Bodies have been a reappearing theme throughout this thesis. In Chapter 3 bodies emerged as a central focal point to explore an alternative perspective to the dominant skills discourse that pervades both vocational and transitional policy in the UK (e.g. Payne, 1999; Ainley, 1993). Bodies were also discussed as important symbolic, physical, economic and cultural resources within the occupational and educational contexts within the Performing Arts (Chapter 4). It was suggested in Chapter 5 that directing empirical and theoretical focus on bodies would have potential to expand and enhance the most sophisticated and promising contemporary typology of transition: life-as-transition (e.g. Colley, 2007; Gale & Parker, 2012). At this juncture (Chapter 6) the term bodies-in-transition was introduced, exposing my motivation to directly explore the role of corporeality in student transition. In this introduction the body was vaguely understood not as a physical substance but rather as the amalgamation of ongoing social and biological processes (Blackman, 2008). My rationale for positioning bodies at the centre of the transition process is to better explore the poorly understood messiness of transition in VE (see Chapter 1).
Despite the attention that bodies have received in the various reviews, a concrete definition of the ‘body’ has been deliberately avoided until now. In part this was because I see value in understanding bodies-in-transition from a wide range of competing perspectives. Mainly, however, it was because throughout the thesis the range of studies cited contained different (implicit and explicit) ontological convictions regarding what the body is and what its relations are with society. In the context of the Performing Arts, for example, artistic bodies were seen as: (1) precarious bodies, or to “live in the condition of an imperilled livelihood, decimated
infrastructure and accelerating precarity” (Butler, 2015, p.10);
(2) productive bodies, or to be connected within wider fields of cultural production (e.g. Bourdieu, 1993);
(3) and as individualised bodies, or to “stand as examples of the process of individualism” (Nixon & Crewe, p.131).
Each of these brief characterisations assumes the body to be shaped by and act in society through relations. It is not only in the reviewed fields (such as transitional theory, VE, skills discourse & performance cultures) where a cohesive, fixed or tangible description of the body is lacking. Scholars have argued that the body has been, and remains, one of the most elusive and
contested concepts in sociology (e.g. Williams & Bendelow, 1998; Shilling, 2005) . This is not 17 to imply, however, that there were no suitable foundations to build upon. Whilst I found it challenging to pin down what the body is and how it may act as a focal point from which student transition can be explored, a broad notion of embodiment provided a stable enough basis to begin theorising on bodies-in-transition. The working theory espoused in this Chapter, therefore, was built upon a general notion that students are not merely a composition of fleshy tissue but “embodied, with pasts and futures, habits and beliefs, emotions and identities, hopes and fears [and so on]” (Barker & Bailey, 2015, p.42). Clearly, then, from this perspective an image of the embodied student is not one of a biological body stripped of emotion, thought and ties to the world. Bodies-in-transition are not mouldable empty shells or some sort of transforming sinewy vehicle that the student gets in and drives. Simply put, students are not just thinking things but bodies that also move, do, experience and become.
A theory of embodiment makes available important paradigms in a number of academic disciplines, such as anthropology (Csordas, 1988), psychology (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) and sociology (Shilling, 2005; 2007; Howson & Inglis, 2001). Within and between each academic tradition, embodiment encloses multiple insightful theoretical perspectives (Evans & Davis, 2011) and has not been confined to homogeneous subject matters or disciplines. In sociological terms, embodiment was defined “as the mode by which human beings practically engage with and apprehend the world” (Abercrombie, Hill, & Turner, 2006 p.128). Within this definition, embodiment represents the experiences, expressions and actions of people as they participate in educational, social and occupational milieus. Yet the specific method and the conceptual apparatus from which social scientists make sense of embodied individuals and the embodiment of collectives remains highly contested (Shilling, 2007). In acknowledging the lack of agreement regarding how to bridge gaps between minds, bodies and society, embodiment might be best described as general ontology of the body. That is, an ontology anchoring a variety of social theories.
For example, in sociology the body has been described as “a fleshy organic entity and 17
a natural symbol of society; the primordial basis of our being-in-the-world and the discursive product of disciplinary technologies of power/knowledge; an ongoing structure of lived experience and the foundational basis of rational consciousness; the wellspring of human emotionality and the site of numerous ‘cyborg’ couplings; a physical vehicle for personhood and identity and the basis from which social institutions, organisations and structures are forged” (Williams & Bendelow, 1998, p.2). Empirical work
Accordingly, a theory of embodiment has been influential in a variety of sociological subdisciplines which shed light on the relationships between corporeality and culture. While I see little benefit expanding on this here, scholars have sought to map the role of embodiment within strands of structuralist, post-structuralist, phenomenological and feminist thought (see Shilling, 2005, 2008; 2012; Grosz, 1994; Sheets-Johnstone, 2009). Distinct strands of thought can contest one another occasionally in incompatible ways. Since the corporeal turn in the 1990s, the elusive nature of the body has only intensified when examined by sociologists (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009). The useful but inconsistent ways in which branches of sociology have come to understand and treat the embodied subject reveal “the ‘problem’ of human embodiment” in social theory (Williams & Bendelow, 1998, p. 9). Despite this, one ontological assertion transcends the diverse strands of thought. Expanding on this assertion can help to paint a picture of the embodied student. Properties that by extension can be assigned to bodies-in- transition.
Fundamentally, the notion of embodiment starts with a rejection of Cartesian dualisms (Williams & Bendelow, 1998) and continues to work towards collapsing dualisms between subject and object (Csordas, 1988). As a general ontology, embodiment is uncomfortable with conceptual dualisms preferring instead dualities, pluralities and multiplicities. Whilst noting that this is consistent with the foundations of bodies-in-transition as illustrated in 5.1, these ontological commitments require an imagination that requires researchers to think beyond established binaries in sociology. It was this type of theorising which enabled a number of properties to be assigned to the embodied student.
The first of these characteristics is that the mind and body of the embodied student are not distinct, nor can they be disentangled analytically. As such, this student does not merely exist as a thinking thing, res cogitans, that has and controls its physical form, res extensa. The embodied student does not put her body to use in various ways throughout her transition. A hierarchy between students’ mental capacities to ‘think’, ‘choose’ and ‘understand’ set against their physical abilities to ‘act’, ‘move’ and ‘feel’ cannot be established. Alternatively, students do not
have a body but are their bodies . The embodied student thinks as they feel, moves as they 18 understand, and acts as they chose and so on. These are not separate and distinct elements of embodiment. Furthermore they are intimately entangled with collective socio-material process beyond that individuals’ skin . 19
In returning to a more sociological concern of the embodied student, Shilling’s (2012) conceptualisation of the social body bears fruit for this study of student transition. From a position that is entrenched in the paradigm of embodiment, Shilling conceptualised ‘the body’ as,
a socio-natural phenomenon possessed of emergent properties and capacities which over time constitutes an ongoing source of society as well as being a location for the structures and contours of the social environment (ibid, pp. 249-250)
This statement, as well as Shilling’s wider writings on embodiment (e.g. 2005, 2008, 2012), provided some substance from which to understand ‘the body’ - that is, the type of body at the centre of bodies-in-transition. His notion of the body avoids thinking of corporeality in terms of an entity as such. Instead, he favours an understanding of the body as a socio-natural phenomenon. In this respect, Shilling offered a view of the body in which it is both a “medium” and “location” for society simultaneously. The flesh as a medium, location and unbounded phenomenon means that bodies are “processes which extend into and are immersed the world” (Blakman, 2012, p.1). At this point of confluence the body truly is in transition. Therefore, by paying sustained attention to students’ embodiment equates to a rigorous examination of their transitions. To illustrate these processes of embodiment is to depict the entire student in transition: their mind, their body, their senses, their emotions, their pasts and their futures. Shilling’s broad and encompassing view of the body enables a realisation of transition (that is absent within the field, see Chapter 5) because “it is by living in, attending to, and working on our bodies that we become fully embodied beings” (2008, p.2).
This line paraphrases Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenological reflections regarding 18
what the body is. In one such reflection Merleau-Ponty came to realise that we do not
have a body but “we are our body” (p.239).
Leder's (1990) reflections on the lived body (drawn upon in 6.1. to introduce bodies- 19
The conceptualisation of the body above is one that is able to house various analyses of the embodied student. It constructs a stable enough foundation to explore the body in transition whilst avoiding biological reductionism and inverted Cartesianism representations (Shilling, 2012). In building upon these foundations, the body cannot be understood as a substance (or entity). Instead it must always be recognised as “a multi-dimensional medium” (Shilling, 2012, p.210) or as a meeting point for multiples processes of embodiment. Determinism and an unbounded lightness of the body without external influence have to be rejected here as well because both societies and bodies are possessive of ‘emergent properties’ (ibid). These can create directions anew or change the determined course of transition. Change and continuity over time are built into these embodied arrangements, and therefore so is a notion of transition. It is in these theoretical spaces where the embodied student lives; it is where bodies-in-transition come into life; it is how they remain in the world after the body ceases to materially exist. These are spaces afforded through a Corporeal Realist approach.