Towards a Sociocritical Framework for Body-Inclusive Embodied Activity Design
Abstract (summary)
This dissertation starts with a core assertion: youth’s bodies are not passive vessels in educational spaces but dynamic, multifaceted sites of knowing, resistance, vulnerability, and desire. Across four interwoven articles, I investigate how embodiment is experienced, designed for, and contested in learning environments—particularly by youth who are multiply marginalized across lines of disability, gender, neurodivergence, and queerness. Central to this work is the recognition that while bodies in schools are constantly subjected to surveillance, discipline, and normative expectations, these visible performances often obscure the affective, internal, and relational realities that shape youths’ participation and agency.
In Article 0, I introduce a five-dimensional framework for conceptualizing the learning body as simultaneously thinking, feeling, observed, politicized, and autonomous. This framework provides theoretical and methodological guidance for researchers committed to trauma-informed, participatory, and dignity-centered research—especially with youth whose embodiments deviate from normative expectations.
Article 1 focuses on youths’ everyday encounters with normative embodied expectations. Through youth narratives, I explore processes of conformity, masking, refusal, and the navigation of binary standards surrounding able-bodiedness, neurotypicality, gender, and sexuality. These narratives illuminate how bodies are both disciplined by and push back against normative assumptions of competence and compliance.
Article 2 deconstructs the design of embodied activities using participatory card-sorting methods. Youth evaluated different elements of embodied learning environments—movement types, sensory demands, participation structures, and more—revealing how unchecked design assumptions privilege regulated, “normative” bodies while marginalizing those rendered hyper-visible or othered.
Article 3 articulates a youth-participatory framework for body-inclusive activity design. This framework surfaces youths’ desires for dignity-affirming learning experiences, the sociocultural and interpersonal threats that inhibit these desires, and actionable guidance for educators and designers committed to co-constructing inclusive spaces.
Together, these studies propose a sociocritical approach to embodied learning—one that centers youth voice, challenges normative educational design, and advances a vision of inclusive practice rooted in dignity, not discipline. This work calls for educational researchers, designers, and facilitators to rethink how we engage bodies in learning spaces towards more liberatory futures for youth with non-normative lived embodied experiences.
Indexing (details)
Education;
Instructional design;
Educational sociology
0515: Education
0447: Instructional Design
0340: Educational sociology
