Embodied Ecologies

Bodies are often thought of as bounded entities, separate from each other and the world; however, our bodies are in and of our ecologies – our environments make us up, in the flesh. Likewise, with our embodied activities - our labor, leisure, dwelling and consumption - we navigate and transform our ecologies. Various disciplines have developed conceptual and methodological frameworks for understanding embodiment that seek to move away from binary divisions between mind and body, reason and passion, objectivity and subjectivity, culture and nature. This course will introduce students to embodied approaches in anthropology, political ecology, and science and technology studies (STS) – many of which draw from wider frameworks of feminism, Marxism, decoloniality, and phenomenology. In this way the students will gain both a broad overview of thinking about bodies and ecologies in the social sciences as well as more in-depth understanding of approaches in anthropology, political ecology, and STS, including multi-modal ethnography, sensorial cartography, and anti-colonial science. Students build on these theoretical and conceptual foundations to develop their own embodied research methods. Through weekly exercises and the development of novel methodologies, students complete the class with a better understanding of human-environment relations and tools for the future that can be applied in their field of study, political activities, or simply everyday life.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• Understand and explain the way mind and body interact
• Understand and reflect on how embodiment is conceptualized and applied in different disciplines and scholarly fields
• Evaluate the benefits and limitations of the presented embodiment approaches
• Apply embodied approach to environmental issues

Assumed Knowledge:

The course is aimed for advanced Bachelor and Master students in various fields, most prominently the social and environmental sciences. We expect students can read and understand scientific papers from different social science disciplines. Some papers may have a high level of abstraction but always in combination with case studies and concrete examples.