Vital materiality and its constitution of knowing in craft practice

Recent scholarship has acknowledged the importance of materiality, body senses and sensible knowledge in understanding knowing in practice, although humans and their practices are still privileged. In response, we examine how vital materiality, or the capacity of things, constitutes the practice of knowing, including in relation to and with the body and bodily senses. This focus is relevant for management education and learning, sharpening our view of what practices and knowing matter most. Drawing on a study of 20 studio potters, involving observation, interviews, and participation in a pottery course, we reveal the agentic power of the material in constituting the practice of knowing, in the resistance of the material, the accidental and unpredictable encounters between material, and the loss of self in, and a subversion from, the material. We show what constitutes “embodied learning” for knowing in practice is the generation of a specific materialized sensitivity of—attunement, sensitivity to risk, and subversion—through the vitality of matter. Offering a stimulus to rethinking subjectivity and positionality in our pedagogy, we propose that to truly unsettle the human-centric practices of teaching and learning, we need to develop a specific “materialized sensitivity” in our pedagogic activities and entanglements.