Leading international authors from across the social science disciplines explore the contemporary re-theorizing of bodies as known, knowing and unknowing. Presents cutting-edge research on ageing, disability, and biomedicine, together with original philosophical debates about the body and embodiment Offers exciting and creative approaches to researching disembodiment and to the practice, organization, and conduct of care Original exploration of contemporary theory and social philosophy on the body Includes innovative and creative approaches to care and primary research in medicine, genetics, disability, and ageing studies

Steinman's book really stands alone among performance art books. While there are many that document what particular artists are doing, this one offers a way in for a person who wants to perform (or know more about how performance artists work). Must reading for anyone interested in performance art, it will also be fascinating to those in theatre, playwriting, visual arts and performance of any sort.

This book aims to define new theoretical, practical, and methodological directions in educational research centered on the role of the body in teaching and learning. Based on our phenomenological experience of the world, it draws on perspectives from arts-education and aesthetics, as well as curriculum theory, cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology. These are arenas with a rich untapped cache of experience and inquiry that can be applied to the notions of schooling, teaching and learning. The book provides examples of state-of-the-art, empirical research on the body in a variety of educational settings. Diverse art forms, curricular settings, educational levels, and cultural traditions are selected to demonstrate the complexity and richness of embodied knowledge as they are manifested through institutional structures, disciplines, and specific practices.

In Unknowing and the Everyday Seema Golestaneh examines how Sufi mystical experience in Iran shapes contemporary life. Central to this process is ma’rifat, or “unknowing”—the idea that, as it is ultimately impossible to fully understand the divine, humanity must operate from an engaged awareness that it knows nothing. Golestaneh shows that rather than considering ma’rifat an obstacle to intellectual engagement, Sufis embrace that there will always be that which they do not know. From this position, they affirm both the limits of human knowledge and the mysteries of the profane world. Through ethnographic case studies, Golestaneh traces the affective and sensory dimensions of ma’rifat in contexts such as the creation of collective Sufi spaces, the interpretation of Persian poetry, formulations of selfhood and non-selfhood, and the navigation of the socio-material realm. By outlining the relationship between ma’rifat and religious, aesthetic, and social life in Iran, Golestaneh demonstrates that for Sufis the outer bounds of human thought are the beginning rather than the limit.

The Book of Unknowing meditates on John's confrontation with the incandescent Jesus, a figure of our desire for immortality. Guiding us through the Gospel's coming to grips with Jesus, the poet David Sten Herrstrom prefers sparking the imagination to arguing a thesis, as he explores John's own obsessions, such as image (light), symbol (water), sign (water to wine), shapeliness (symmetry), loves (Peter, Mary's), and above all, words (the Word, the body of Jesus). The result is a heady, literary engagement not afraid of wit and paradox. For anyone who loves literature or whose business is interpretation--ministers and teachers--this book blossoms with fresh revelations about the many voices of Jesus living in the House of the Interpreter and interacting with another interpreter (Nicodemus), as well as about John the interpreter who continually pauses to explain Jesus' motives, metaphors, and the meaning of his death. This meditation on John's Gospel takes the goat's leaping approach to the craggy language of John and Jesus rather than the methodical rock climber's. And along the way, to help him find footholds on the how and why of John's strategies, the author calls on other poets, from William Blake to Emily Dickinson and Miguel de Unamuno. The result: a poet's rather than a preacher's, theologian's, or scholar's reading of John's book, one which crosses the borders of disciplines. Throughout The Book of Unknowing, David Herrstrom is unsettled and exhilarated by the peculiar orneriness and fragrance of John's book, by its strange particulars that grab him by the throat and call lives into question. As William Blake has said, "Exuberance is Beauty," and this is an exuberant book.

This book emerges at a time when critical race studies, postcolonial thought, and decolonial theory are under enormous pressure as part of a global conservative backlash. However, this is also an exciting moment, where new horizons of knowledge appear and new epistemic practices (e.g. symmetry, collaboration, undisciplining) gain traction. Through our critical engagements with structural, relational, and personal aspects of knowing and unknowing we work towards a greater multiplicity of knowledges and practices. Calling into question the asymmetrical global economy of knowledge and its uneven division of intellectual labour, our interdisciplinary volume explores what a decolonial horizon could entail for African Studies at the crossroads. Contributors are Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Eric A. Anchimbe, Edwin Asa Adjei, Susan Arndt, Muyiwa Falaiye, Katharina Greven, Christine Hanke, Amanda Hlengwa, Catherine Kiprop, Elísio Macamo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Lena Naumann, Thando Njovane, Samuel Ntewusu, Anthony Okeregbe, Zandisiwe Radebe, Elelwani Ramugondo, Eleanor Schaumann

Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to "unknowing" by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism.Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of "coming to know"—the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices—postmodern and postcolonial—that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison.