Remy Y.S. Low - Böcker

This book extends on the scholarship on decolonising higher education by focusing on classroom pedagogies that can transform students’ embodied affects and habits as conditioned by coloniality.It does so by offering a historical case study of how one exemplary educator – Canadian activist and scholar Roxana Chu-Yee Ng (1951–2013) – drew on traditional Chinese medicine philosophy and Qigong practice to offer an embodied pedagogy that had profound effects on many of her students.This book brings together scholarship from critical education, contemplative pedagogy, the neuroscience of stress, mind–body medicine, and embodied cognition to make the case for the importance of embodied pedagogies in any project for decolonising higher education. An innovative contribution to embodiment and decolonial studies, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students exploring interdisciplinary methods.

This book is a philosophical and historical study that explores how meditative practices for cultivating mindfulness can be regarded as a unique form of education against violence—one that emphasizes stopping and contemplation as a necessary precursor to action. It brings together the idiosyncratic but insightful musings on violence by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek with recent research on mindfulness and violence as a lens. Using this lens, it looks at two exemplary educators and how they taught mindfulness meditation as a way of resisting the types of violence they and their students faced: the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh amidst the brutality of the Second Indochina War (1955-1975), and the African-American studies professor and cultural critic bell hooks in the face of systemic oppression in the United States of the 1980s.

This open access book offers a unique and refreshing view on working with social theory in higher education.