Learning,Embodiment,and the Critical (Micro)Phenomenology of Embodied Social Justice

Abstract

This article explores embodied learning among practitioners of embodied social justice. Drawing on interview data with 18 participants, the study distinguishes between ‘embodied memory’ – how past moments persist to shape present attitudes and future possibilities – and ‘the remembering body’ – instances where the body speaks for itself through present tense re-experiencing. Initial ethnographic narratives revealed how participants framed learning as transformative impacts that reoriented their lives over time. Micro-phenomenological interviews then uncovered a three-phase structure of learning: impact (bodily disruption), resonance (embodied shift registration), and landing (integration and resolution). This hybrid approach, I argue, contributes to critical phenomenology’s goal of understanding lived experiences as they are situated within overlapping social, political, and historical structures of power. It further contributes to the claim, in critical phenomenology, that phenomenological inquiry can and often does afford the kind of nuanced interrogation that has the capacity to unsettle and even transform such structures.