colonization on other African families as well. By centring his decolonizing dialogue with his family within a relational framework grounded in Ubuntu philosophy, he fuses the political and the personal and invites his readers to share his embodied journey into the geopolitical and social landscape of race, colonialism, sexism, and politics.

In “Resistance and Remedy Through Embodied Learning,” Batacharya investigates the practice of yoga as a counterhegemonic healing strategy through which young South Asian women are able to explore their cultural identity and contest racism, colonalism, and cultural essentialism. Her discussions with participants in a series of yoga workshops reveal the potential of Indigenous knowledges and practices to serve as both individual and collective forms of resistance and to ameliorate the painful consequences of violence and oppression. Similarly, in “Please Call Me by My True Names,” Wong explores the use of Buddhist practices of mindfulness to engage students in embodied critical reflection. She observes how students began to recognize their interbeing with all things when they were grounded in the physicality of their own bodies through mindfulness. This deep inward seeing not only helped the students to reclaim who they were in their particular history of relations with the world but also imbued them with energy, enabling them to turn outward and act in the world from the centre of their being, anchored in a relational consciousness.

In developing an integrative critical embodied pedagogy, Ng emphasizes that traditional Chinese medicine and qigong should not be placed in opposition to Western knowledges, as an alternative or an antithesis. This theme of moving beyond oppositional theorizing—which merely creates yet another dualism—runs through several other chapters in the book, notably those by authors who draw on Indigenous knowledge systems. Young Leon and Nadeau observe, for example, that the focus of “all my relations” pedagogy on the well-being of land, community, and future generations is intended to move us “out of a deconstructive agenda into a constructive one.” Wong likewise identifies the need for knowledges and pedagogies that do not rest on oppositional frameworks. As she points out, discursive-analytical investigations of power encourage a binary framing of the oppressive and the anti-oppressive, a framing that in turn implies the opposition of “bad” to “good.” Such dualistic conceptions, she argues, “allow those who self-identify as anti-oppressive (and morally ‘good’) or as the oppressed to claim innocence and to avoid examining their own implication in oppression along the multiple axes of power.” Moreover, rather than fostering a sense of the interrelatedness of being, such as Wong’s students gained through the practice of mindfulness, oppositional thinking promotes the hardening of boundaries between self-constructed identities and, in so doing, ultimately undermines healing.

Related themes surface in Temitope Adefarakan’s “Integrating Mind, Body, and Spirit Through the Yoruba Concept of Ori,” which explores pedagogical practices founded on Indigenous African cosmology. Adefarakan introduces the Yoruba concept of ori—literally “head,” but also “destiny” or “purpose”—as a multilayered element of the Yoruba “worldsense,” a term coined by Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí (1997) to describe a way of grasping the world that does not privilege sight. In the creation of ori, spirit and matter merge: the one cannot exist without the other, nor can an individual exist except in relation to the collective. We cannot align ourselves with our ori, thereby embracing our destiny, unless we recognize our fundamental interconnection to all other human beings. Especially, though not exclusively, for African students who have grown up in diaspora, conceptualizing oneself in terms of ori, as the fusion of body and spirit, offers an empowering complement to Western pedagogical approaches.

Besides arguing for Indigenous knowledges and practices as counterhegemonic healing strategies, the chapters by Batacharya and by Candace Brunette-Debassige create a contrapuntal conversation about the Western appropriation of Indigenous knowledge systems, specifically yoga. As Batacharya notes, young South Asian women who are seeking to recover from the damages inflicted by racism and colonialism are highly critical and selective in their choices surrounding the learning and practice of yoga. This caution arises partly in light of New Age appropriations of yoga, but it also reflects the fact that yoga may be associated with a variety of hegemonic, and deeply hierarchical, discourses—orthodox religious, nationalistic, patriarchal.

In “From Subjugation to Embodied Self-in-Relation,” Brunette-Debassige, a Cree embodied learning educator who teaches yoga, explains how she negotiates the ethics of engagement with a tradition not her own while at the same time integrating yoga into the process of healing from colonization. In settler colonial Canada, she notes, Indigenous peoples were taught the habit of self-restraint—taught to ignore what their bodies were telling them and to resist the impulse to speak out. In her own experience of healing, Brunette-Debassige learned through the practice of yoga to overcome the internal fragmentation that she had inherited. But, as an Indigenous woman who is also a yoga instructor, she tells us, “I felt the responsibility to reflect critically upon my teaching in relation to the history and globalization of yogic knowledge(s).” In teaching yoga to Indigenous students, Brunette-Debassige seeks to challenge “the kinesthetic reality of colonization” through processes of embodied learning.

Drawing on her background in theatre, Brunette-Debassige also illuminates the decolonizing power of an embodied approach to performance writing. Such writing strengthens her inner voice, as it allows her to explore her place in the world and then to share her story through breath and body. In “Poetry: Learning Through Embodied Language,” Sheila Stewart likewise takes up the theme of embodied writing and its potential for decolonizing Eurocentric ways of knowing and being. As she points out, “poetry is poised in the moment between the sentient and the social, a moment of dialogue.” Poetry demands to be spoken and heard: it demands to be embodied. In its rhythms and cadences, it evokes the visceral and emotional, while its fragmentary, imagistic quality, its insistence on pushing language beyond its ordinary limitations, allows poet to access “fluid thinking-feeling states and embrace embodied forms of learning and being.” Reflecting on Tuck and Yang’s examination of decolonization in relationship to land, Stewart further suggests that poetic writing “can be a way to dwell in the complex space of connections and disconnections among body, word, and place, where learning, integration, and healing are possible.”

Two other authors—Susan Ferguson and Wendy Peters—also focus on embodied forms of writing. Ferguson’s chapter, “Embodied Writing and the Social Production of Pain,” explores the possibilities of embodied writing for social research and its implications for decolonizing knowledge production about and of the body. Despite considerable interest in issues of subjectivity and embodiment in fields such as sociology, education, and women’s studies, theories of embodiment tend to reproduce dominant understandings of the relationship of the body to knowledge production, through writing practices that (re)produce disembodied relations to text. Beginning with the understanding that writing is a key, but contested, site of knowledge production in Western society, Ferguson treats writing as a social and bodily practice. Using an examination of the social production of bodily pain to illustrate her approach, she brings together disability studies, feminist autobiography, and phenomenologically informed interpretive sociology to develop an understanding of embodied writing as a pedagogical practice, one that can support a project of decolonizing knowledge production through the recognition of embodied difference and the cultivation of alternative ways of knowing.

In “Patient Stories: Renarrating Illness and Valuing the Rejected Body,” Peters also interrogates Western constructions of the body and their affective, social, and material consequences. In 1997, Peters was diagnosed with a pituitary tumour, and during the period of her illness and subsequent recovery from surgery, she kept a journal. In her chapter, she returns to the journal to engage in a self-reflexive meditation on her experience. As she critically revisits her illness narrative, Peters recognizes how Eurocentric epistemologies and normative discourses informed both her conceptualization of and her reactions to her illness. In particular, she explores her previously unquestioned assumptions surrounding the ideal of bodily normalcy—the “expectation of perpetual good health” and its implications for identity, friendship, and broader social interactions. In revealing her complicity in an internalized sense of dominance founded on the possession of a “normal” body, Peters elucidates some of the ways in which privileged subjectivities are constituted within and through the marginalization of rejected bodies—bodies perceived as flawed and, hence, as threatening.

The theme of privileged subjectivities figures centrally in two other chapters, those by Carla Rice and by Randell Nixon and Katie MacDonald. In “Volatile Bodies and Vulnerable Researchers,” Rice examines the Western construction of the “normal” body specifically in relation to disability, body size, and gender variance, with the goal of exploring ethical issues that arise when one is conducting research with groups positioned as anomalous. As a methodological approach, Rice argues, critical self-reflexivity requires that the researcher be willing to become vulnerable. “Being a vulnerable researcher,” she writes, “means being present and honest with ourselves throughout our projects—namely, with our contradictory, uncomplimentary, or difficult thoughts and emotions, including our fears and desires and implicatedness in others’ suffering.” It asks us to participate in the experience of weakness and lack of power—a condition associated in our culture with the socially excluded, the differently abled, and the culturally and politically oppressed. At the same time, vulnerability directs researchers “to attend to the partiality and cultural specificity of their knowledge claims.” In other words, it unsettles the privileged subject. In this way, the willingness to assume a position of vulnerability assists in the project of decolonizing hegemonic ways of knowing and disrupting established hierarchies of privilege and power.

In their chapter, Nixon and MacDonald turn a decolonizing lens on another construction of vulnerability, one that reinforces a colonial and imperialist definition of the Western subject as “the bearer of knowledge and truth” on whom responsibility now falls to intervene in moral wrongs committed by the formerly colonized. “Being Moved to Action: Micropolitics, Affect, and Embodied Understanding” explores the affective power of a video, Kony 2012, that formed the centrepiece of a campaign by a US-based charitable organization, Invisible Children, dedicated to spurring public outrage about the actions of Joseph Kony, leader of a guerrilla group called the Lord’s Resistance Army that was active in several countries in central Africa at the time. Inspired by a combination of Christian fundamentalism and Acholi nationalism, Kony and his followers were suspected of abducting children to serve as fighters. As Nixon and MacDonald point out, far from evoking a sense of dis-ease that might prompt them to learn more about the context of the situation, the Kony 2012 video left viewers feeling “benevolent and satisfied,” content with the knowledge of how they could do their part to put a stop to Kony’s activities. In no way did it require viewers to engage with the history and ongoing expressions and ramifications of colonialism or to consider their own complicity in these processes; rather, the video demanded “a seemingly intuitive action that made thinking about or reflecting upon this action counterintuitive or potentially unethical.” Using Kony 2012 as an illustration, Nixon and MacDonald explore the ethical politics of “being undone”—the experience of feeling “that who I am and the patterns of thinking and feeling I use to navigate the world are troubled and shaken.” Acknowledging the power of emotional responses, they call for an embodied pedagogy of affect that unsettles, rather than strengthens, existing structures of inequality and helps us to recognize the ways in which we sanction and support racism, imperialism, and the assumption of Western moral superiority, all in the service of global capitalism.

Two other contributors—Stephanie Moynagh and Jamie Magnusson—also consider the intertwining of colonialism and capitalism, specifically in relation to the embodied experience of poverty and social class. As Moynagh observes in “Class and Embodiment: Making Space for Complex Capacity,” in the settler state of Canada (and indeed throughout the Global North), “the production of poverty through capitalism would not survive without the theft and exploitation of Indigenous lands.” The class oppression essential to capitalism is thus closely bound up with social and material inequities inherent in colonial relations of power, inequities profoundly visible in the poverty with which Indigenous peoples still live. Understanding that class is a culture, with its own ways of knowing, Moynagh explores the relationship between class identity and somatic knowledge. In particular, she argues that embodied experiences, emotional as well as physical, that are rooted in poverty-class cultures generate their own knowledges—knowledges routinely devalued within white, colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal systems of education. She calls for embodied and inclusive approaches to teaching that make space for nondominant and potentially counterhegemonic ways of knowing and that, in so doing, “honour survival” while at the same time seeking transformative change.

Jamie Magnusson’s chapter, “Fighting Out: Fractious Bodies and Rebel Streets,” extends the theme of somatic knowledge and class oppression beyond the boundaries of individual experience to consider the place of embodied learning in solidarity building. Magnusson takes as her example “Fighting Out,” a program in downtown Toronto that offers classes in qigong and civil self-defence for sex workers and LGBTQ2 populations and that, unlike most self-defence classes, encourages collective, grassroots action against state violence. Fighting Out also participates in the tradition of taking back the streets—in this case, by reclaiming urban space from processes of enclosure, privatization, and commodification. Basing her conclusions on an analysis of monopoly-finance capital, the real-estate-driven production of safe, gentrified spaces within urban landscapes, and the emergence of fractious bodies criminalized and incarcerated by the “territorializing state”—bodies that include those of queers, sex workers, poor women, and Indigenous people—Magnusson argues that the collective practice of civil self-defence can be an effective political strategy for building social movements that aim to transform the social relations, grounded in colonial histories and capitalist imperialism, that organize political violence.

Bodies exist within historically conditioned relations of power that determine the material conditions of life specific to a given time and place. Embodied learning thus requires an engagement not only with the fundamental materiality of our being but also with the social hierarchies and discursive constructions that both express and seek to perpetuate existing relations of power. Despite the recent development of a discourse of reconciliation, in Canada these relations of power remain grounded in colonialism, an ideology inherited by white settlers from their British forebears and imposed upon the colonized. If an embodied pedagogy is to contribute to decolonization, it must therefore encourage us to confront our lived experience of the material conditions produced by these colonial relations of power, including the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land.

In addition, an embodied pedagogy must help us to reflect critically on our lived experience and on how to develop ways of examining our perceptions as a way to challenge colonial relations of power. Given that dominant frameworks of education are founded on these relations of power, they do not promote such reflection. Rather, by presenting dominant, intellect-based epistemologies as the only reliable source of information about the world and, in so doing, tacitly disparaging other ways of knowing, they seek to normalize existing inequities. By shifting the emphasis to the sentient-social experience of our bodies as situated within a particular set of historically constituted circumstances, and that our perceptions can be enriched through attunement to our sentient-social embodiment, the contributors to this collection seek to revalue other modes of knowledge production, as well as to challenge colonial configurations of power.

In some way, all of the chapters in this collection defy conventional expectations regarding academic discourse. This is something that we, as editors, celebrate. In addition to illustrating the authors’ diverse epistemological groundings, such variation renders concrete our desire to create space for nondominant approaches to knowledge building. Decolonization will not happen if we insist on the safe and familiar. As Roxana Ng once wrote,

Understanding oppression and doing antiracist work is by definition unsafe and uncomfortable, because both involve a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. To speak of safety and comfort is to speak from a position of privilege, relative though it may be. For those who have existed too long on the margins, life has never been safe or comfortable. (1993c, 201)

In one way or another, the contributors to this volume interrogate their positions of privilege: they write their bodies, their emotions, and their vulnerabilities into their texts. They, and we, insist that our body-mind-spirit and our historical and geopolitical situation are materially and discursively intertwined and that both are inseparable from knowledge production and thus from the activities of teaching and learning. This “teaching against the grain,” as Roxana Ng explains, “involves struggles with our colleagues and our students, as well as within ourselves” (1993, 201). It is a challenge that we embrace.

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1  See the acknowledgement at “Research Guides: The Indigenous History of Tkaronto,” University of Toronto Libraries, https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/Toronto (last updated 10 August 2018).

2  In 1920, during testimony to a special parliamentary committee of the House of Commons convened in connection with proposed revisions to the Indian Act, Scott—the deputy superintendent of general of the Department of Indian Affairs—stated: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem.” As he subsequently explained, “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” His remarks have been quoted many times. The original testimony is in Library and Archives Canada, RG 10, vol. 6810, file 470-2-3, vol. 7, pp. 55 (L-3) and 63 (N-3).