Corporeal Knowing: Refugee Youths' New Material Agency and Art Space

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Current Issues in Arts Education: Teacher Shortages, Curricular Innovations, and Creativity Assessment

Abstract

Drawing on posthumanist /new materialists’ insights, this paper explores bodily movement/ space paradigms that can inform alternative ways of knowing through a spontaneous yet theorized community art event involving pre-teen and teen refugee girls’ embodied experiences of a local cafe located in a Northeastern US city. Their bodily encounters involved incipient actions—drifting, knitting, and wrist-tying performances—in the creation of a new space within the cafe space. It takes as a central consideration of thing-power rather than human-power and advances a framework of corporeal spatial/temporality for understanding pedagogical practice. The understanding of the lived body informs a new direction for social justice education, one that offers a new materialistic agency that goes beyond the strictures of the humanist mindset.

Author

• Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis, Buffalo State College - SUNY