Indigenous Women’s Worldview in Food Related Research: Rematriating food, bodies and lands.

Western discourses around food (in)security and nutrition often focus on food access primarily through male-driven efforts. In turn, the gendered dimension is missing. Yet Indigenous food systems cannot be fully understood without Indigenous women’s worldview, challenges and labour. Our critique points to the importance of centering Indigenous women’s embodied knowledge systems in our food related research. Novelty: Rematriating food research regenerates the complexities of kinship wellbeing, sustainable economies, and body sovereignty.

OBERIU and the Conversations of the Lipavsky Circle

This article distinguishes the avant-garde group OBERIU and its predecessors, led by the poets Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Zabolotsky and performing openly in Leningrad between 1925 and 1930, from the informal circle of the 1930s, which also included the poet Nikolai Oleinikov and the philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin. Prevented from making their writings public, in 1933–1934 members of this underground circle of friends documented their interactions in Lipavsky’s Conversations. A history of the two overlapping groups, emphasizing their social aspects, is followed by a synopsis of the philosophy of the circle. The article argues that the montage-based composition paradigms of the avant-garde, replacing determinism, causality, and rationality with contiguity and the non sequitur, are reflected in Kharmsian play with numbers and in his concept of the “real,” as well as in the phenomenological methods of Druskin and Lipavsky, which seek perspectival, qualitative, and embodied knowledge that science cannot grant.

Teaching Fieldwork Experience: Experiment, Embodiment, Emotions

The emotional and sensual dimension of fieldwork, as well as the positionality of the researcher are often debated and considered crucial in anthropology. We assume that “good ethnography” includes sensory and bodily fieldwork experience. But how do we address these issues in teaching? How can we teach students to notice, analyse and make sense of their bodily experiences? How do we encourage the awareness of positionality? What practical steps can we take in designing suitable learning experiences that address these points? In this paper, we share our experience of teaching adapted courses that provide students with fieldwork encounters, where the significance of embodied knowledge can be explored, and their ethnographic awareness cultivated. Basing our analysis on the undergraduate Ethnographic Lab and Ethnographic Methods courses taught at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, we argue that it is important to put students in uncomfortable or unusual fieldwork and teaching situations, forcing them out of their comfort zone so that they experience fieldwork encounters both emotionally and bodily. Recordings of these encounters and the bodily reactions of themselves and others constitute a core part of the data to be gathered, which prevents students from focusing solely on narratives and discourses.

Considering the corporeal to facilitate research to practice transitions

PurposeThe authors suggest that the research-to-practice gap, such as that found in evidence-based management, is due in part to a lack of attention to embodied knowledge. The recommendation is for change agents to bring attention to embodied knowing when implementing change based on research. The purpose of the paper is to address the research-to-practice gap.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper that considers limitations of the predominant approach to considering the research-to-practice gap. The literature on phenomenology, feminist theory, and learning theory form the basis for exploring these challenges as well as possible solutions for transcending the research-to-practice gap.FindingsStrategic opportunities for introducing increased corporeal understanding are advanced. The suggestions address the research-to-practice gap at three critical stages of research-based change initiatives. These include making embodied knowledge integral to change initiatives in framing research, reducing resistance, and increasing acceptance. Among the specific strategies discussed are attending to tacit knowledge when considering the change, embracing the embrained body including attending to kinesthetic resistance and starting with the body to increase acceptance when implementing change.Originality/valueThere has been very little previous attention to the corporeal in management research and practice, including in the organizational change literature. This paper not only increases this discussion significantly but also provides suggestions for how to move forward in practice.

Athens besieged: Greek and Ottoman perceptions of shifting space during the Greek Revolution of 1821

This article explores aspects of the quotidian history of space in the Greek Revolution of 1821, using as a case study the transitional events of the siege of the Acropolis by the Ottoman army in 1826 and the recapturing of the city of Athens. Through a thorough study of space as embodied knowledge grounded in the dynamic interaction between humans and material culture, it identifies the shifts in the Athenian landscape during this period. Its findings are based on primary textual and visual sources pertaining to warfare, which are juxtaposed to the Greek and Ottoman emerging official perceptions of the significance of the city of Athens as a political and imaginary objective. The article deploys a phenomenological analysis of space that foregrounds the everyday experiential dimensions and is highly relevant in understanding the ideological and political complexities and implications of the shifting spatialities of the revolutionary period.

Waste recyclers, embodied research and planning: evidence from Guangzhou, China

The continued flow of rural migrants into cities has created major challenges for planning and urban management in China. Despite the growth of research concerning the embodied dimension of rural migrants’ urban lives, the development of integrated embodied knowledge and its significance for planning and urban management is yet to be articulated. In connection with waste recyclers in Guangzhou, a conceptual framework involving the body of power, the experiencing body and the embodied encounter is established to integrate embodied knowledge. Reflection on the ways in which rural migrants struggle to live in cities and their agency and capability is imperative to inform socially sensitive planning in a diverse and heterogeneous metropolis.

Feasting with Buddhist Women: Food Literacy in Religious Belonging

This ethnographic study shows that women’s knowledge and practices involving food in Japanese Buddhist contexts circulate as gendered currency. It emphasizes how what we term “food literacy” cultivates aesthetic and affective senses of belonging among Buddhist practitioners. We argue that this embodied knowledge helps women negotiate their experiences of Buddhism and show how these experiences articulate the complexities of their bounded and self-disciplining Buddhist selves. Women use food literacy to teach, learn, and practice the way Buddhism feels and etch it into their own and others’ emotional, social, and material bodies. By recognizing women as stewards of religion, particularly through food literacy, we also elucidate how women’s uses of mundane practices illuminate food literacy as a value carrier that generates belonging through food. Such practices can equally become sites of failure to connect if the intended recipients do not share understandings or appreciations of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of it.