Recapturing the Personal (Essays on Education and Embodied Knowledge in Comparative Perspective)

In this volume, contributors discuss both the theoretical and practical applications of an embodied knowledge perspective, using the field of education as an exemplar. It should be noted that while the theorists whose writings are discussed in these pages, have made seminal contributions to the sociology of the body literature, it is not possible nor is it our goal to comprehensively review the theoretical discourse of everyone who has written in the area. Our more modest aim is to give our audience a sampling of what some of the important theoretical positions entail. To that end, we turn to the writings of the three social and cultural theorists whose work is given the greatest degree of attention in the volume, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Butler, and will briefly summarize their views.