Embodied reflexivity: Knowledge and the body in professional practice

Abstract

Embodiment and reflexivity are concepts familiar to contemporary professional practice and education scholarship. This chapter explores the fusion of these concepts, considering embodied reflexivity as an approach to knowledge generation in the context of professional practice. It presents reflexive writing about the author’s own personal and professional experiences and observations over several years of employment as an attendant service worker, with the aim of showing how an embodied narrative about embodied experience can reveal embodied reflexivity, as a form of reflexivity that is felt within the body. It is further suggested that attending to embodied reflexivity potentially offers an important avenue for knowledge generation: a path of access to the unique knowledges of individual practitioners’ knowledges that are developed through embodied professional experience. The chapter begins by examining conceptual work on reflexivity and embodiment, to consider how a notion of embodied reflexivity may be a salient concept with respect to making tacit or invisible embodied knowledges more visible. A reflexive narrative is presented as a case that exhibits reflexivity in both cognitive and embodied forms. The intent is to show how acknowledging and attending to embodied reflexivity offers a unique contribution to how we think about what counts as knowledge, specifically in the context of professional practice.