Corporeal Pedagogy: Transforming Café and Refugee Girls’ Post-Agency

I explore a spontaneous community art event involving pre-teen and teen refugee girls and their embodied experiences at a local café located in a Northeastern U.S. city. Their bodily encounters involved incipient actions—drifting, knitting, and wrist-tying performances—in the creation of a new space within the space of the café. Drawing on posthumanists’ and new materialists’ works, I engage the lived body as foci of understanding, necessitating an understanding of the body as “liberating to” rather than “liberating from.” A central consideration of thing-power rather than human-power advances a framework of corporeal spatial/temporality for understanding curriculum and pedagogy. Understanding of the real, lived body informs a new direction for an art educational approach, one that offers a new materialistic agency that goes beyond the strictures of the humanist mindset. It opens up new ways of thinking about community art practice, as it organizes and reorganizes the senses.