USD $155.00
Somapower: Somaesthetics Reads Politics
Series: - Studies in Somaesthetics, Volume: 8
Volume Editor:
We do politics in, through, and as bodies. All our political activity is inevitably corporeal. Parliamentary debates, party assemblies, street demonstrations, and civil disobedience are all bodily actions. Political regimes maintain their power by controlling our bodies, both through explicit acts of violence and, more insidiously, by inculcating somatic norms of obedience to the political authorities and ideologies. This oppression can be effectively challenged if we use somaesthetics to identify and examine the bodily habits and feelings that express and reinforce such domination. Somaesthetically explored, they can be refashioned and help overcome the oppressive social conditions that produce them.
Leszek Koczanowicz is Professor of Cultural Studies and Political Science at the SWPS University, Poland. He has authored and edited twelve books and numerous articles on the theory of culture, social theory, and cultural aspects of politics, recently
Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life: Niches of Liberation (Palgrave, 2023).
Combining philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and anthropology, the book explores the topical theme of the social and political functioning of the body. It will be of immediate interest to academic institutions and their libraries, researchers in these disciplines and to lecturers and students as a supplementary resource on corporeality in social sciences, humanities, politics and social policy courses.