Embodied knowledge

Embodied knowledge situates intellectual and theoretical insights within the realm of the material world. Embodied knowledge is sensory; it highlights smell, touch, and taste as well as more commonly noted sights and sounds. Knowledge grounded in bodily experience encompasses uncertainty, ambiguity, and messiness in everyday life, eschewing sanitized detached measurement of discrete variables. Such an epistemology, or way of knowing, resists the Cartesian mind–body split that underlies Enlightenment philosophy and its persistent remnants, including the scientific method and the glorification of objectivity. Embodied knowledge is inherently and unapologetically subjective, celebrating—rather than glossing over —the complexities of knowledge production. Fieldwork, interviewing, writing, and other qualitative methods involve embodied practices performed by actors occupying specific standpoints or positions within cultures. The researcher\u27s body—where it is positioned, what it looks like, what social groups or classifications it is perceived as belonging to—matters deeply in knowledge formation

Embodied Knowledge: Writing Researchers’ Bodies Into Qualitative Health Research

After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers’ bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research

Embodied Knowledge Construction inWriting

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Intellectual Capital Architectures and Bilateral Learning: A Framework For Human Resource Management

Both researchers and managers are increasingly interested in how firms can pursue bilateral learning; that is, simultaneously exploring new knowledge domains while exploiting current ones (cf., March, 1991). To address this issue, this paper introduces a framework of intellectual capital architectures that combine unique configurations of human, social, and organizational capital. These architectures support bilateral learning by helping to create supplementary alignment between human and social capital as well as complementary alignment between people-embodied knowledge (human and social capital) and organization-embodied knowledge (organizational capital). In order to establish the context for bilateral learning, the framework also identifies unique sets of HR practices that may influence the combinations of human, social, and organizational capital

Using the Asymptotically Ideal Model to estimate the impact of knowledge on labour productivity: An application to Taiwan in the 1990s.

This paper examines the impact of embodied and disembodied knowledge on labour productivity in Taiwan’s manufacturing industry, using the Asymptotically Ideal Model. The model is estimated on a panel of 27,754 firms observed from 1992 to 1995, using three estimations procedures: fixed-effect regression, random-effect GLS, and Hausman-Taylor estimation. Our findings show that, in traditional industries, labour productivity is mostly driven by embodied knowledge, whereas in high-tech industries, labour productivity depends on both embodied and disembodied knowledge. The latter result may be the consequence of the Industrial Upgrading Statute implemented in Taiwan after 1991.Asymptotically Ideal Model; Disembodied Knowledge; Embodied Knowledge; Labour Productivity; Newly Industrialized Countries.

Negotiating cultural identity through the arts: Fitting in, third space and cultural memory

The article examines ways in which arts-based educational approaches were applied to a group of African descendant youth in Western Australia, as a way of understanding challenges to their bicultural socialization and means to developing their bicultural competence. Drawing on African cultural memory as a cultural resource enabled participants to discover the relevance of African cultural memory and embodied knowledge to their bicultural socialization and bicultural competence. The article challenges the argument that successful integration into dominant culture is only possible when migrants remain focused on acquisition of dominant cultural values – ‘Fitting in’. The African Cultural Memory Youth Arts Festival (ACMYAF) offered an alternative conception of successive integration as a process inclusive of creative appropriation and revaluation of ancestral culture through cultural memory. The festival became a third space through which the participants explored embodied knowledge and African cultural memory towards a positive self-concept and bicultural competence

Modalities of expression: Capturing embodied knowledge in cooking

When cooking we negotiate between instructions in recipes and personal preferences to make in-the-moment creative decisions. This process represents moments of creativity that utilise and reveal our embodied knowledge. This paper focuses on the capture of expressions of embodied knowledge by digitally-networked utensils. We present a design process investigating the design of tangible interfaces to capture and communicate embodied knowledge as a proposition for recipe authoring tools for open innovation in food. We reflect upon this process to discuss lessons about the individual nature of embodied knowledge and its expression, and the context of capturing it to make design recommendations

Improvisation and embodied knowledge: three artistic projects between life, art and research.

In life there exists no script. The primacy of experience in the form of 'trying out' or improvisation, a moving from an indefinable and undifferentiated state to feeling our way by creating a direction. In art, improvisation is differently nuanced. As artists, we cast a critical eye on the predetermined structures of social, cultural, material experience while recognising that freedom and constraint are profoundly interrelated. Improvisation in art across cultures is a specific approach to form making that centres the imagination (of creator/performer/spectator) precisely on managing the interplay between freedom and constraint