This is an end of award report for the ESRC for the project Children's embodied social capita... more This is an end of award report for the ESRC for the project Children's embodied social capital and (dis)ability: connecting micro- and macro- scales of exclusion/inclusion.
This is a report for teachers, professionals, policy makers and parents. It was published and sen... more This is a report for teachers, professionals, policy makers and parents. It was published and sent to participants of the ESRC project and all Local Authorities nationally. The project explored the social relationships of young people with and without diagnoses of Special Educational Needs (SEN) and/or disabilities in different school spaces, and links with home and leisure spaces.
This project was supported by the Religion & Society Research Programme ( award number AH/H009108... more This project was supported by the Religion & Society Research Programme ( award number AH/H009108/1) of the ESRC (Economic & Social Science Research Council) and AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council). We would very much like to thank all the diarists who took part in the research.
This is the summary of key findings and policy recommendations booklet for young people. The proj... more This is the summary of key findings and policy recommendations booklet for young people. The project explored the social relationships of young people with and without diagnoses of Special Educational Needs (SEN) and/or disabilities in different school spaces, and links with home and leisure spaces.
Lea, J., Holt, L., Bowlby, S, Blazek, M. & Kraftl, P., Children's Emotions in Policy and Prac... more Lea, J., Holt, L., Bowlby, S, Blazek, M. & Kraftl, P., Children's Emotions in Policy and Practice: Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood, (2015), Palgrave Macmillan reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Through a performative and speculative style of writing, this chapter develops the ways in which ... more Through a performative and speculative style of writing, this chapter develops the ways in which non-representational theories might provide purchase in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we present two short juxtaposing autoethnographic vignettes of our experiences of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in the South of England, UK. Next, we offer some theoretical suggestions, guiding the reader through an ‘ABC’ of non-representational concepts including absent presence, affect, atmospheres, bodily knowledges and corporeogeographies, before inviting them to make their own connections and think through their own experiences. The intention here is to provoke speculation, to animate in our reader new ways of making sense of their relational, non-representational experiences of the pandemic. In this way, the chapter performs some of the tenets of non-representational thinking and doing. We conclude by speculating ourselves on the ways that the pandemic has refigured and reconstituted our own bodily boundaries and knowledges, affective and felt experiences in public spaces and everyday encounters and routines.
This paper investigates the spatially variable schooling of young people with special educational... more This paper investigates the spatially variable schooling of young people with special educational needs and disability (SEND) and interconnections with class and capitals, using analysis of the School Census and interviews with 64 educational professionals and parents in three areas in Southeast England. Three key original findings emerge. First, high proportions of young people with SEND come from poor backgrounds; however, most young people with SEND labels are not poor. Second, social class, capitals, and SEND intersect in ways that relatively advantage young people from more affluent and educated families, who gain access to specific labels and what is locally considered the "best" education. Third, we conceptualise school spaces as differently "bounded" or "connected," providing different opportunities to develop meaningful relationships and qualifications, or social and cultural capital, rather than focus on the type of school ("special," separate schools for students with SEND; or "mainstream" local schools). What are locally considered to be "the best" school spaces are connected and porous, providing opportunities to develop social and cultural capital. Other school spaces are containers of both SEND and poverty, with limited opportunities to acquire social and cultural capitals. Overall, we suggest that the intersecting experience of SEND, class, and capitals can (re)produce socioeconomic inequalities through school spaces.
Bodyworkas work which takes the body as its immediate site of labourincludes forms of service wor... more Bodyworkas work which takes the body as its immediate site of labourincludes forms of service work, healthcare and caring. While work on bodywork has undeniably foregrounded the body, at the same time it has worked with a relatively limited understanding of bodily knowledges and practices. This article uses a theoretical framework taken from writing on Non-Representational Theory, by Human Geographers, in order to take seriously 'alternative' body knowledge such as energy. The article draws on data from in-depth interviews conducted with therapeutic massage practitioners in order to take seriously the ways in which energy directs and shapes the work that these bodyworkers do, adding new empirical understandings of what working with energy entails. It makes a broader conceptual contribution to bodywork literatures, advocating the importance of extending analysis beyond social constructionist approaches and questioning the taken-for-granted understandings of materiality that are most often drawn upon in order to attend to the kinds of knowledge that are less easy to formalise, anomalous, or that push at the fringes of the definite or the limits of the believable, but which are nonetheless central to many different kinds of bodywork contemporarily.
This paper examines the peer-related social experiences and friendships of young people (aged 11–... more This paper examines the peer-related social experiences and friendships of young people (aged 11–17) diagnosed with Special Educational Needs in four different school settings: two mainstream schools with special units and two special schools in Southeast England, UK. Findings from qualitative research involving young people with Special Educational Needs and adults, and participant observation, are presented. The young people had one or a combination of the following diagnoses of Special Educational Need: ‘Moderate Learning Difficulties’, on the ‘Autistic Spectrum’, and ‘Social, Emotional and Mental Health Difficulties’. We use the term ‘differences’ rather than ‘difficulties’ to express the interconnected socio-spatial construction of, and corporeality of, the experiences of these differences. There has been limited scholarship about the social experiences of young people with these diagnoses. In our study, young people’s experiences of friendships, exclusion, inclusion and bullyi...
This paper looks at the production and shaping of the self via Ashtanga yoga, a bodily practice, ... more This paper looks at the production and shaping of the self via Ashtanga yoga, a bodily practice, growing in significance in Western cultures, which can involve a radical form of (re)shaping the self. In particular, it looks at the interaction of external and internal sources of authority, including the yoga student's own expertise of themselves (experiential authority), the authority of the practice and the authority of the teacher. This allows the paper to rethink standard models of authority in educational and 'spiritualities of life' literatures, which have generally imagined a top-down singular form of authority, essentially stamped onto the subjects being educated. The paper outlines what might enter into a more 'distributed' form of authority; being not simply the educator figure (their positionality, status, institutional location, contextualisation within prior fields of knowledge/belief), but also how their exertion of authority meshes (and sometimes conflicts with) the 'experiential authority' of the subjects being educated, articulating with their own 'self-authority' (what they know, expect and command from themselves , on the basis of countless prior experiences, encounters, interactions, times and spaces). The paper draws upon qualitative fieldwork carried out in Brighton, UK.
Mindfulness meditation (in the context of mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness base... more Mindfulness meditation (in the context of mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy) is a reflexive practice that seeks to reduce suffering in the form of depression, anxiety and stress. Through a variety of techniques, mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate awareness of the participant's current experience (notably their thoughts and feelings), as well as an attitude of non-judgement towards this experience. Via Crossley's (2001) account of the relation between habits and the development of a self-reflexive stance, the paper develops an understanding of agency as distributed across body, mind and context which is not fixed in time or space. Drawing on in-depth depth interviews carried out with students and teachers of mindfulness meditation, the paper analyses the role of dialogue in the practice, and situates it within the wider routines of the participant's everyday lives.
Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising... more Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising the importance of nurturing, maintaining and preventing the dissipation of diverse 'energies', this paper explores the possibilities for geographical health studies which take seriously 'new energy geographies'. It is explained how this account is derived from in-depth fieldwork tracing how practitioners of yoga and meditation find times and spaces for these practices, often in the face of busy urban lifestyles. Attention is paid to the 'energy talk' featuring heavily in how practitioners describe the benefits that they perceive themselves to derive from these practices, and to claims made about 'energies' generated during the time-spaces of these practices which seemingly flow, usually with positive effects, into other domains of their lives. The paper then discusses the implications of this energy talk in the context of: (a) critically reviewing conventional approaches to studying 'energy geographies'; (b) identifying an alertness to the likes of 'affective energies' surfacing in recent theoretically-attuned works of human geography (and cognate disciplines); and (c) exploring differing understandings of energy/energies extant in geographical studies of health and in step with the empirical research materials presented about yoga, meditation and healthfulness. While orientated towards explicitly geographical inquiries, the paper is intended as a statement of interest to the wider medical humanities.
Post-phenomenological geographies are an emergent (and as yet relatively fragmentary) body of wor... more Post-phenomenological geographies are an emergent (and as yet relatively fragmentary) body of work. This work does not reflect a turn away from phenomenological theories; rather a critical engagement with them which re-reads them through the post-structural theories of such authors as Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas. This re-reading, and the disciplinary context of a turn to practice, and the 'more-than-human' has resulted in post-phenomenological geographies extending the boundaries of the phenomenological focus upon the experiencing subject (in place). Thus the focus is upon the ways in which in-human, non-human and more-thanhuman forces contribute to processes of subject formation, place making, and inhabiting the world. These geographies have thus far been played out through critical explorations of the realms of the experiencing subject, and landscape. This morethan-human focus has tested conventional human geographical methods, requiring innovative use of technologies such as video to document research, the use of experiential research methods, and also experimentation with the form of narrating these experiential methods.
This paper explores the process of learning an embodied knowledge using the work of Dreyfus and D... more This paper explores the process of learning an embodied knowledge using the work of Dreyfus and Deleuze. Although geographers have begun to acknowledge the role of embodied knowledges in social life, there have been few in-depth case studies of how these skills are learned. This paper offers a case study of Thai Yoga massage (TYM), a 'complementary and alternative therapy' which is growing in popularity in the United Kingdom. Having outlined the case study, the paper explores the cultural geographies of the formalisation, documentation and contestation of the set of techniques that have come to cohere in the UK as TYM. The paper then interrogates the messy corporeal geographies of learning a skill, and briefly considers how more advanced practitioners experience their skilled practice.
This is an end of award report for the ESRC for the project Children's embodied social capita... more This is an end of award report for the ESRC for the project Children's embodied social capital and (dis)ability: connecting micro- and macro- scales of exclusion/inclusion.
This is a report for teachers, professionals, policy makers and parents. It was published and sen... more This is a report for teachers, professionals, policy makers and parents. It was published and sent to participants of the ESRC project and all Local Authorities nationally. The project explored the social relationships of young people with and without diagnoses of Special Educational Needs (SEN) and/or disabilities in different school spaces, and links with home and leisure spaces.
This project was supported by the Religion & Society Research Programme ( award number AH/H009108... more This project was supported by the Religion & Society Research Programme ( award number AH/H009108/1) of the ESRC (Economic & Social Science Research Council) and AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council). We would very much like to thank all the diarists who took part in the research.
This is the summary of key findings and policy recommendations booklet for young people. The proj... more This is the summary of key findings and policy recommendations booklet for young people. The project explored the social relationships of young people with and without diagnoses of Special Educational Needs (SEN) and/or disabilities in different school spaces, and links with home and leisure spaces.
Lea, J., Holt, L., Bowlby, S, Blazek, M. & Kraftl, P., Children's Emotions in Policy and Prac... more Lea, J., Holt, L., Bowlby, S, Blazek, M. & Kraftl, P., Children's Emotions in Policy and Practice: Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood, (2015), Palgrave Macmillan reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Through a performative and speculative style of writing, this chapter develops the ways in which ... more Through a performative and speculative style of writing, this chapter develops the ways in which non-representational theories might provide purchase in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we present two short juxtaposing autoethnographic vignettes of our experiences of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in the South of England, UK. Next, we offer some theoretical suggestions, guiding the reader through an ‘ABC’ of non-representational concepts including absent presence, affect, atmospheres, bodily knowledges and corporeogeographies, before inviting them to make their own connections and think through their own experiences. The intention here is to provoke speculation, to animate in our reader new ways of making sense of their relational, non-representational experiences of the pandemic. In this way, the chapter performs some of the tenets of non-representational thinking and doing. We conclude by speculating ourselves on the ways that the pandemic has refigured and reconstituted our own bodily boundaries and knowledges, affective and felt experiences in public spaces and everyday encounters and routines.
This paper investigates the spatially variable schooling of young people with special educational... more This paper investigates the spatially variable schooling of young people with special educational needs and disability (SEND) and interconnections with class and capitals, using analysis of the School Census and interviews with 64 educational professionals and parents in three areas in Southeast England. Three key original findings emerge. First, high proportions of young people with SEND come from poor backgrounds; however, most young people with SEND labels are not poor. Second, social class, capitals, and SEND intersect in ways that relatively advantage young people from more affluent and educated families, who gain access to specific labels and what is locally considered the "best" education. Third, we conceptualise school spaces as differently "bounded" or "connected," providing different opportunities to develop meaningful relationships and qualifications, or social and cultural capital, rather than focus on the type of school ("special," separate schools for students with SEND; or "mainstream" local schools). What are locally considered to be "the best" school spaces are connected and porous, providing opportunities to develop social and cultural capital. Other school spaces are containers of both SEND and poverty, with limited opportunities to acquire social and cultural capitals. Overall, we suggest that the intersecting experience of SEND, class, and capitals can (re)produce socioeconomic inequalities through school spaces.
Bodyworkas work which takes the body as its immediate site of labourincludes forms of service wor... more Bodyworkas work which takes the body as its immediate site of labourincludes forms of service work, healthcare and caring. While work on bodywork has undeniably foregrounded the body, at the same time it has worked with a relatively limited understanding of bodily knowledges and practices. This article uses a theoretical framework taken from writing on Non-Representational Theory, by Human Geographers, in order to take seriously 'alternative' body knowledge such as energy. The article draws on data from in-depth interviews conducted with therapeutic massage practitioners in order to take seriously the ways in which energy directs and shapes the work that these bodyworkers do, adding new empirical understandings of what working with energy entails. It makes a broader conceptual contribution to bodywork literatures, advocating the importance of extending analysis beyond social constructionist approaches and questioning the taken-for-granted understandings of materiality that are most often drawn upon in order to attend to the kinds of knowledge that are less easy to formalise, anomalous, or that push at the fringes of the definite or the limits of the believable, but which are nonetheless central to many different kinds of bodywork contemporarily.
This paper examines the peer-related social experiences and friendships of young people (aged 11–... more This paper examines the peer-related social experiences and friendships of young people (aged 11–17) diagnosed with Special Educational Needs in four different school settings: two mainstream schools with special units and two special schools in Southeast England, UK. Findings from qualitative research involving young people with Special Educational Needs and adults, and participant observation, are presented. The young people had one or a combination of the following diagnoses of Special Educational Need: ‘Moderate Learning Difficulties’, on the ‘Autistic Spectrum’, and ‘Social, Emotional and Mental Health Difficulties’. We use the term ‘differences’ rather than ‘difficulties’ to express the interconnected socio-spatial construction of, and corporeality of, the experiences of these differences. There has been limited scholarship about the social experiences of young people with these diagnoses. In our study, young people’s experiences of friendships, exclusion, inclusion and bullyi...
This paper looks at the production and shaping of the self via Ashtanga yoga, a bodily practice, ... more This paper looks at the production and shaping of the self via Ashtanga yoga, a bodily practice, growing in significance in Western cultures, which can involve a radical form of (re)shaping the self. In particular, it looks at the interaction of external and internal sources of authority, including the yoga student's own expertise of themselves (experiential authority), the authority of the practice and the authority of the teacher. This allows the paper to rethink standard models of authority in educational and 'spiritualities of life' literatures, which have generally imagined a top-down singular form of authority, essentially stamped onto the subjects being educated. The paper outlines what might enter into a more 'distributed' form of authority; being not simply the educator figure (their positionality, status, institutional location, contextualisation within prior fields of knowledge/belief), but also how their exertion of authority meshes (and sometimes conflicts with) the 'experiential authority' of the subjects being educated, articulating with their own 'self-authority' (what they know, expect and command from themselves , on the basis of countless prior experiences, encounters, interactions, times and spaces). The paper draws upon qualitative fieldwork carried out in Brighton, UK.
Mindfulness meditation (in the context of mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness base... more Mindfulness meditation (in the context of mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy) is a reflexive practice that seeks to reduce suffering in the form of depression, anxiety and stress. Through a variety of techniques, mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate awareness of the participant's current experience (notably their thoughts and feelings), as well as an attitude of non-judgement towards this experience. Via Crossley's (2001) account of the relation between habits and the development of a self-reflexive stance, the paper develops an understanding of agency as distributed across body, mind and context which is not fixed in time or space. Drawing on in-depth depth interviews carried out with students and teachers of mindfulness meditation, the paper analyses the role of dialogue in the practice, and situates it within the wider routines of the participant's everyday lives.
Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising... more Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising the importance of nurturing, maintaining and preventing the dissipation of diverse 'energies', this paper explores the possibilities for geographical health studies which take seriously 'new energy geographies'. It is explained how this account is derived from in-depth fieldwork tracing how practitioners of yoga and meditation find times and spaces for these practices, often in the face of busy urban lifestyles. Attention is paid to the 'energy talk' featuring heavily in how practitioners describe the benefits that they perceive themselves to derive from these practices, and to claims made about 'energies' generated during the time-spaces of these practices which seemingly flow, usually with positive effects, into other domains of their lives. The paper then discusses the implications of this energy talk in the context of: (a) critically reviewing conventional approaches to studying 'energy geographies'; (b) identifying an alertness to the likes of 'affective energies' surfacing in recent theoretically-attuned works of human geography (and cognate disciplines); and (c) exploring differing understandings of energy/energies extant in geographical studies of health and in step with the empirical research materials presented about yoga, meditation and healthfulness. While orientated towards explicitly geographical inquiries, the paper is intended as a statement of interest to the wider medical humanities.
Post-phenomenological geographies are an emergent (and as yet relatively fragmentary) body of wor... more Post-phenomenological geographies are an emergent (and as yet relatively fragmentary) body of work. This work does not reflect a turn away from phenomenological theories; rather a critical engagement with them which re-reads them through the post-structural theories of such authors as Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas. This re-reading, and the disciplinary context of a turn to practice, and the 'more-than-human' has resulted in post-phenomenological geographies extending the boundaries of the phenomenological focus upon the experiencing subject (in place). Thus the focus is upon the ways in which in-human, non-human and more-thanhuman forces contribute to processes of subject formation, place making, and inhabiting the world. These geographies have thus far been played out through critical explorations of the realms of the experiencing subject, and landscape. This morethan-human focus has tested conventional human geographical methods, requiring innovative use of technologies such as video to document research, the use of experiential research methods, and also experimentation with the form of narrating these experiential methods.
This paper explores the process of learning an embodied knowledge using the work of Dreyfus and D... more This paper explores the process of learning an embodied knowledge using the work of Dreyfus and Deleuze. Although geographers have begun to acknowledge the role of embodied knowledges in social life, there have been few in-depth case studies of how these skills are learned. This paper offers a case study of Thai Yoga massage (TYM), a 'complementary and alternative therapy' which is growing in popularity in the United Kingdom. Having outlined the case study, the paper explores the cultural geographies of the formalisation, documentation and contestation of the set of techniques that have come to cohere in the UK as TYM. The paper then interrogates the messy corporeal geographies of learning a skill, and briefly considers how more advanced practitioners experience their skilled practice.
in Mills, S. and Kraftl, P. (eds) Informal Education and Children's Everyday Lives: Geographies, Histories and Practices, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
The project upon which this chapter is based brings together three researchers who share a curren... more The project upon which this chapter is based brings together three researchers who share a current interest in 'subjective-life spiritualities', in particular practices such as yoga and meditation which cannot be easily distinguished from contemporary health and wellbeing practices. Chris Philo has a range of established academic interests spanning the history, theory and practice of human geography. Key to the research presented below is his long standing work on mental ill health and health care, Foucauldian studies and the historiography and theoretical development of the discipline. Jennifer Lea was awarded her PhD in 2006. Her doctoral and subsequent postdoctoral work has centred on the body and embodiment, particularly in relation to producing, consuming and experiencing 'health'. Empirically she has focussed on yoga and therapeutic massage, and her research into the former helped to form the basis of the research project which we discuss here. Louisa Cadman was also awarded her PhD in 2006 and has worked within the field of Foucauldian and poststructural geographies, with a particular interest in questions of power and resistance in relation to health care and mental health. As relative newcomers to the fields of spirituality and religion we wondered what contribution our respective interests in health, the body and innovative theory and methods in human geography might bring to discussions of 'subjective-life spiritualities'. This culminated in a research project funded by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society research programme which looked at everyday spiritual practices in an urban context. Below we focus on the use of participant time-space diaries and in-depth interviews as an effective way to research the lived experiences of spirituality and religion, including how spirituality is infused with the slipperiness of human subjectivity, emotion and embodiment.
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