Embodying Theory ― Epistemology, Aesthetics and Resistance

Embodying Theory: Epistemology, Aesthetics and Resistance takes a deep dive into representational spaces of social science theory and research, positioning post-structuralist frameworks as potent tools in ongoing fights against injustice and inequity. In this interactive text, the reader takes a discursive tour through theoretical and imagistic landscapes that offer options for liberated existence and expression from repression and moralism. By foregrounding the "double articulation" of what is articulated through language and what is shown through visual material, Embodying Theory furthers an argument that there are numerous ways to embody, interpret and interact with meaning across cultural, materialist and populist platforms, to strategically create counter-narratives in the service of building peaceable, inclusive, sustainable and joyful futures.

Embodying Theory offers a series of writings and images to make theory walk, recasting major post-structural and deconstructive thought in order to explore spheres of action in the educational, the sociopolitical, the ethical, the aesthetic and the academic. This is an explicitly politicized approach to text creation, understood as both building theory and practice, to collaboratively design a textual experiment. This book reconceptualizes the text as an anti-moralistic response, as a non-violent battleground visually and textually. Embodying Theory uses the form of the book to demonstrate the always possible, to break open words and images. Through an interplay of light and language, the text foregrounds an affirmative stance against the nihilistic and the cynical. Embodying Theory interacts with core notions of "becoming" as key to understanding processes of subjects constructing their present and future.

Elizabeth Bishop is a researcher, educator and youth advocate. She is Director of Curriculum and Outcomes Evaluation at Global Kids, and Faculty of Youth Studies at the City University of New York School of Professional Studies. Bishop also directs the Drop Knowledge Project, where she conducts ongoing research exploring the intersections of literacy, civic engagement, global education, cultural studies and youth organizing.

Tamsen Wojtanowski is an artist interested in where the medium of photography might overlap with painting, printmaking and installation. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Paris and Vancouver. Wojtanowski is a found-ing member of the artist-run exhibition space, NAPOLEON, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She teaches photography classes at the University of the Arts and Tyler School of Art, Temple University.