Cael H, MA Somatic Studies

Task One: take a body of work from an artist and relate it to notions of knowledge, certainty, and positivism.  For this first task I chose to look at the work of Martha Graham. Graham technique is something I have dabbled in a few times throughout my early 20's and early 30's and over the Winter Holiday I decided to complete the teacher training workshop via zoom from the Martha Graham School in NYC. It was a lot to take on while on break from the MA but it was really incredible and I was so grateful for the time moving my body and relating it to what I had been reading for a few months prior.  One thing that I love about Graham technique is the use of imagery, the explanation of breath, and the simplicity of the theory yet the difficulty of the execution. Martha's technique was built on "the simplest movements walking, running, skipping, leaping" (Bannerman, 2010, p.3), and the reference to the spine is often correlated to a tree or more specifically a tree of l...

Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject . Learning: the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught. Information: facts provided or learned about something or someone. Questions taken from Dr Helen Kindred's blog.  Where are you now in your MA journey?  At this exact moment I am in the roundabout. I feel as though there are several different routes I can go, each with a destination that is unknown, yet I can't quite decide which off-ramp to take. I have been circling a few common themes and ideas about the inquiry and now just need to let those sit and percolate before I decide which one I will dive into. I am feeling more confident in my academic writing and understanding of where to access the research, and have enjoyed almost all of the texts I have read thus far. I am still continually confused with the school website and the ...

I have just finished reading "Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples", by Linda Smith. After chatting in the MAPP Cafe with a few of you I wanted to bring forward a couple of quotes that have me reflecting on the research to come.  "Another problem is that academic writing is a form of selecting, arranging and presenting knowledge. It privileges sets of texts, views about the history of an idea, what issues count as significant; and, by engaging in the same process uncritically, we too can render Indigenous writers invisible or unimportant while reinforcing the validity of other writers" p. 39 This reminded me of the blog post that Matthew posted reflecting on the readings as mainly white male-authored, and how as a researcher it is imperative to the narrative that we understand where the research we are using is coming from and the lens this gives  "The basic questions to answer are ‘Where are you from?’ ‘What brings you here?’ ‘What are y...