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Abstract

This article draws on a collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet to propose a dancing pedagogy for productive unsettlement. Developed within a sociology of consumption module, we show how art can bridge the sociological and empathic imaginations, encouraging learners to ‘feel themselves away’ from their individual experience and better reflect on the wider social structures that shape it. Ballet, an art form marked by financial, cultural and bodily exclusion, served as a lens through which learners could engage with the experience of being ‘out of place’ in confronting their own vulnerabilities and privileges in relation to structural marketplace inequalities. This fostered a transformative shift we term ‘productive unsettling’, whereby rather than accepting and staying in their place, learners were encouraged to try other places, transform place for themselves and make space for others, finding joy in the process of creating social change.

Keywords

arts dancing pedagogy discomfort embodiment empathic imagination sociology of consumption

Introduction

‘Sociology is about seeing with a new pair of eyes’ (Hjelm, 2013: 872); an objective that is central to developing students’ sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), enabling them to connect personal experiences to broader social forces, question hegemonic worldviews and understand systems of oppression. While Mills emphasised integrating the social, biographical and historical, recent work on the empathic imagination complements the sociological imagination by more fully accounting for the lived affective and embodied consequences of inequality, exclusion or privilege. Ruiz-Junco (2021: 547) defines empathic imagination as ‘the ability to enter into and share a person’s consciousness, which results in a process of understanding’. It involves engaging with another’s subjective world, not just understanding structurally why a situation exists but how it feels to inhabit it. In this article, we explore how a ‘dancing pedagogy’ can bridge both forms of imagination in the sociology classroom, fostering the emotional resonance and ethical responsibility necessary to analyse and engage with difference, vulnerability and power. By guiding students between emotional proximity and critical distance, this process supports transformative sociological pedagogy.

Various pedagogic approaches have been developed to foster such a transformative social agenda. Here, we contribute to pedagogies of discomfort (Boler, 1999) and hope (Freire, 1994) by proposing a dancing pedagogy that fosters embodied and relational learning. At the heart of our approach was a pedagogic collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB hereafter) integrated into a sociology of consumption module. To achieve the module’s learning objectives, we sought to nurture students’ sociological and empathic imaginations and prompt critical reflection on positionality, privilege and the social norms embedded within ballet, norms that mirror wider marketplace inequalities. Ballet, an art form synonymous with aesthetic perfection, celebrates agile bodies yet remains financially, culturally and physically exclusionary for many. This article asks: how can working with an art form that often leaves students feeling ‘inadequate or less than’ generate a learning experience that offers insights into structural inequalities and makes space for emotions as a catalyst for social change?

In unpacking the key tenets of dancing pedagogy, we drew inspiration from philosopher Claire Marin and her 2022 book, Being in One’s Place. Marin’s work offers a philosophical meditation that deconstructs the multiple social places we inhabit throughout our lives and especially, places of belonging. Marin challenges the notion of being ‘in place’, daring us to interrogate the places assigned to us and others, rather than simply accepting them. Through reflections on life disruptions, such as periods of illness, Marin illustrates how such experiences move us, compelling us to confront the instability of our social positioning. Displacement, in her view, becomes a source of embodied insight, exposing the hierarchical and often invisible structures that shape where and how we are allowed to belong. This displacement, we argue, offers a powerful pedagogical entry point as it invites students to confront their own dislocation within systems of value, taste and belonging. This experiential unsettlement activates the sociological imagination, by revealing the structural forces that shape consumption practices, and the empathic imagination, by fostering emotional and ethical engagement with the unequal social worlds those practices reflect and reproduce.

For Marin, displacement creates the conditions to ‘see with a new pair of eyes’, as it propels the body to seek or construct alternative spaces from which empathy and understanding can emerge. We found her reflections particularly resonant with our pedagogical use of dance. The momentary imbalance of movement, the risk of destabilising familiar body habits and the trust required to jump into the unknown all require us to move out of place. While language and discourse are usually privileged in the classroom, they alone are insufficient to do justice to the entanglements of everyday realities. Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury (2019) highlight the importance of attending to student emotions, particularly discomfort, in politicising learners and fostering social change. MacNevin (2004) highlights that learning about social inequality through the body can bring sociology to life in unconventional ways. Similarly, Gardner and McKinzie (2020) show that embodied approaches help students grasp complex concepts such as intersectionality and inequality by making them more tangible, interactive and open to nuanced interpretation. Movement can thus shift not only the body but also thoughts and emotions. It also allows for collective interrogation of the visceral affective responses that emerge when confronting difficult knowledge. We theorise this as a process of ‘productive unsettling’, which transformed students’ learning.

Whereas formal education often keeps students ‘in their place’ (Marin, 2022), our dancing pedagogy intentionally moves them ‘out of place’. In introducing our dancing pedagogy, we make four contributions to the literature on teaching sociology. First, we show how, by creating space for students to consider their own identities and social positions, whether marginalised in some way or not, a dancing pedagogy enables students to question the world around them. Second, we provide empirical data showing how experiences of discomfort and perceived exclusion can cultivate empathic imagination, allowing students to reorient from a position of disempowerment towards meaningful learning through self-insight and interpersonal connection. Third, we argue that a dancing pedagogy equips students for a rapidly changing world where it is increasingly difficult to ‘stay in our place’ and in which we need to recognise our entanglement to imagine and create social change. Here, discomfort can also generate hope for personal growth and positive social change (Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury, 2019). Finally, we contend that dance injects energy, play, risk and joy (Shuster and Westbrook, 2022) into the curriculum; offering a non-prescriptive, embodied mode of learning that enables access to a more relational ontology and embraces the generative possibilities of being out of place, possibilities that traditional, static modes of teaching often constrain.

Unsettling by Displacing: Pedagogies of Discomfort

The challenge of pursuing social justice within a neoliberal educational system is well documented. Cull et al. (2018: 23) highlight that neoliberal education promotes a ‘value free’ professional, rather than preparing students ‘to live relational lives as independent and caring people in society’. Although higher education’s original social mission was to reduce social inequalities, Holmwood (2014: 589) argues that the UK university sector has become a ‘neo-liberal knowledge regime’ increasingly complicit in widening them. Burke (2018) therefore calls for a disruption of the meritocratic myth that success is solely the result of individual effort, urging recognition of the deep structural inequalities our students face. Addressing social inequality is thus a key purpose of the sociological classroom (Ross and Rocha Beardall, 2022) and numerous studies (e.g. Bennett and Burke, 2018; Hempel-Jorgensen, 2015; Romero, 2020; Shahjahan, 2015) explore how best to do so, usually building on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1994). Hempel-Jorgensen (2015) advocates that socially just pedagogies can enhance the agency of ‘disadvantaged learners’, enabling more meaningful knowledge-construction. To implement such pedagogies, learners’ identities and previous knowledge must be validated, pedagogical power relations critically analysed and learners need to co-imagine and co-transform pedagogical (and wider social) relationships in line with the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959).

Pedagogical studies in sociology have repeatedly demonstrated that sociology is composed of ‘difficult knowledge’, which unavoidably engenders emotional responses and discomfort. To have students question hegemonic worldviews, requires that they are pushed outside of their comfort zones to allow for critical reflection. Indeed, emotion can ‘clarify our socio-political realities’ (Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury, 2019: 1034) in allowing students to recognise their privileges. Despite acknowledging the need for discomfort, how to achieve such an ‘unsettling’ within the restrictions of the neoliberal knowledge regime has received little attention.

For this unsettling to occur, we suggest that students need to feel ‘out of place’. As Marin (2022) discusses, staying in one’s place is limiting and leaving one’s place can be risky, as it requires confronting one’s assumptions and habits. The unsettling nature of critical pedagogy for students, teachers and institutions of higher education is, Fobes and Kaufman (2008) argue, the point of it. Indeed, anti-oppression pedagogies must interrogate the norms of neoliberal higher education (Shahjahan, 2015). Unsettling has also been explored in sociological methodology, notably through breaching experiments (Garfinkel, 1967), whereby social norms are intentionally violated to expose their socially constructed nature. This approach relies on a divide between insiders, who purposefully perform the unsettling, and outsiders, who are unsuspectingly subjected to it. The latter often respond with confusion or discomfort, prompted by the former’s ‘creative, mischievous or anarchic spirit’ (Stanley et al., 2020: 1267). Students have frequently been enrolled in breaching experiments, performing norm-disrupting actions to both unsettle others and, in the process, disrupt and reflect on their own taken-for-granted understandings of social reality (Braswell, 2014).

An alternative approach comes from arts-based pedagogy, a form of critical pedagogy in which artistic practices ‘educat[e] the senses and nurture[e] the imagination’ (Rieger and Chernomas, 2013: 54), helping students engage in higher levels of thinking and analysis and applying theory to their lives (Hunter and Frawley, 2023). While Hunter and Frawley (2023) used the arts to make unfamiliar theories more familiar, through film, for example, we took the opposite approach: for students to understand unfamiliar subjectivities by engaging with an art form they themselves were unfamiliar with. Rather than contextualising specific sociological theories, we sought instead to contextualise inequality as a felt experience. In this way, our arts-based pedagogy produced a ‘sense of displacement’ (Romero, 2020: 217) and unsettling.

Resettling by Embodying Alternatives: Pedagogies of Hope

If we are serious about inclusivity, our teaching must prioritise fostering relationality. While Ross and Rocha Beardall (2022) advocate for mindfulness and contemplative approaches to activate the sociological imagination in attending to feelings of discomfort and imagining alternatives, we focus on a dancing pedagogy that brings discomfort into focus in a more embodied and collective way. Mere recognition of unequal power relations is not sufficient; students must be able to challenge and reconfigure these relations through embodied self-expression in understanding how they are implicated in society. Learning sociology is therefore primarily a reflexive process and educators must cultivate students’ capacity to reflect on both themselves and others.

While many pedagogical studies aim to nurture this reflexivity, the role of the body remains underexplored, despite a few notable exceptions (Fields et al., 2021; Gardner and McKinzie, 2020). An embodied approach foregrounds the visceral presence of affect, creating space for disruptive, consciousness-raising ideas (Romero, 2020). In their teaching of intersectionality, Gardner and McKinzie (2020) argue that embodiment enables students to understand their interconnectedness and their role in the reproduction of inequality and privilege rather than just considering it abstractly. Furthermore, Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury (2019) show that collective emotionality and relationality are essential for transforming a pedagogy of discomfort into a pedagogy of hope.

In drawing attention to bodily experience, social categories of difference (such as gender, size, ability and ethnicity) are made visible and felt. MacNevin (2004: 316) shows how disrupting the body–self connection can foster a ‘hyperawareness of other’, illuminating how habitual social interactions and practices reflect societal power structures. In putting students ‘out of place’, they could glean insights into their own and others’ sensory and emotional experiences of sociological theories, making abstract concepts tangible through lived experience, an approach aligned with the empathic imagination (Ruiz-Junco, 2021). We asked students to attend to the particular ways their bodies generate knowledge, drawing on feminist, queer, critical race and disability theorists.

Following Ross and Rocha Beardall (2022: 263), we incorporated ‘embodiment as a key contemplative teaching tool for addressing what some have called the “sociology depression” (Yogan, 2015)’. Through a ‘dancing for learning’ pedagogic approach, we sought to help students question their own subject positionings, providing them with tools to understand why they may feel ‘out of place’ in specific situations and to discover themselves through experiencing the places of others. In doing so, we resisted the notion of knowledge as fixed or fully attainable, instead framing it as fluid, evolving and inherently incomplete. In the next section, we outline the structure of the module and detail our methodology to show how our dancing pedagogy was implemented in practice.

The Study: A Collaborative Choreography

This article draws on data from a wider study conducted in the UK within a postgraduate sociology of consumption module, developed and delivered in collaboration with the BRB. The module took place over 11 weeks in 2022–2023 and involved 265 students, 90% of whom were international. The learning objectives aimed to examine the role and impact of consumption practices on markets, individuals and society through multiple perspectives (socio-cultural, ethical, political, as well as economic). Theoretical content included sociological theory on taste formation and status-seeking, alongside critical theories of race, class, gender and disability. These frameworks were applied to explore marketplace access, exclusion and the reproduction of social inequalities and hierarchies in consumer experiences.

Numerous practice-based activities were interwoven throughout the module to complement lectures and readings (see Online Appendix A for more on the course structure). These included: guest lectures from the BRB’s management team, close observation of two professional ballet performances, voice coaching and, a dance workshop led by the BRB’s dancers, where students acted as both performers and choreographers, encouraged to build creative confidence and explore emotion through embodied practice. In actively co-choreographing the dance workshop, students could further consider their own identity as part of the group, analysing and deconstructing power relations in a visceral, physical way. Granting the body presence within the educational context enhanced students’ sense of accountability (Shilling, 2017). To further support empathic understanding, the module incorporated a variety of embodied and reflective creative practices including inspiration walks, collage, poetry, journaling, meditations and design thinking. This diversity of approaches allowed the students to explore theory through different modalities, providing them with new perspectives to question their realities. This aligns with Shilling’s (2017) anti-Cartesian body pedagogic approach, which positions learning as fundamentally embodied while recognising that thought and reflexivity contribute to and are inseparable from physical experience.

Unlike traditional breaching experiments, which rely on surprise and discomfort to expose social norms, our approach did not involve uninformed subjects or seek to intentionally induce trouble (Burns, 2023; Lynch, 2023) through staged disruptions to subordinate others’ discomfort for the benefit of our students’ edification. Braswell (2014) observes that breaching experiments are not always thoughtfully designed, while Stanley et al. (2020: 1252) caution that they can lead to ‘potentially distressing consequences’. We therefore reflected on our responsibility in causing discomfort. Rather than an experiment, our dancing pedagogy offered an immersive, reflective experience in which discomfort was collectively explored, not as a sudden rupture in everyday life, but as an ongoing, embodied experience within the privileged context of ballet. In line with Braswell (2014) we therefore took care to consider the impact of unsettling, prioritising informed participation from the outset, clearly communicating the nature and purpose of the activities that extended beyond conventional classroom practices.

We designed the module with an ethics of care, aiming to foster critical reflection on inequality and vulnerability. This included building in ‘holding spaces’ for decompression and reflection, acknowledging the emotional intensity the module could provoke. Moreover, the students danced in private, not public, settings, an environment that, as De Welde and Hubbard (2003) suggest, can make norm-challenging experiences even more transformative. While workshop attendance was compulsory, dancing was not, yet all students chose to participate, with some even joining additional workshops. Throughout the module, we openly discussed the norms being challenged and engaged in collective reflection on the unsettling process.

The teaching team intentionally participated in both the voice and dance workshops, often taking instruction from students, thereby reversing typical classroom power dynamics and shifting the pedagogical ‘gaze’ (Hemy and Meshulam, 2021). This was a conscious effort to flatten hierarchies and cultivate a more horizontal relationship through shared vulnerability – physical, emotional and intellectual. However, this also generated reflexive discomfort (Pillow, 2003), as we navigated the tension between decentring our authority and the ongoing responsibility of assessing students’ work, some of which contributed to our research, highlighting the persistence of traditional hierarchies.

This manuscript draws on the analysis of two of the three assignments for the module. The first was a task in which students responded to a brief set by the BRB to develop strategies for engaging a more diverse audience. Working in teams, students presented their recommendations to the BRB, applying sociological insights to enrich their understanding of ballet’s audience and, crucially, those individuals from the wider community who do not attend. This involved considering subjective and emotional responses to ballet, as well as thinking through the current barriers to attendance. In focusing on the BRB and its potential audiences, students engaged with context-relevant and local ways of knowing, acknowledging themselves as carriers of accumulated experience rather than as tabula rasa (Burawoy, 2004). The second assignment involved individual reflective diaries in which students documented their learning. Gardner and McKinzie (2020) suggest that journaling or reflective pieces are particularly suited to enabling students to attach sociological ideas to uniquely experienced realities and explore nuanced interpretations of difficult concepts.

Full ethical approval was granted by the University of Birmingham’s ethics committee. All students enrolled in the module received full information about the research and were asked for consent for their assessments to be included in the dataset. Of the 265 students who took the module, 107 consented to participate. The resulting assignment dataset equated to approximately 1800 pages of double-spaced text. Data were analysed using a thematic approach. In the first stage, we familiarised ourselves with the data through multiple close readings of the assignment scripts, before generating initial codes and searching for patterns across the dataset. Qualitative critical thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was well suited to our study as it allowed us to identify and interpret complex and layered reflections, capturing the emotional, embodied and intellectual responses elicited by this unconventional pedagogical experience. All three authors engaged in an iterative process in which data collection, coding and analysis occurred simultaneously and reflexively informed one another. Each author initially engaged in independent interpretation and analysis of the multiple data sources, before coming together to discuss and refine emergent themes collaboratively, taking an abductive approach (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014) in moving between data and theory. A focus on the emotional aspect of unsettling emerged early in the process.

The coding process employed a hybrid approach, combining theory-driven and data-driven strategies (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006). It was informed by the theoretical insights of Marin (2022), while remaining grounded in the empirical data. We identified key moments that encapsulated the depth and complexity of students’ experiences and learning throughout the module and systematically encoded these to support further interpretation (Boyatzis, 1998). Latent codes were developed and refined to capture underlying meanings and then re-analysed to generate broader themes. These themes were guided by resonant emotional trajectories, particularly fear, inadequacy, growth and learning, as conceptualised by Saldaña (2020). See Online Appendix B for a summary of our coding framework. We draw on illustrative excerpts from students’ assignments to structure our conceptualisation of productive unsettling, focusing on the discomfort and vulnerability associated with feeling out of place, as well as the subsequent emergence of more expansive and productive learning spaces.

From in Place to out of Place

When individuals or groups are unable to participate in market-based activities or repeatedly encounter the care-less marketplace (Hutton, 2019), they are made acutely aware of their place, often resulting in exclusion, stigma and self-exclusion. This creates a sense of powerlessness and shame. Conversely, for others, knowing one’s place may offer comfort, safety and a sense of competence and success. If everyone knows and remains in their place, the established sense of order is retained (Marin, 2022). From this place of relative stability and comfort, however, it can be difficult to access and understand the experience of others who are excluded. It is this tension that our collaboration with the BRB sought to address, developing students’ empathic imagination through embodied engagement with structural inequalities and social hierarchies, while reinforcing Mills’ (1959) insight that no social experience exists in isolation.

From the outset, this module was different in its approach, activity and expectations. It asked students to move out of place, both physically and intellectually. As P1¹ recorded in their diary, this was not how they were used to a module proceeding: ‘At first, I thought this course would follow the rules.’ Their response to being out of place was a feeling of discomfort and awkwardness (Boler, 1999). This response arose from a disruption in the usual classroom order and structure, which many students had assumed to be natural. Faced with unfamiliar collaborations, unexpected activities and an ethos that challenged conventional pedagogical norms, students began to experience a sense of displacement. As P76 reflected: ‘I have kind of lost track of what I am learning and become more confused. I would expect this class to lead us through theories and practices of consumption, but it is not like this.’ Such expressions of confusion and unease were echoed across reflective diaries: ‘When I first attended this module, I was nervous. I was daunted by the prospect of the ballet and what would be expected of me in terms of engagement with it’ (P46).

Feelings of discomfort can provoke resistance, prompting students to cling to the familiar and remain ‘in place’, an expression of inertia and unwillingness to embrace the unfamiliar (Marin, 2022). Early in the module, doing things differently led to consternation, unhappiness and even the voicing of complaints. The focus on ballet only amplified this discomfort:

I felt that I would not enjoy [ballet] as it was not meant for someone like me to enjoy. . . I grew up in a very class-conscious household, where based on only traditional views, things were dictated as either for ‘people like us’ or ‘not for people like us’. (P4)

At the start of the module, I was a reluctant participant as the topic of ballet did not appeal to me, partly due to the unconscious bias that I held as a young heterosexual male. While growing up and attending an all-boys school, it was clear that boys should be sporty and it was socially unacceptable amongst my peers to have an interest in the arts, especially ballet. (P74)

Perceptions that ballet is not ‘for people like us’ or even ‘unacceptable’, echo patterns of self-exclusion commonly found in the narratives of those who experience marginalisation (Hutton, 2019). Many students had previously dismissed ballet due to negative experiences with it, feeling ‘put in their place’ by barriers related to cost, class, physicality, gender or personal interest.

While remaining in place within the classroom offers comfort and efficiency (Bennett and Burke, 2018), it risks limiting reflection and self-discovery for both students and educators (Marin, 2022). Being out of place allowed students to see their place from a critical distance, with curiosity and fresh eyes (Preece et al., 2023). Dislocation reveals how personal experiences intersect with wider concerns. In contrast to the rigidity of remaining in place, being out of place is pregnant with possibility (Hempel-Jorgensen, 2015). Our module was designed to embrace being out of place, gently pushing students to combat educational rigidity through literal movement, stimulating curiosity and critical thinking in the process (Gardner and McKinzie, 2020), and recognising and recording their discomfort while exploring the reasons for it:

When watching the performance, I felt bored and awkward, largely due to the fact that I was different from the majority of the audience in terms of demographics. I was unfamiliar with specific ballet techniques and conventions, thus making it difficult for me to fully engage with and appreciate the performance. . . Additionally, the fact that the majority of the audience was composed of women and older individuals created a sense of disconnection and discomfort as I felt that my presence as a young male was out of place. (P74)

Our use of arts-based pedagogy did not aim for mastery but rather, sought to embrace the vulnerability of being out of place. As P86 described in their reflection, it ‘wasn’t about whether or not I was good’. Instead, students were encouraged to experiment with more contemplative ways of moving, dishabituating them from familiar ways of learning and slowing the pace of education (Shahjahan, 2015). The resistance that arose from being out of place was productive in sociological terms as most of what students disliked about ballet was rooted in socio-cultural structures such as social class, gender representation, race or ableism:

My instinctive response to the ballet was one of subconscious aversion, which I did not fully realise at the time. I now realise that this was due to my association with the ballet as an activity catering purely towards the wealthy. (P4)

As students reflected on this displacement in their diaries, an inherent tension between the known and the unknown emerged. In embracing not knowing, new forms of knowledge became available, making them more active learners (Hempel-Jorgensen, 2015). For example, this process of unsettlement made visible students’ own privilege: ‘As a white male, I have never properly understood how certain products and services can be inaccessible to people’ (P74). Rather than a fixed ‘how to’ recipe, the module offered a lived laboratory in which students were invited to sit with their discomfort, become more accepting of it (Bennett and Burke, 2018; Cull et al., 2018; Shahjahan, 2015) and open up to the learning it could provoke:

My first diary entry about this experience was very raw and cynical. That was the moment when I was unwilling to open myself to this art form, assuming I could never gain interest in it. However, the ‘pushing’ aspect was that the module was more practical than theoretical. So, I had to give this art form as well as myself a chance. (P13)

Despite being out of place, or perhaps because of it, ballet allowed students to access new emotional repertoires and attune themselves to these emotions as P21 illustrated: ‘each movement presented on stage requires countless hours of practice and repetition to convey to the audience the proper emotion of the dance. This may be a truth I need to learn in my studies and my life.’ In disrupting ‘business as usual’ in the classroom and encouraging students to recognise moments of dislocation, through, for example, reflective meditative guides and body mapping, students could question their own belongingness and surface broader issues of accessibility and inclusion in society, including at the ballet.

Making Space for the Empathic Imagination

As Marin (2022) suggests, staying in one’s place can limit our ability to understand the position of others. She argues that the point of life is to be destabilised, displaced and dislodged so that we may discover capacities within ourselves previously unknown. P10 evidences this in practice:

The way I typically learn was redefined in this course, it allowed us to experience things we had never even considered or dared to, rather than just using slides and textbooks to deliver presentations. . . To fully comprehend something, one must put oneself in the shoes of the subject in order to interact with them. As I worked on the assignments for this course, I felt that my creativity had increased and that I had many imaginative ideas that I had never considered.

Students’ reflections revealed a shift from being out of place to making space (Marin, 2022), both for themselves and for others, cultivating new empathy paths or orientations (Ruiz-Junco, 2017) to understand and relate to those around them:

This adventure in the world of ballet definitely taught me a lot about the relationship we have with others, about our place in a group, in society itself. It was the first time I had worked in this way. It was not a question of discussing theory with my classmates, but of collecting points of view, opinions and feelings. You discover the variety of ways of thinking that are specific to each person, because yes, not everyone thinks like me. I can finally say that I understood the analytical concept of empathy that the professors talked about. By diving into the heads of others, we question ourselves, we forget ourselves, to make a little more room for the Other, and that is always enriching. (P92)

By recognising and working through challenging emotions of unsettlement, students became more aware of and able to connect to others, both those close to them and those whose experiences were vastly different as per the empathic imagination (Ruiz-Junco, 2021):

This module has many challenges for me as I am used to traditional teaching styles. For example, one question that has been bothering me for a long time is, ‘what is data?’ The conventional way of thinking about data is numbers, information collected through questionnaires or interviews. However, now I understand that feelings are also data, and some insights can be extracted from them (Petriglieri, 2014). After embracing this way of thinking, my learning became apparent. I began to focus on my own feelings and those of others, and I discovered my own values and the tension between the dancer, audience and self. (P11)

Engaging the body created a means of thinking and acting, which included, rather than excluded, re-orientating students towards the needs and vulnerabilities of others.

Students’ reflections were deeply personal, revealing moments of vulnerability, empathy for loved ones or imaginative engagement with the lives of strangers who may not share their privileges. For instance, having Evangelos Avgoulas, a visually impaired Greek lawyer and activist, share his everyday experiences navigating the marketplace deepened students’ emotional connection to issues of accessibility and inclusion. These emotions were central to the learning process and are richly documented across the data:

This session was very insightful and eye-opening for me (bringing) back the feeling of being treated weirdly and labelled skinny and then the miserable journey of fighting it. I could picture what it must be like for people with disabilities to battle societal, corporate and individual preconceptions. (P8)

Avgoulas reminded me of my dad. He practised law for over 25 years. Unfortunately, he had a stroke five years ago. Thankfully, he pulled through. However, he was in a dreadful state afterwards since he couldn’t use his right side in any way, even to talk. Formerly a busy lawyer who went to court every day and met a bunch of people, he now seldom spoke and moved at all. Physiotherapy has helped him make progress. But now, he has lost all trust in himself. He lacked the confidence to talk with anybody, least of all his co-workers or clients. After today’s lecture, I finally understood my father’s frustration over the past five years. I can imagine how he had trouble using public transportation and entering several facilities since they were not accessible to those with disabilities. People’s pitying looks just made things worse. I couldn’t help but message my dad about today’s class during the session. (P15)

While guest lectures offer valuable perspectives, we argue that such insights become significantly more impactful when students have already been pedagogically unsettled and can therefore make space for others by decentring the self.

Dancing for Joy: An Aesthetic Ethics of Inclusion through Discomfort

As we have shown, engaging with an art form like ballet brought students into embodied contact with their own sense of not belonging and in occupying this peripheral position, students became more attuned to the absence of others similarly excluded. Group 45 noted in their presentation, it was only when they discussed their own emotional responses to ballet that they recognised a shared experience: ‘crucially, [we] all shared the feeling that the demographics in the audience weren’t diverse, to the point that [we] felt OUT OF PLACE and it felt NON-INCLUSIVE’. While this emotionality prompted critical reflection on how to infuse fairness and inclusivity within the field of consumption, it paradoxically also resulted in a sense of joy: ‘I was not expecting to enjoy the world of ballet as much as I have, although it is somewhat marred by my new understanding of the inequalities in this’ (P4). Scarry (1998: 79), suggests that ‘aesthetic fairness’ generates ‘a state of delight in [one’s] own lateralness’. Aesthetic fairness is the felt ethical impulse awakened by the experience of beauty, compelling individuals to recognise and create conditions of justice and inclusivity, which P8 illustrates: ‘The ballet experience taught me that attempting to get involved and participate in things can change your perspective on them. . . [this participation] involves the emotions, moral values, sense of justice and injustice, of authenticity and inauthenticity.’ Similarly, P10 also shared: ‘I have discovered that performance art seems to be more than simply a performance; it also has the potential to provide healing, change and even inspire fresh ideas.’

While discomfort when learning about inequalities may be unavoidable (Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury, 2019) and arts-based pedagogies are particularly effective in creating displacement and discomfort (Romero, 2020), our data reveal that art provides moments of joy and fun. Above all, it was working with ballet that generated a source of joy. Although students often find group work daunting or conflictual, and many initially expressed hesitation, if not resistance, towards the collaboration with the BRB, their reflections revealed unexpected enjoyment: ‘the dancing workshop was soothing. All the participants are either vibing or smiling, I enjoyed it a lot’ (P1). P59 summarised the ‘module’s atmosphere as warm and free’. Critical sociological inquiry exposes the hidden structures underpinning socio-economic injustice; in contrast, dance, as an aesthetic practice, introduces a sense of inspirational joy that eases the difficulty of confronting feelings of displacement or self-exclusion:

As I took my seat in the audience, the first thing that sprang to my mind was that it would be uninteresting. I was completely incorrect. As soon as the music started and the dancers took the stage, I was completely taken aback. Despite the fact that I had little understanding of the ballet techniques, storylines, or songs played by the orchestra, I was astonished because of the performance. The day I watched ballet for the first time has personally taught me a deep appreciation for all types of artistic expression. Isn’t it the point of art to make people more benevolent and appreciative of others and their experiences? (P14)

If, as Shuster and Westbrook (2022) suggest, there is a ‘joy deficit’ in sociological scholarship, it is unsurprising that this extends into the teaching of sociology, particularly when addressing marginalisation and exclusion. Introducing joy into the classroom and specifically the joy of being displaced, can facilitate relational bonds, deepen emotional engagement and encourage students to embrace the unknown:

Brainstorming about love, friends, family, pets, nature, music, etc. is a satisfying way to work up the brain and activate the heart. All we have studied in our undergraduate days and now postgraduate days are theories from books and articles. We hardly get to learn something from the things we love and enjoy deeply. . . In this case, ballet tells a story that makes the audience stand on their feet post-show. The strength of an art form [capable] to connect to every age, race, gender, etc., with its theatrical display of movements is what every workshop tried to teach us. (P13)

As our findings demonstrate, joy can be pregnant with possibilities to ‘activate the heart’ and gather the courage needed to meaningfully engage with social inequalities:

After seeing the ballet, I started to think a lot about body image, diversity and inclusion. I thought about how incredible the ballet dancers looked and, in a way, I compared myself to them. I read around these topics extensively and I was extremely saddened to find how much people of colour were excluded from the industry. Until recently, dancers of colour had to dye their ballet shoes to match their skin tone as the traditional light pink was the only colour available, I did not understand how it has taken this long to make more coloured shoes. Learning about the level of discrimination within this industry made me think about the privileged position I am in and how I subconsciously overlook the extent of discrimination others face. This journey has made me realise we all need to take account for the way people are treated in society. Within the ballet industry more needs to be done to include non-Eurocentric looking dancers. (P82)

Teaching in an embodied, intimate and joyful way supported students to think and feel the significance of otherness, while also recognising their own vulnerabilities. This joyful engagement surfaced previously unacknowledged aspects of the self and cultivated a ‘hyperawareness of other’ (MacNevin, 2004: 316), alongside a growing willingness to ‘help’, putting an emphasis on action and social responsibility (Hironius-Wendt and Wallace, 2009).

We observed expressions of collective joy and enthusiasm for social transformation across the data, particularly when students bridged their empathic imagination (feelings of exclusion) with their sociological imagination (structural understanding). For instance, Group 45 proposed a partnership between the BRB and underprivileged schools in the local area to promote ‘INCLUSIVITY and the JOY of children discovering something they enjoy before society can influence their idea of who should attend ballet’. Their toolkit to achieve this revealed their understanding of macro-structural barriers and a desire to extend the joy of dance to others, especially in light of students’ own memories of childhood exclusion. The effects that this understanding of self and others had on students’ worldviews are captured in the data. They found hope for personal growth and positive social change (Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury, 2019): ‘thanks to this module, I experienced a transformational change, acknowledging my tribulations allowed me to be more empathic, compassionate and sensitive’ (P95).

We hope that this understanding of how wider social structures intersect with personal lives, both their own and those of others, will remain with students as they progress through the education system and beyond:

I discovered a new way to feel the world [. . .]. This module gave me a new view of how to experience and consider the world through emotions, visuals, sounds and creativity. As a result, I feel more a part of the world than ever before. ‘The world is your oyster’, as the old saying goes, and ballet is your new instrument. (P21)

Our unsettling engagements enabled a productivity that extends beyond the neoliberal sphere’s focus on metrics and attainment. Armed with new ‘instruments’ for understanding the world, students could connect their empathic imagination to future acts of solidarity (Cull et al., 2018).

Discussion: Reclaiming Productivity in Education

The transformative breakthroughs needed for productive learning are surprising, messy and uncomfortable. They require learners to deconstruct existing beliefs and make sense of new ones to enable growth. The current higher education system does a good job of imparting knowledge as per the status quo. However, we argue that teaching is more than just the emotionally detached impartation of knowledge (Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury, 2019). Our dancing pedagogy opens up a wider perspective for learners to go beyond the status quo and imagine alternative possibilities for a drastically changing, uncertain world. This involves not only embracing the unknown but also letting go of fixed assumptions to make space for other perspectives (Preece et al., 2023) and generate new empathy paths (Ruiz-Junco, 2017). Through our conceptualisation of dancing pedagogy, we introduce ‘productive unsettling’ as a method for moving students out of place, a process that supports the development of both their sociological (Mills, 1959) and empathic (Ruiz-Junco, 2017) imaginations. This enables students to better recognise, question and understand what it feels like to be affected by structural inequalities in the marketplace.

If the university is to be a space for critical thought and transformative becoming, then a different type of productivity is needed, one that embraces unsettling. We suggest that while unsettling can come from many practices that move students beyond their comfort zones, the arts are particularly well suited for unsettling for a number of reasons. First, art has a particularly close relationship with imagination. Although some sociological studies have considered the value of arts-based pedagogies (e.g. Hunter and Frawley, 2023), it is striking how little attention has been given to the role of the arts in nurturing the imagination. The arts offer alternative vantage points from which to view the world; serving as a powerful medium for reframing existing discourses, exposing hidden power structures and destabilising taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions.

Second, the arts are useful to embody emotional responses and also for channelling them. Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury (2019) stress the need to consider emotionality in teaching sociology, particularly given the focus on emotionally charged contexts such as inequalities. Our data show that students grappled with discomforting experiences, often triggered by a deliberate disruption to conventional learning formats as they were asked to step out of their usual place as passive students in lectures. This discomfort, grounded in social categories such as class, race or gender, surfaced with notable emotional intensity. We found the embodiment and sensemaking inherent in the artistic experience particularly suited to unsettling. In their study of ex-dancers’ lived experiences, Wainwright and Turner (2006: 237–239) note that dance, especially ballet, has been ‘a neglected topic in the sociology of the body’ despite being a ‘paradigm case of embodiment’. Pain, they note, runs through all ballet biographies and in interrupting a ‘business as usual’ approach to life, creates space for the development of new skills. Bodily sensation becomes a powerful site of learning, as the social and material world is incorporated into the embodied subject (see also Shilling, 2017). In actively introducing discomfort into the design of the module to provoke reflection on inequality, we found that new body-centred ways of seeing, sensing and feeling emerged, serving as guiding forces for social awareness and transformation, the very aims of sociological teaching and learning.

Third, the beauty of the arts and their inherent relationality offer powerful opportunities for productive unsettling in education. Artistic encounters can interrupt comfortable places of knowing, inviting students to collectively rethink and find shared comfort in discomfort. The arts are uniquely suited to foster joy in our own peripheral positions on the margins (Scarry, 1998). Dance with its transitions that disturb balance and introduce ‘unnatural’ and uncomfortable gestures, creates space for unexpectedly rewarding discoveries. As Ditzel Facci (2020: 8) illustrates in her work on dancing for peace-making, movement can facilitate a better understanding of ‘intrapersonal and relational dynamics’ and ‘cultivate resonance to notice imbalances in system’s energies’. Dance’s capacity to attune to social imbalances brings urgent social issues to the fore, inspiring action for social change. Through this interplay of pain and discomfort but also beauty and joy, the arts invite students into critical self-reflection. It helps them recognise points of connection with others (Ruiz-Junco, 2021) and develop richer understandings of marginalisation, both their own and others’.

The arts thus offer transformative potential, a mixture of discomfort and joy that produces moments of mutual vulnerability. It is this joy that, as Connelly and Joseph-Salisbury (2019) show, can move a pedagogy of discomfort into a pedagogy of hope. We therefore present our dancing pedagogy as a means of fostering empathy and restoring students’ agency over their learning, resulting in diversity of voice. We contribute to the conceptualisation of the empathic imagination by building on Ruiz-Junco’s (2021) work and showing how attention to affective and subjective lived experience, how social life feels, complements the longstanding aims of the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) to reveal systemic social structures (see Online Appendix C for a more detailed comparison). Significantly, we note that this includes being open to the unexpected joy that can arise from marginal perspectives (Shuster and Westbrook, 2022) while raising important ethical questions about for whom empathy is extended or withheld (Ruiz-Junco, 2023). By drawing on Marin’s ideas of displacement, we show how the arts can help bridge both forms of imagination, offering both emotional perspectives and structural understanding for social change.

Whereas a focus on productivity might seem aligned with neoliberal education policies that individualise and decontextualise difficulties students may be facing (Bennett and Burke, 2018), we return to the original meaning of the word as ‘fertile, producing abundantly’ to reclaim productivity from this neoliberal discourse. In Online Appendix D, we offer a more detailed rationale and a pedagogical companion for reclaiming productivity in sociological education, elaborating on the wider applicability of our contributions. We argue that the most transformative form of productivity in education is not measured by output but by the embodied, aesthetic awakening of a deeper sense of fairness.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-soc-10.1177_00380385261416323 – Supplemental material for Encountering Social Inequalities through Productive Unsettling

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-soc-10.1177_00380385261416323 for Encountering Social Inequalities through Productive Unsettling by Pilar Rojas-Gaviria, Chloe Preece and Emma Surman in Sociology

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Pilar Rojas-Gaviria

Chloe Preece

Emma Surman

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Pilar Rojas-Gaviria is Professor of Marketing at Kedge Business School. Her research draws on sociology, literature and philosophy to explore consumption-related phenomena and their embodied experiences using qualitative methods, including arts-based approaches. She is particularly interested in embodied methodologies, such as poetising and dance, which enrich critical discovery, unlearning and collaboration.

Chloe Preece is Professor of Marketing at ESCP Business School. Her research is in the field of marketing, specifically marketing within the arts and creative industries. To date this research has focused on production and consumption issues in the arts and how this translates into social, cultural and economic value. She is currently chair of the Arts, Heritage, Non-profit and Social Marketing Special Interest Group of the Academy of Marketing.

Emma Surman is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at University of Birmingham. Her research falls broadly within the sociology of consumption and examines issues of sustainability and responsibility. She is currently focused on food consumption among young people during times of transition, the use of creative methodologies to decolonise research and education and developing forms of nature-based learning in the business school.

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