Embodied Inquiry: Amazigh Girlhood, Yoga Practice, and Methodological Innovation in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Theory, Methods, and the Body

Abstract

How can sociologists attend to the body as both a site and method for understanding the lived experiences of girls navigating access to higher education in the Global South? This paper centers the body at every stage of research, proposing participatory yoga teacher training not only as a subject but as a somatic, feminist methodology for the sociology of embodiment. Drawing on longitudinal fieldwork with adolescent Amazigh girls in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, I explore how practicing and learning to teach yoga makes the body itself a portal for accessing the tensions, aspirations, and challenges shaped by structural precarity and familial expectations. Moving beyond verbal and interview-based approaches, this research establishes the yoga mat as a co-created, affective “place-world” where embodied presence, gesture, and sensation become primary data. I argue that through movement, posture, and breathwork, lived experiences are registered, negotiated, and sometimes transformed before they are ever verbalized. The body here is not just an object of inquiry but an active participant in meaning-making, revealing how young women physically carry and cope with the demands of academic achievement and the shifting horizon of their futures. The paper also analyzes the methodological flexibility and embodied resilience that emerged in the aftermath of the 2023 earthquake, as the girls collectively adapted yoga practices to create new forms of support and relational repair. Ultimately, this work demonstrates that embodied methodologies open up vital pathways for sociologists to witness, interpret, and theorize the lived and felt dimensions of girlhood, allowing for a richer, more grounded engagement with agency, adaptation, and care.

Author

• Jordan Ashley Katz, Souljourn Yoga Foundation