Embodying Academia is a pilot project that explores embodied learning in anthropology and asks: What kinds of creative potential for research can be released and nurtured by explicitly training kinesthetic and affective sensitivities and attention? The study explores current anthropological research and teaching practices and, experimentally, brings three alternative embodied learning methodologies into these: contact improvisation, storytelling, and bodily-emotion-attention training.

The workshop at Earthwise with the preliminary title “Understanding? An empirical exploration” will bring together scholars with an empirical interest in the experience of understanding. What especially interests us here is the bodily element that forms the root of the English word, i.e. standing – an etymologically implied embodied positionality that is echoed in its Danish and German counterparts, respectively forståelse and verstehen. How we experience “understanding” is thus not a philosophical question to us, but a proposal to look closer, listen to others and sense one’s own body as we experiment with different ways of reaching for understanding