Amplifying embodiedness through life-art-writing: fleshy encounters as spaces for enlivening synergy and creative scholarship

Neoliberal portrayals of academic lives as singular formulaic posturings in university settings are disembodying, dangerous, and unproductive. This productivity-driven narrative in academia is unfruitful and lacks an ethic of relational embodiedness. Arts-based research can recreate memories of lived educational experiences and leverage diverse perspectives to theorize enfleshments of embodied selves. Addressing the question: How can body-mind contradictions be tangibly enfleshed as co-creative and care-full, this article profiles women’s academic lives as ethically relational experiences that call for enlivening body-mind interrelations. Bodies inscribed in the ethics of materiality offer opportunities for re-imagining spaces in academia – what they are and how we use them. Corporeal data, as a means of life writing, is used to center the place of the body in scholarship. Finding joyful ways for collective, embodied, ethical care offers women academics powerful practices in the commodified competitive spaces of the academy.