Published: ‘Workshopping: Exploring the Entanglement of Sites, Tools, and Bodily Possibilities in an Academic Gathering,’ co-authored and co-filmed by Anna Harris and Paul Craddock

Workshopping: Exploring the Entanglement of Sites, Tools, and Bodily Possibilities in an Academic Gathering, a video article co-authored by Anna Harris and Paul Craddock, is online! The article is a contribution to the Journal of Embodied Research  .

Paul Craddock and Anna Harris have co-written and co-produced a video article examining academic and craft workshops as places of embodied experimentation and learning. Workshopping: Exploring the Entanglement of Sites, Tools, and Bodily Possibilities in an Academic Gathering is an experiment in the video article form, combining text and audio-visual information.  Film is used to attend to the embodied dimension shared by both craft and academic workshops, even those framed as purely cerebral affairs – the entanglement of social rituals, hierarchies, materials, tools, places, and bodies.

Craddock and Harris follow the lead of social semiotician Gunther Kress by attempting to recognize and respect non-spoken, non-written contributions to knowledge, using film to do this. Their approach has led them to resist the convention of translating every important expression into a textual medium. In many cases, it has meant they chose to retain seemingly incidental audio not because it spells out our argument, but rather because it reflects a more central point: that learning is an embodied process – often untidy, dirty, and occasionally undignified. This is not to say they resist text. On the contrary, this article experiments with a combination of text and audio-visual information. It is the authors’ intention to invite a non-linear approach to engaging with a traditionally linear medium and encourage viewers to use the ‘play’ and ‘pause’ functions to move back and forth as necessary.

Watch the video article Workshopping: Exploring the Entanglement of Sites, Tools, and Bodily Possibilities in an Academic Gathering here.