Moving From "They'll Choke" to "We All Have a Heart": Transformation and the Body

• In Event: 66.016 - Resisting Regressive Notions of Opportunity: Participatory Scholarship in Action

Abstract

In this paper I reflect on my history as critical researcher engaged in expressive acts of confrontation/activism and dissensus with young people in different cities in the United States and in Montréal. The sum of this work examines the ways in which education and other institutions in young people’s lives influence their health and development (Freudenberg & Ruglis, 2007). The idea is to build critical analyses of the workings of “circuits of dispossession” (Fine & Ruglis, 2009) that privileges the thoughts, voices and actions of young people who disrupt “common sense” hegemonic narratives about the fairness, justice and equity of educational opportunity, and the costs of growing up in such, often toxic, institutions.

Drawing on data from participatory action research in three cities and academic institutions, and autoethnographic data, this paper explores the limits of, and critiques, the question:“How do we transform the power of knowledge and scholarly discourses into public will, engaging practice, and responsive policy?” The paper first examines experiences of rejection and resistance by institutions when critical, activist scholars and young people endeavor research with the purpose (and power) to transform knowledge and discourses into public will, to reveal the faultlines of what is necessary for engaging practice and responsive policy.

The paper moves to discussing the second aspect of what is needed for transformation: the body, and a bodily ethic. Advancing the author’s previous theorizing on biopolitics (Ruglis, 2011), by drawing on multiple forms of data and embodiment (Krieger, 2005; Merleau-Ponty, 1962), human capabilities (Wolff, 2009; Nussbaum, 2000), and critical disability (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015) theories, this paper argues we cannot transform “knowledge” and “discourses” into meaningful public will, policy or practice with the mind alone. Transformation entails more than a Cartesian approach: it requires the body, and embodied knowledge. In locating knowledge inside bodies, and not separate from, we are forced to reconcile that not all bodies have the same value. Many bodies – black and brown bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies, women’s bodies, immigrant bodies, indigenous bodies, dis/abled bodies - have less worth. And true transformation cannot happen unless all these bodies matter. A bodily ethic illuminates and engages, in disarmingly powerful, and sometimes “cathartic” ways, what responsive policy and practice should entail. A bodily lens reveals the ethics and behaviors necessary for resisting regressive notions of educational opportunity.

The paper then presents an arts-based research method useful for disrupting discourses of education and development, and revealing what is necessary for practice and policy (Ruglis, 2011). Transformation requires becoming different, it necessitates movement, the body. It therefore requires a body language. To this end, the transformative power of knowledge and discourses cannot be severed from aesthetics and arts. Creativity and movement is knowledge derived from - located in - the body in the world. The paper ends with a model for critical participatory action research that is a collaboration between research and arts, rooted in an embodied ethic, and an approach to transformation for knowledge and scholarly discourses into public will, practice, and policy.

Author

• Jessica Ruglis, McGill University