Somatic Approaches to Academic Pedagogy: Notes from "Somatics, Scholarship, Somatic Scholarship: Materiality and Metaphor”

Abstract

In line with this issue’s theme, this essay focuses on what the scholar-practitioners who participated in the symposium Somatics, Scholarship, Somatic Scholarship: Materiality and Metaphor on February 27, 2015 at the University of California, Berkeley, had to say about how somatic practices shape pedagogical practices in the context of the university. Although the panelists differ in their approaches to “the body” and in the degree to which they explicitly mobilize somatic exercises in the classroom, all four locate the academic seminar room as the site in which their embodied practices most clearly intersect with their academic work.