Embodied knowledge: Toward a corporeal turn in professional practice, research and education

Abstract

This chapter provides a commentary of the entire Body/Practice volume. It offers new reflections on the body in professional practice, learning and education by identifying threads woven through the fabric of the preceding chapters. Philosophical and empirical advances are highlighted, and located within broader intellectual traditions, as well as the author’s own work on reflective practice and phronēsis in professional education. Returning to the core question around which the book is framed (Does the body matter in professional practice?), the conclusion is a resounding ‘Yes!’. This chapter maps out the complexity and multiplicity in what this response means, and where it moves us in scholarship that takes the body seriously. It argues that our capacity to ‘think with the body’ has been enriched and extended, forging new connections with crucial questions pertaining to knowledge and epistemology – connections in which bodies are made visible. The body is thereby brought out of the shadows, but not fixed, and it is proposed that the practising and learning body is best understood as unruly, volatile, messy, and gendered. The chapter continues with a final engagement with questions of representation and concludes with a clear call to the future with regard to professional practice scholarship.