Abstract
This contribution takes the Interculturality Programme of the city of Barcelona as a starting point for exploring self-awareness and deeper self-environment relations as important aspects of urban sustainability education and transformative learning. Building on how anti-discrimination workshops evidence that enriching self-other relations starts with ‘self’, the article explores how this is related to a different interconnected understanding of ‘body’, involving also fascia, our bodily connective tissue. In particular, the both/and quality of the fascia tissue-system challenges to re-think the relations of wholes and parts and how this impacts sustainability concepts and practices. Training teachers and students in body awareness and developing process- and verb-oriented vocabularies such as bodying are suggested as impactful tools. Drawing together neurophysiology, systems thinking and transition theory in this way, inspires to play with how knowledge of bodily complexity can help shift sustainability education towards more transdisciplinary awareness and action.
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Notes
For example, ‘Resonant Body-ing: Cities, Senses and Alterity’. Extemporaneous Cities, Barcelona, December 3, 2018; ‘Becoming Sensicle’. Mobile Utopia Conference, University of Lancaster, November 1–2, 2017; ‘Cities as Creative Networks: a Sensorial Experience’ at OuiShare Fest Paris, July 5–7, 2017; ‘Tension and Connectivity: Sensorial awareness in processes of migration and mobilities’. SIEF Migration and Mobility Working Group Meeting, September 11–13, 2016, Basel.
The search terms included for example: body, practice, individual, person, stranger, organism, sense, sensi*, anatomy, material*, corp*, viscous, elasticity.
This excludes the term ‘body’ as used in established combinations such as ‘body of law’, ‘social body’ or ‘body of literature’.
The outermost layer is known as the hypodermis or ‘superficial fascia’ and has a spongy quality and yellow colour. The second level is the filmy and ‘membranous fascia’ which is like gauze with stretchy, wet, slippery, gelatinous qualities. The third layer is known as ‘deep or dense fascia’ which is both elastic and grid-like, stable like strapping tape and white in colour. These descriptions were presented by integral anatomist Gil Hedley at the British Fascia Symposium, Worcester, June 25–26, 2016. (See also www.gilhedley.com, and an interview the author conducted with Gil Hedley about fascia: Hedley 2019).
The push-and-pull keeping the fascial system both stable and moving have been conceptualized as biotensegrity (Levin, 2002), the application of tensegrity already known in architecture as Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. With fascia, also called the ‘organ of form’ (Varela & Frenk, 1987), it has been shown how tensegrity extends to the cellular level (Ingber, 2003).
Latour develops his argument through a critical assessment of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank all interview partners for their insights on interculturalism, in particular Lola Lopez for taking the time to answer all my questions around Barcelona’s Pla Interculturalidad, and the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility (UNU-GCM) for providing the research framework. I also thank the INTREPID 32 country network, and in particular the Intrepid-U, for our collaborations inspiring more efficient and effective interdisciplinary research in Europe.
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Weig, D. Celebrating both/and bodying: transformative learning, transdisciplinarity, and interculturality in Barcelona. Environ Dev Sustain (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03189-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03189-x