Chapter 2: Syncopation, Sensing, and Sense-Making: The Genealogies of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault

Scholars in the area of the sensuous curriculum present a rather strong case for the importance of the body in teaching and learning processes. Their work shifts the conversation in the field of curriculum studies from cognitive discussions to more haptic understandings. Rather than produce scholarship absent affect, or sanitized from the body, sensory-oriented curriculum compels scholars to explore the epistemological and ontological modes that exceed the all too common cognitive function as the site of knowledge and experience. Scholars write about the intricacies of mothering, for example, and propose that “Sense-based theorizing asks less about what one thinks so much as it asks who one is, by the way of what one experiences, in their body as it moves through the world” (McDermott, 2011, p. 135). Other scholars writing in this area echo McDermott’s emphasis on the body. They have written about how the role of art in classrooms generates “bodyful listening” (Weibe, 2011), how the history of museums historically guarded against touching physical objects, but holding and feeling an artifact actually helps museum-goers make sense of the world as well as feel and inspect their historical understandings (Wood & Latham, 2011), for example. Scholars have also discussed the role of disciplining procedures in schools and the sensory implications of those procedures (Leafgren, 2012), the relationship among food, identity, and sense-making (Hurren & Hasabe-Lubt, 2011). Additionally, scholars have focused on sound (Gershon, 2011), taste (Hurren & Hasabe-Lubt, 2011), touch (Wood & Latham, 2011), and somatic imagination (Fettes, 2011).