Jennifer Lea

Liberation or Limitation? Understanding Iyengar Yoga as a Practice of the Self

This article explores the Foucauldian notions of practices of the self and care of the self, read via Deleuze, in the context of Iyengar yoga (one of the most popular forms of yoga currently). Using ethnographic and interview research data the article outlines the Iyengar yoga techniques which enable a focus upon the self to be developed, and the resources offered by the practice for the creation of ways of knowing, experiencing and forming the self. In particular, the article asks whether Iyengar yoga offers possibilities for freedom and liberation, or whether it is just another practice of control and management. Assessing Iyengar yoga via a ‘critical function’, a function of ‘struggle’ and a ‘curative and therapeutic function’, the article analyses whether the practice might constitute a mode of care of the self, and what it might offer in the context of the contemporary need to live better, as well as longer.

Changing the habits of a lifetime? Mindfulness meditation and habitual geographies

Mindfulness meditation (in the context of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy) is a reflexive practice that seeks to reduce suffering in the form of depression, anxiety and stress. Through a variety of techniques, mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate awareness of the participant’s current experience (notably their thoughts and feelings), as well as an attitude of non-judgement towards this experience. Via Crossley’s (2001) account of the relation between habits and the development of a self-reflexive stance, the paper develops an understanding of agency as distributed across body, mind and context, and which is not fixed in time or space. Drawing on in-depth interviews carried out with students and teachers of mindfulness meditation, the paper analyses the role of dialogue in the practice, and situates it within the wider routines of the participant’s everyday lives.

Special units for young people on the autistic spectrum in mainstream schools: sites of normalisation, abnormalisation, inclusion, and exclusion

This paper explores the experiences of young people on the autistic spectrum (AS) who attend a special unit within a mainstream secondary school in England. The paper feeds into contemporary debates about the nature of inclusive schooling and, more broadly, special education. Young people on the AS have been largely neglected within these debates. The paper focuses upon processes of normalisation and abnormalisation to which the young people on the AS are subject, and how these are interconnected with inclusion and exclusion within school spaces. At times, the unit is a container for the abnormally behaving. However, processes of normalisation pervade the unit, attempting to rectify the deviant mind—body—emotions of the young people on the AS to enable their inclusion within the mainstream school. Normalisation is conceptualised as a set of sociospatially specific and contextual practices; norms emerge as they are enacted, and via a practical sense of the abnormal. Norms are sometimes reworked by the young people on the AS, whose association with the unit renders them a visible minority group. Thus, despite some problems, special units can promote genuine ‘inclusive’ education, in which norms circulating mainstream school spaces are transformed to accept mind—body—emotional differences.

New Energy Geographies: A Case Study of Yoga, Meditation and Healthfulness

Beginning with a routine day in the life of a practitioner of yoga and meditation and emphasising the importance of nurturing, maintaining and preventing the dissipation of diverse ‘energies’, this paper explores the possibilities for geographical health studies which take seriously ‘new energy geographies’. It is explained how this account is derived from in-depth fieldwork tracing how practitioners of yoga and meditation find times and spaces for these practices, often in the face of busy urban lifestyles. Attention is paid to the ‘energy talk’ featuring heavily in how practitioners describe the benefits that they perceive themselves to derive from these practices, and to claims made about ‘energies’ generated during the time-spaces of these practices which seemingly flow, usually with positive effects, into other domains of their lives. The paper then discusses the implications of this energy talk in the context of: (a) critically reviewing conventional approaches to studying ‘energy geographies’; (b) identifying an alertness to the likes of ‘affective energies’ surfacing in recent theoretically-attuned works of human geography (and cognate disciplines); and (c) exploring differing understandings of energy/energies extant in geographical studies of health and in step with the empirical research materials presented about yoga, meditation and healthfulness. While orientated towards explicitly geographical inquiries, the paper is intended as a statement of interest to the wider medical humanities.

Post-Phenomenology/Post-Phenomenological Geographies

Post-phenomenological geographies are an emergent (and as yet relatively fragmentary) body of work. This work does not reflect a turn away from phenomenological theories; rather it reflects a critical engagement which rereads them through the post-structuralist theories of such authors as Deleuze, Derrida, and Levinas. This rereading, combined with a disciplinary context of a turn to practice and the ‘more than human’, has resulted in post-phenomenological geographies which extend the boundaries of the phenomenological focus upon the experiencing subject (in place). Thus, the interest is in the ways in which inhuman, nonhuman, and more-than-human forces contribute to processes of subject formation, place making, and inhabiting the world. These geographies have thus far been played out through critical explorations of the realms of the experiencing subject and landscape. This more-than-human focus has tested conventional human geographical methods, requiring innovative use of technologies such as video to document research, the use of experiential research methods, and also experimentation with the form of narrating these experiential methods.

Learning How to Behave in School: A Study of the Experiences of Children and Young People with Socio-emotional Differences

This chapter discusses the ways in which children in school learn behaviours that are deemed to be acceptable within the school environment. It focuses on the experience of students who are defined by teachers as having ‘Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties’ (BESD)1 in one primary school and one secondary school in the same English Local Authority (LA).

‘It’s a fine line between . . . self discipline, devotion and dedication’: negotiating authority in the teaching and learning of Ashtanga yoga

This article looks at the production and shaping of the self via Ashtanga yoga, a bodily practice, growing in significance in Western cultures, which can involve a radical form of (re)shaping the self. In particular, it looks at the interaction of external and internal sources of authority, including the yoga student’s own expertise of themselves (experiential authority), the authority of the practice and the authority of the teacher. This allows the article to rethink standard models of authority in educational and ‘spiritualities of life’ literatures, which have generally imagined a top-down singular form of authority, essentially stamped onto the subjects being educated. The article outlines what might enter into a more ‘distributed’ form of authority – being not simply the educator figure (their positionality, status, institutional location, contextualisation within prior fields of knowledge/belief) but also how their exertion of authority meshes (and sometimes conflicts with) the ‘experiential authority’ of the subjects being educated, articulating with their own ‘self-authority’ (what they know, expect and command from themselves, on the basis of countless prior experiences, encounters, interactions, times and spaces). The article draws upon qualitative fieldwork carried out in Brighton, UK.

Reconstituting Social, Emotional and Mental Health Difficulties? The Use of Restorative Approaches to Justice in Schools

The inclusion of children with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools is seen to be beneficial to all students; as Alur and Timmons (2009, p. ix) suggest, ‘if we can successfully provide education to our most vulnerable children the education of all children will improve’. The inclusion of certain ‘vulnerable’ children, however, particularly those with socio-emotional differences, troubles this assumption. Many young people with socio-emotional differences who participated in the research were diagnosed under the SEN Code of Practice (2001) as having Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties, or BESD. The new SEN Code of Practice came into force in the UK in September 2014, and involves a change of labelling of this category of SEN to ‘Social, emotional and mental health difficulties’. Here we use the term ‘socio-emotional differences’ because it emphasises the embodied experience of feeling different in a specific place, and that these differences emerge in specific normative contexts.

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This paper examines the peer-related social experiences and friendships of young people (aged 11–17) diagnosed with Special Educational Needs in four different school settings: two mainstream schools with special units and two special schools in Southeast England, UK. Findings from qualitative research involving young people with Special Educational Needs and adults, and participant observation, are presented. The young people had one or a combination of the following diagnoses of Special Educational Need: ‘Moderate Learning Difficulties’, on the ‘Autistic Spectrum’, and ‘Social, Emotional and Mental Health Difficulties’. We use the term ‘differences’ rather than ‘difficulties’ to express the interconnected socio-spatial construction of, and corporeality of, the experiences of these differences. There has been limited scholarship about the social experiences of young people with these diagnoses. In our study, young people’s experiences of friendships, exclusion, inclusion and bullying were socio-spatially shifting. Young people had varying experiences in the different school settings. In all settings, most had friends within the school, although those in special schools and units tended to have more friends within the school. However, bullying and ‘othering’ were also experienced in all three settings based on a variety of perceived ‘differences’. All young people needed opportunities for ‘encounter’ to forge friendships. Encounters are risky and can reproduce and reinforce difference as well as generating social connections and friendships. In many spaces, young people’s opportunities for encounter were constrained by the socio-spatial organisation of schools.