Emergent Strategies for Urgent Times: A Critical Autoethnographic Inquiry into Embodiment, Decolonization and Transformative Social Change

Abstract

Staged against the backdrop of our ecological crises, this autoethnographic inquiry is, at its core, a journey of awakening. Challenging the normative divisions between knowledge-production and wisdom-generating processes and the erasure of the body from academic spaces, this project seeks to further clarify dominant articulations of power taking root at the level of our biology (Foucault, 1997) while examining the potential of contemplative practices to assist in ‘unearthing’ injurious colonizing scripts. Engaging in research-as-praxis (Freire, 1970), this project invites consideration of our internal condition as correlate of our external social realities, and challenges us to consider our complicity with colonialist—and colonizing—inscriptions of power influencing our conduct and limiting our transformative potential. Guided by phenomenological insights from the subjective terrain of embodied practice, themes relating to the prevalence of disembodiment, consumptive appetite and materialistic notions of progress are examined and contextualized through critical historical and theoretical analysis.