CFR Co-Sponsored: Book Launch for ‘Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization,’ eds. Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong.

CFR Co-Sponsored:
BOOK LAUNCH
Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization
edited by Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong
Date: Saturday, 10 November 2018
Time: 9:00-10:30 am
Location: Room 5-260
University of Toronto
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto, ON M5S 1V6
Featuring a roundtable discussion that will address the process of generating academic scholarship and critique hegemonic modes of education.
Summary: Treating bodies as more than discursive in social research can feel out of place in academia. As a result, embodiment studies remain on the outside of academic knowledge construction and critical scholarship. However, embodiment scholars suggest that investigations into the profound division created by privileging the mind-intellect over the body-spirit are integral to the project of decolonization.
The field of embodiment theorizes bodies as knowledgeable in ways that include but are not solely cognitive. The contributors to this collection suggest developing embodied ways of teaching, learning, and knowing through embodied experiences such as yoga, mindfulness, illness, and trauma. Although the contributors challenge Western educational frameworks from within and beyond academic settings, they also acknowledge and draw attention to the incommensurability between decolonization and aspects of social justice projects in education. By addressing this tension ethically and deliberately, the contributors engage thoughtfully with decolonization and make a substantial, and sometimes unsettling, contribution to critical studies in education.
Sheila Batacharyacompleted her doctoral studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her scholarship in embodiment and embodied learning is fueled by her experiences teaching yoga and her curiosity and concern with articulating and practicing attunement to social-sentient embodied experiences in formal education and community contexts.
Yuk-Lin Renita Wong is a professor at the School of Social Work at York University. Her scholarship and teaching aim at deconstructing the power relations in the knowledge production and discursive practices of social work, and in re-centering marginalized ways of knowing and being.
Co-sponsored by: Athabasca University Press and OCAD University.