 Hi, my name is Elina Kieft and my background is in anthropology and dance. Before I studied medical anthropology, I trained to become a professional dancer from a very young age. In a way, I have always made sense of the world through my body and through movement. During my PhD, I studied the effects of dance on health and well-being. I noticed that my body was instrumental in making sense of what research participants were telling me. I brought the data with me into the studio in the face of analysis. And when I was writing, I was searching for words through my moving body to express details and nuances as clearly as I could. I currently work at the Center for Dance Research at Coventry University and my fascination with embodied learning and embodied research continued. With a grant from the NCRM, I had the opportunity to lead a project to design a somatic toolkit for ethnographers. This online learning resource follows on from that project to introduce the possibilities for applying the deep wisdom of the body in movement to any phase of the research cycle, as well as to draw on the body for mental and emotional support. And embodied research invites all of the aspects of the researcher into the work. This resource includes three videos that explore how we can consciously apply our body as a research tool and site of knowing and what role movement can play to increase this. This first video briefly introduces the discipline of somatic practices leading up to a wider view on knowledge and perception than one only based in cognition. Instead, the entire body can be considered as a way to get to know things. The second video provides a practice opportunity for you to try out moving with lines and angles versus circles and spirals and serves as an example to derive insights through movement. The final video further adapts this concept of the body as instrument to the academic research cycle, including practical suggestions of how you can include bodily awareness and a movement approach in your own research. Before we continue, let me acknowledge that it is somewhat strange to be talking to you without actually seeing you, your body posture and the space that you're in. Please make yourself comfortable. Take a few deep breaths. Lean back into your chair. And soften your eyes. And give yourself the opportunity to relax as much as you can while learning new content. We all have a multitude of different learning styles and these videos will include audio, visual as well as movement explorations. And you can also read the script if you click on the subtitles and closed caption button at the bottom of your screen. At first glance, it seems very obvious what we mean by a body. But theoretically, it is not that straightforward. Our cultural positioning, our life experience, our degree of awareness of the world around us are all factors that influence our body. Perhaps we could say that our body is a process. It is always changing and morphing. Somatic practices offer a way to familiarize ourselves more intimately with our physicality. The body is still quite a marginal topic within academia. And over the last few decades, research about the body has become more common. But with the body is still quite a novelty. Many of today's educational systems emphasize brain cognition over physical bodily intelligence. Reading, writing and computing skills are most favorite. We mainly learn through books, audio, visual or virtual media. And whatever the medium, our body does not usually play an active role in learning, exploring and discovering. On the contrary, it is usually required to still accept a physical education in which students can blow off some steam. However, the role of body in pedagogy and learning should not be underestimated and could be much better utilized. How can we widen our conceptual epistemological roadmap to include learning through and with the body as an alternative route into learning and research? And I believe that any topic can be explored through the body in conscious movement so that includes anything related to research as well. Why would it be useful to include the body more consciously into learning and research? First of all, knowledge is not only created through cognition. The body is like a library, an archive or site of knowledge. We orient ourselves in space through physical, kinesthetic orientation of our body. Our body holds memories of our experience. And our senses alert us to things around us. So through increased body awareness, a structured exploration of the senses and fine-tuning our perception and interpretation, we can access a much deeper, visceral understanding of research data. And this leads to richer outputs. Physical engagement also provides different creative avenues into the research process and helps with getting unstuck, refresh and find our flow again. For example with literature review or writer's block. And this informs the research and supports the researcher in a different way. It can also provide emotional support during stressful aspects of the research. When you feel you're drowning in your data or struggling with personal challenging responses to the material, movement is an excellent way to explore and release such experience. How would we go about this? First, let's have a closer look at somatics. Somatics is a bit of an unusual word. It comes from the Greek word soma, which means body. And the legacy of early somatic pioneers has influenced many disciplines and systems of inquiry. Perhaps you've heard of alexander technique, laban, mensendik, authentic movement or body-mind centering. The origins of somatic practices, as we know them today, they can be traced back to the end of the 19th century. Both from an urge to break free from very strict views on the body, but also often in response to illness and disabilities, people started to investigate the way the body functions and is experienced from within. This included interest from phenomenological and existential philosophy as well as from the expressionist movement, which is contrasted with the strict rules of classical ballet. In the mid-1980s, commonalities between various approaches started to be recognized, and nowadays their core principles are widely applied as part of healthcare, performing arts and in commercial settings. However, there has not yet been a comprehensive attempt to integrate somatics into a scholarly research methodology nor to track the benefits that come from such an integration. Let's look at the characteristics of somatic practices. Most of them, as you see here, include an awareness of breath and the senses and focus on conscious relaxation. They promote a connection between inner and outer self in the world and emphasize that we are active beings with a sense of agency. Practices often work consciously with memory, images and the imagination. They tend to offer ways to explore different points of views and transitions between those. Very simply put, if you are standing, you have a different view than when you're sitting down. So what does our position, our environment, even our speed afford us to experience and to observe? They also investigate habitual movements and introduce new movement possibilities. Much like Gestalt psychology, for example, our perceptions will be different when we slump or when we straighten our shoulders. Try that now and see how it affects you. Here you see some similar and related concepts such as felt sense, somatic mind, somatosensory awareness, bodily intelligence, somatic markers and somaesthetics. The field of somatics is closely linked to a newer field of embodied cognition with a similar historical trajectory and traced back to similar scholars. Anthropology saw the sensory turn in the 1990s and recognizes that sensory experiences are culturally constituted and also inform knowledge creation. Although ethnography specifically recognizes the literacy of the body and has the capacity to embrace paradoxes such as body, mind, personal, scholarly, individual or social, evocative versus analytical without making the research less rigorous or theoretical. Then you have dance studies which looks at the artistic explorations of corporeality with the body both as object and subject and also as a form of social and political performance. Sensual scholarship and embodied inquiry or inquiry look at translating theory into the moving body and of these celeste snowbers is the most concrete and visceral of the tools. What can we do to explore the potential of the body aside for knowing throughout the entire research cycle? Let's have a very quick look at knowledge. Our educational system strongly emphasizes explicit knowledge. We have to learn and repeat facts, use mathematical formula and understand the structure of language. Tested knowledge gets much less attention in formal education even though it makes up a larger proportion of our life and our daily decision making. It is intuitive. It is rooted in context, in experience, in values. This makes it really hard to communicate because it resides in the knower and it is hard to talk about physical experience because there are so many different levels of translation from the experience to the written word. So this is really the distinction between know that versus know how. There are different ways to look at intelligence as well. Howard Gardner introduced the notion of seven different types of intelligences. Logical, mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. And whereas the first two could potentially, although debatably, be located in the brain alone, all the others involve more of the body. Another way of classifying embodied intelligence is according to where our perception is focused. This classification is used by Schustermann, for example, and also appears in neuroscientific research. You will see overlap with Gardner's multiple intelligences. So going from the external to the internal, exteroception refers to anything that we perceive around us. This includes what we hear, what we see. Proprioception includes the perception of our bodily movement as well as orientation in space. And finally, interoception is our perception of the internal physical and emotional states, interior perception. So far, I have introduced some territory of corporality and embodied knowledge. Intelligence is not only based in cognition, or rather, there are multiple aspects of our being that supply our cognition with data. And these go often unacknowledged. The second video offers a concrete movement exploration of knowing with and through your own body. So I'll talk you through moving with two spatial concepts of lines and angles compared to circles and curves. You can do this at home if you have a space of two square meters to move freely. And if you prefer to skip the movement practice now, the third and final video addresses the concrete application of the body as instrument for the research cycle. Thank you for your time and remember your body.