'Embodying Identities' presents social theories that allow people to embody their differences with a sense of dignity and self-worth, enabling them to understand the complexities of their lived identities in a post-modern globalised world.

How do we know we are ill? Are health, illness and disability universal categories? How important is the body in our understanding of health? These crucial questions are just some of the issues tackled in this comprehensive and insightful new book. Embodying Health Identities offers a fundamental account of the sociology of health, exploring the relationship between health and identity through a focus on embodiment. Bringing together existing literature with new cutting edge theories, the authors investigate the implications of the body on our experiences of health and illness and its role in how health, illness and identity relate to each other. The text begins by outlining the key concepts of health and illness, and then continues with an exploration of the social factors which impact on health and a consideration of the journey of illness, from causation to treatment, across the life course. Throughout the text, theoretical arguments are effectively illustrated with contemporary examples taken from every day life and a diverse range of cultures. Written by two reputed authors in the field, this accessible text offers stimulating and refreshing reading for all students of the sociology and anthropology of health.

Sport and dance command the passions and devotion of countless athletes, dancers and fans worldwide. Although conventionally thought to reside within separate social realms, these two embodied cultural forms are revealed in this benchmark volume to share a vital capacity to constitute and express identities through their practiced movements and scripted forms. Thus, the work of choreographers and coaches along with the performances of dancers and athletes offer not merely entertainment and aesthetic accomplishment but also powerful means for celebrating existing social arrangements and cultural ideals or, alternately, for imagining and advocating new ones.Drawing on a wide selection of sport and dance activities from around the world, this book elucidates the ways in which embodied performances both mirror and reshape social life. It traces, for example, how football, salsa and tango can each be employed to articulate or rewrite national and gender identities. Also examined are children's sport and the dynamics by which immigration and cultural integration, along with the socialization of children and youth, may be directed through the organization of community sport. The volume investigates the marshalling of sport and dance in settings from Africa to Ireland as vehicles for framing moral issues that revolve around the appropriate use, protection and exhibition of the body. This innovative study establishes the paradoxical fashion in which dance and sport can unite certain people and communities while at the same time serving exclusionary and nationalistic purposes.

Since the time of Freud, some of the most radical innovators within critical theory have stressed the importance of the body and its representation to the constitution of subjectivity. This book explores some of the theoretical debates surrounding the body, and assesses its value as a critical concept, through an analysis of the body’s representation both in Welsh literary texts in English, and discourse about Wales more generally. Combining psychoanalytic with more culturally orientated approaches to the body, the book offers an historically informed account of the body that analyses its role in the construction and contestation of identity at a cultural as well as individual level, contributing in a new and radical way to the rapidly expanding critical literature concerned with exploring the construction of identity in a Welsh cultural context.

This book explores embodiment in second language education, sociocultural theory and research. It focuses on process drama, an embodied approach that engages learners’ imagination, body and voice to create a felt-experience of the second language and culture. Divided into three parts, it begins by examining the aesthetic and intercultural dimension of performative language teaching, the elements of drama and knowing-in-action. The central part of the book examines issues related to play, emotions, classroom discourse and assessment when learning a language through process drama, in a sociocultural perspective. The third part is an analysis of the author’s qualitative research, which informs a subtle discussion on reflective practitioner methodology, learner engagement and teacher artistry. Each chapter includes a drama workshop, illustrating in practice what embodying language in action can look like when working with asylum seekers, adult learners with intellectual disabilities, pre-service teachers, international students and children involved in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programme. A unique combination of theory, research and reflective practice, this book provides valuable insights for teacher/artists, teacher educators and researchers in the fields of performative and sociocultural language learning.

This book combines approaches from the design disciplines, humanities, and social sciences to foster interdisciplinary engagement across geographies around the identities embodied in and of peripheries. Peripheral communities bear human faces and names, necessitating specific modes of inquiry and commitments that prioritize lived human experience and cultural expression. Hence, the peripheries of this book are a question, not a given, the answers to which are contingent forms assembled around embodied identities. Peripheries are urban fringes, periphery countries in the modern world-system, Indigenous lands, occupied territories, or the peripheries of authoritative knowledge, among others. No form can exist outside historical relations of power enacted through knowledge, political structures, laws, and regulations.

In the long tradition of the archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean bodies have held a prominent role in the form of figurines, frescos, or skeletal remains, and have even been responsible for sparking captivating portrayals of the Mother-Goddess cult, the elegant women of Minoan Crete or the deeds of heroic men. Growing literature on the archaeology and anthropology of the body has raised awareness about the dynamic and multifaceted role of the body in experiencing the world and in the construction, performance and negotiation of social identity. In these 28 thematically arranged papers, specialists in the archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean confront the perceived invisibility of past bodies and ask new research questions. Contributors discuss new and old evidence; they examine how bodies intersect with the material world, and explore the role of body-situated experiences in creating distinct social and other identities. Papers range chronologically from the Palaeolithic to the Early Iron Age and cover the geographical regions of the Aegean, Cyprus and the Near East. They highlight the new possibilities that emerge for the interpretation of the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean through a combined use of body-focused methodological and theoretical perspectives that are nevertheless grounded in the archaeological record.

As increasing quantities of health and biological information are generated, the need for us all to consider the human impacts of its ubiquity becomes more urgent than ever. This book explains the ethical imperative to take seriously the potential impacts on our identities of encountering bioinformation about ourselves.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the role the body plays in constituting our sense of self, signalling the interplay between material embodiment, social meaning, and material and social conditions.

Addressing central questions in the debate about Foucault's usefulness for politics, including his rejection of universal norms, his conception of power and power-knowledge, his seemingly contradictory position on subjectivity and his resistance to using identity as a political category, McLaren argues that Foucault employs a conception of embodied subjectivity that is well-suited for feminism. She applies Foucault's notion of practices of the self to contemporary feminist practices, such as consciousness-raising and autobiography, and concludes that the connection between self-transformation and social transformation that Foucault theorizes as the connection between subjectivity and institutional and social norms is crucial for contemporary feminist theory and politics.