Gut Feelings. Pedagogies for Embodied Knowledge

Abstract

Peripheries have been exposed to the extraction of wealth, resources, and labour, leaving behind broken relationalities with the land and within communities, and burdening marginal territories with the disposal of waste matter. How the disciplines of architecture and design are taught, reinforce and amplify the disconnect between and from culture and nature. As researchers and educators, how can we propose pedagogical methods to forefront socio-ecological relations, stimulate acting, and enable inhabiting among compromised worlds? We propose three other ways to access knowledge and encourage young designers to reground their practice. First, following dirty traces (Frichot, H., 2019; Tsing, A.L. et al., 2017), which contaminate diverse bodies and permeate the land—second, getting our hands dirty, going beyond design studio settings and using our bodies to perceive the site—and third, digesting soiled matter to question human bodies’ impermeability towards dirt, suggesting our immersion into a shared, messy, earthly body. As argued by many others (Mol, Tsing, Haraway, Akama), researching through embodied knowledge facilitates a deeper understanding of the place and rekindling with others, humans, and beyond. This attention to learning through bodily sensitivity and awareness of the physical belonging to matter in constant flux brings us to introduce these insights within academic pedagogical settings through a methodology based on ingestion: matter enters the body, murking the boundaries between in and out, land and self, human and non. Guttural knowledge stemming from the body—rather than the mind—grounds us through the senses and invites us to confront anthropocentric singularity and our obsession with cleanliness. It fertilises our willingness to engage with mud, gut, and dirty selves. Through ingestion, we advance a pedagogical approach that embraces enjoyment and experimentation, becoming shared matter, unhinging a sense of care for others, and challenging the individualised self to plunge into our muddied commons.