Abstract
In Embodied Social Justice, Rae Johnson (preferred pronouns: they/them/their) puts forth embodiment praxis as a foundational framework for social justice work. A slim yet dense read, the book develops a model of “embodied critical learning and transformation” (p. 101)—with a stated focus on learning versus healing—inviting a wide range of practitioners to re/consider embodiment as core praxis. Embodiment is also intimately tied to feminist praxis throughout the text, specifically through gender-based case studies. The book asserts that somatic illiteracy within traditionally cognitive/disembodied helping professions both limits and undermines a social justice lens, particularly within fields servicing historically oppressed populations. Johnson’s third full-length publication is informed by 30 years of clinical practice and scholarship, as a social worker and somatic therapist, along with a multiyear study of their emergent embodied model.
Johnson gives readers an overview of their embodiment lens (a combination of liberation psychology, somatic science, research in nonverbal communication, and traumatology) in the introduction. The purpose of this lens and this book is 2-fold: (1) to show how bodily experience creates conditions to be empowered or disempowered in society and (2) to show how bodily experience (of clients and clinicians) reproduces social power in clinical settings.
Part I explores the “body stories” (p. 10) of four women—clients with diverse identities and the author themselves. These synopsized life-span narratives reveal complex intersectional bodily experiences of individual and collective dis/empowerment and also reveal the unique intimacy and efficacy of Johnson’s “embodied inquiry” (p. 11) mode of qualitative ethnographic research. I believe any reader will feel a desire to reflect on their own “body story” after reading just one. Moreover, Johnson’s self-inclusion underscores the book’s underlying theme of clinician accountability and intercorporeal versus interpersonal reflexivity, for socially just engagement with clients. The learning focus of the book is highlighted by discussion of main educational themes gleaned from these narratives, all illuminating the harm of disembodiment within the helping professions.
Part II is comparatively brief and conceptual, interweaving anti-oppressive and somatic theory as preparation for working with Johnson’s model. From the teachings of Paulo Freire to the science of felt sense, an astute threading of seemingly disparate modes of critical experiential pedagogy create a harmonic call for the proposed pedagogy that follows.
Part III traces Johnson’s embodied learning model, a synthesis of David Kolb’s four-stage learning cycle and Eugene Gendlin’s focusing techniques. The experience of a genderqueer graduate student is used to demonstrate the model and does so with aplomb. A conclusory guide to using the model is surprisingly brief yet gives any practitioner just enough tools to start exploring embodiment in a classroom or clinical setting. The final chapter also offers a welcome list of recommended readings, websites, trainings, and professional associations, devoted to embodiment and social justice—I happily found many new interwebbed bread crumb trails to follow.
Johnson accomplishes their goal of moving embodiment praxis from margin to center; any reader will view the body as a core site of social dis/empowerment and recognize the importance of body literacy in social justice discourse, after reading Part I alone. The framework of the book mirrors the framework of the entire methodology; and the final chapter resources, along with extensive first-person footnotes at the end of every chapter, support a pathway forward for those wishing to explore the emergent field of socially just embodiment. Moreover, the narrative-focused language is relatively accessible to practitioners outside of academia.
This book fills a critical gap in both social justice and social work texts, whose frameworks are historically cognitive based. I would love to see this text included in the graduate curriculum of all clinical mental health fields, as a way to introduce embodiment as a core issue of interdisciplinary social justice praxis. I want embodiment to replace the dominant (and domineering) care models that leave so many folks without their most deeply embodied needs ever addressed.