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Thematic Section: Somatic education and embodiment in a digital world

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2024): Revista Estud(i)os de Dança 3

Editorial: Somatic education and body awareness in a digital world: Theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical contributions

DOI
https://doi.org/10.53072/RED202401/00101

Abstract

Following the invitation from the editorial board of RED to curate a thematic section dedicated to education and somatic practices, the desire emerged to foster reflection and discussion on the challenges and potentials that this field of study encounters in contemporary times. Somatic education cultivates an intensified awareness of the body through sensorimotor perception. Knowing and sensing the body through sensory experience means inhabiting the body intensely, as a porous and pulsating space, while also engaging in the incorporation of a slow and expanded temporality. In a digital era dominated by the tyranny of speed, as Paul Virilio (2007) warns, embracing somatic practice as an epistemological perspective is, in itself, an act of resistance. Thus, the very notion of "somatic education," as we propose it here—understood as a pathway to the practice of sensitivity and the stimulation of a relational and creative mode of self-knowledge—also emerges as a form of resistance.

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