Karen-Anne Coleman | The University of Sydney (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Karen-Anne Coleman
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2017
This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for... more This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for use in assisted reproductive technologies and speculates on how those processes may affect the future life of the donor-conceived person. I will suggest that trust is an integral part of the exchange between donors, recipients, and gamete agencies in donor conception and heavily informs concepts of relatedness, race, ethnicity, kinship, class, and visibility. The decision to be transparent (or not) about a child's genetic parentage affects recipient parents' choices of donor, about who is allowed to Bknow^children's genetic backgrounds, and how important it is to be able to Bpass^as an unassisted conception. In this way, recipients must trust the process, institutions, and individuals involved in their treatment, as well as place trust in the future they imagine for their child. The current market for donor gametes reproduces normative conceptions of the nuclear family, kinship, and relatedness by facilitating Bmatching^donors to recipients by phenotype and cultural affinities. Recipient parents who choose not to prioritize Bmatching,^and actively disclose the process of children's conceptions, may embark on a project of queering heteronormative family structures and place great trust in both their own children and changing social attitudes to reduce stigma and generate acceptance for non-traditional families.
Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies, 2020
This chapter examines how Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) practices may be inclusive or exclusive of s... more This chapter examines how Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) practices may be inclusive or exclusive of specific kinds of difference and identity. I analyse several discourses surrounding MPY and argue that critical theory, as a discipline, provides some potential for thinking through how difference is treated within yoga classes, and the kinds of obstacles that may prevent some individuals from participating or feeling included in representations of yoga. I specifically look at difference as it functions in the cases of disability and gender, as examples of how yoga may sometimes be empowering for alternative identities but at other times may merely reinforce the imperative to produce a normalised body. In doing so, I argue that practitioners and scholars of MPY should continue to pay attention to the details and nuances of the practice, consistently attending to the work of reinventing MPY as more inclusive and accepting of difference, and resisting the temptation to judge bodies based on their ability, gender, race, size and/or age.
SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2019
In this chapter, sensory ethnography is presented as a methodological approach, demonstrating how... more In this chapter, sensory ethnography is presented as a methodological approach, demonstrating how the senses can function both as an object for analysis and the mode by which research can be conducted. There is no single practice or technique that defines sensory ethnography. Rather, it is an overall disposition to the significance of the senses that informs all stages of the research project. A 'sensory sensibility' centres on the body in its sensing and sensed capacity in cultural life-an embodied engagement that is embedded in sensory experience and expression. Sensory ethnography warrants an exploratory openness, coupled with critical self-reflexivity, which yields invaluable insight into the cultural life under consideration and the overall research process that sought to capture it. This critical reflexivity, then, should extend to the epistemological aspects of research: a reflexive discussion of sensory ethnographic practice that renders the processes of knowledge production open and transparent. Sensory Ethnography as Methodology As a methodology, sensory ethnography is not a study of the senses as a primary objective of research per se, but rather, it is an approach to understanding people's experiences in cultural life. This approach signals a shift from sensorial-based sensations to a more complex, enfolded sensory disposition, and suggests that the senses function as a context, in addition to an object, of research. The 'sensory sensibility' employed in this approach is not just an awareness or acknowledgement of the senses, but an orientation to the manifold entanglements and enmeshments of sensory experience. Developing a sensory sensibility increases the possibilities of ethnographic experience and expression because it offers expanded participatory modes to elucidate complex meaning from everyday cultural life. This methodological endeavour, then, seeks to capture something of lived experience, recognising that people's lives are lived and interpreted through their full sensorial capacities. As such, sensory ethnography can often reveal the complexities of sensory experience and expression that are at work in any ethnographic endeavour. At heart,
This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for... more This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for use in assisted reproductive technologies and speculates on how those processes may affect the future life of the donor-conceived person. I will suggest that trust is an integral part of the exchange between donors, recipients, and gamete agencies in donor conception and heavily informs concepts of relatedness, race, ethnicity, kinship, class, and visibility. The decision to be transparent (or not) about a child's genetic parentage affects recipient parents' choices of donor, about who is allowed to know children's genetic backgrounds, and how important it is to be able to pass as an unassisted conception. In this way, recipients must trust the process, institutions, and individuals involved in their treatment, as well as place trust in the future they imagine for their child. The current market for donor gametes reproduces normative conceptions of the nuclear family, kinship, and relatedness by facilitating matching donors to recipients by phenotype and cultural affinities. Recipient parents who choose not to prioritize matching, and actively disclose the process of children's conceptions, may embark on a project of queering heteronormative family structures and place great trust in both their own children and changing social attitudes to reduce stigma and generate acceptance for non-traditional families.
Log in | Register Search in: Journal Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies... more Log in | Register
Search in:
Journal
Continuum
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Latest Articles
0
Views
0
CrossRef citations
0
Altmetric
Original Articles
Minor bodies: how disability is figured in children’s yoga classes
Karen-Anne Wong
Pages 1-11 | Published online: 21 Dec 2016
Download citation
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1262106
Crossmark
In this article
Abstract
Disability in epidemic: or, a plague of minoritization?
Separation and special education
Diagnosing and treating disability
Embracing difference, or, ‘You are different, and so is everyone else’
Notes on contributor
Disclosure statement
Abstract
In this article, I argue that children’s yoga classes can reinforce normative understandings of disability, minoritizing disabled children, but also having the potential to reconfigure disabled children’s bodies in new ways. Yoga pedagogy is multifarious and malleable enough to be adapted to the distinct classroom cultures produced by teachers and students. I focus on interview data from three teachers of children’s yoga to discuss the different ways they understand disabled children in their classes. This analysis leads me to argue that teachers of children’s yoga mobilize various narratives about disability in their classes, such as the need for inclusion, separation, diagnosis, treatment and/or correction. It is critical that students, parents and teachers are aware of how these narratives and pedagogical approaches may produce minoritizing effects, or alternatively offer means for resistance or intervention to the minoritization of disabled children.
Child's Pose: Becoming Child and the Phenomenology of Children's Yoga Classes To date there ha... more Child's Pose: Becoming Child and the Phenomenology of Children's Yoga Classes
To date there has been little theoretical consideration of how children's yoga affects students' ways of thinking
and being. Using interviews with child students of yoga and my own participant observation as a children’s
yoga teacher, this paper focuses on how a theoretical understanding of narrative may illuminate our
perceptions of how children learn to think and feel during yoga practice. Narrative is considered a tool for
students’ to view their own bodies as vehicles for storytelling, producing new conceptions of self. I read
children’s yoga practices through Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus. Using Deleuze
and Guattari’s theories of the body, I suggest that in a yoga class, children are not imagining themselves to
become other, such as a dog or tree. Instead, children are actually becoming a new entity, a mediated body
that lies somewhere between self and other (such as a dog or tree). By listening to children and engaging with
theory this research brings greater understanding of children’s experiences. Ways of being on the yoga mat
may provide a window into the ways that individuals experience childhood.
Thesis Chapters by Karen-Anne Coleman
This thesis is an ethnographic study of children's yoga practices, focused particularly on the co... more This thesis is an ethnographic study of children's yoga practices, focused particularly on the complex intermeshing of the normalising and liberating potential of these practices. It draws on focus groups, interviews and/or questionnaires with fifty-one young people and nineteen adults, along with participant observation drawn from the researcher’s role as a teacher of children’s yoga. A visual component accompanies the textual account; a short ethnographic film forms an appendix to the thesis. The research tracked ways in which specific yoga practices normalise children's bodies, forcing them into standardised poses and facilitating judgment of children’s behaviour according to moralised norms. It is argued that this process of normalisation replicated and reproduced dominant understandings of childhood and children's futures. The research nonetheless found that the same yoga practices could simultaneously embrace and endorse non-dominant versions of childhood and alternative futures for individual children. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Megan Watkins and Cressida Heyes, it is argued that multiple versions of discipline affected children's experiences in yoga - from discipline within the classroom to discipline as a form of body modification and subjection. Both normative and non-normative approaches to discipline had the potential to provide children with new skills and capacities. The meanings and effects of children’s yoga are also, it is argued, highly dependent upon the contextual circumstances of children's lives, institutions and the teacher's pedagogy. Following Kerry H. Robinson, Kylie Valentine and others, this study demonstrates that children had a great deal of competency, agentic capability and power within their relationship networks. The final two chapters investigate this process through two themes that emerged from the fieldwork: disability and sexuality. They analyse how children negotiated disabled and sexualised subjectivities within yoga classrooms in both limiting and enabling ways.
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2017
This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for... more This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for use in assisted reproductive technologies and speculates on how those processes may affect the future life of the donor-conceived person. I will suggest that trust is an integral part of the exchange between donors, recipients, and gamete agencies in donor conception and heavily informs concepts of relatedness, race, ethnicity, kinship, class, and visibility. The decision to be transparent (or not) about a child's genetic parentage affects recipient parents' choices of donor, about who is allowed to Bknow^children's genetic backgrounds, and how important it is to be able to Bpass^as an unassisted conception. In this way, recipients must trust the process, institutions, and individuals involved in their treatment, as well as place trust in the future they imagine for their child. The current market for donor gametes reproduces normative conceptions of the nuclear family, kinship, and relatedness by facilitating Bmatching^donors to recipients by phenotype and cultural affinities. Recipient parents who choose not to prioritize Bmatching,^and actively disclose the process of children's conceptions, may embark on a project of queering heteronormative family structures and place great trust in both their own children and changing social attitudes to reduce stigma and generate acceptance for non-traditional families.
Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies, 2020
This chapter examines how Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) practices may be inclusive or exclusive of s... more This chapter examines how Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) practices may be inclusive or exclusive of specific kinds of difference and identity. I analyse several discourses surrounding MPY and argue that critical theory, as a discipline, provides some potential for thinking through how difference is treated within yoga classes, and the kinds of obstacles that may prevent some individuals from participating or feeling included in representations of yoga. I specifically look at difference as it functions in the cases of disability and gender, as examples of how yoga may sometimes be empowering for alternative identities but at other times may merely reinforce the imperative to produce a normalised body. In doing so, I argue that practitioners and scholars of MPY should continue to pay attention to the details and nuances of the practice, consistently attending to the work of reinventing MPY as more inclusive and accepting of difference, and resisting the temptation to judge bodies based on their ability, gender, race, size and/or age.
SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2019
In this chapter, sensory ethnography is presented as a methodological approach, demonstrating how... more In this chapter, sensory ethnography is presented as a methodological approach, demonstrating how the senses can function both as an object for analysis and the mode by which research can be conducted. There is no single practice or technique that defines sensory ethnography. Rather, it is an overall disposition to the significance of the senses that informs all stages of the research project. A 'sensory sensibility' centres on the body in its sensing and sensed capacity in cultural life-an embodied engagement that is embedded in sensory experience and expression. Sensory ethnography warrants an exploratory openness, coupled with critical self-reflexivity, which yields invaluable insight into the cultural life under consideration and the overall research process that sought to capture it. This critical reflexivity, then, should extend to the epistemological aspects of research: a reflexive discussion of sensory ethnographic practice that renders the processes of knowledge production open and transparent. Sensory Ethnography as Methodology As a methodology, sensory ethnography is not a study of the senses as a primary objective of research per se, but rather, it is an approach to understanding people's experiences in cultural life. This approach signals a shift from sensorial-based sensations to a more complex, enfolded sensory disposition, and suggests that the senses function as a context, in addition to an object, of research. The 'sensory sensibility' employed in this approach is not just an awareness or acknowledgement of the senses, but an orientation to the manifold entanglements and enmeshments of sensory experience. Developing a sensory sensibility increases the possibilities of ethnographic experience and expression because it offers expanded participatory modes to elucidate complex meaning from everyday cultural life. This methodological endeavour, then, seeks to capture something of lived experience, recognising that people's lives are lived and interpreted through their full sensorial capacities. As such, sensory ethnography can often reveal the complexities of sensory experience and expression that are at work in any ethnographic endeavour. At heart,
This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for... more This article explores the processes through which Australian recipients select unknown donors for use in assisted reproductive technologies and speculates on how those processes may affect the future life of the donor-conceived person. I will suggest that trust is an integral part of the exchange between donors, recipients, and gamete agencies in donor conception and heavily informs concepts of relatedness, race, ethnicity, kinship, class, and visibility. The decision to be transparent (or not) about a child's genetic parentage affects recipient parents' choices of donor, about who is allowed to know children's genetic backgrounds, and how important it is to be able to pass as an unassisted conception. In this way, recipients must trust the process, institutions, and individuals involved in their treatment, as well as place trust in the future they imagine for their child. The current market for donor gametes reproduces normative conceptions of the nuclear family, kinship, and relatedness by facilitating matching donors to recipients by phenotype and cultural affinities. Recipient parents who choose not to prioritize matching, and actively disclose the process of children's conceptions, may embark on a project of queering heteronormative family structures and place great trust in both their own children and changing social attitudes to reduce stigma and generate acceptance for non-traditional families.
Log in | Register Search in: Journal Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies... more Log in | Register
Search in:
Journal
Continuum
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Latest Articles
0
Views
0
CrossRef citations
0
Altmetric
Original Articles
Minor bodies: how disability is figured in children’s yoga classes
Karen-Anne Wong
Pages 1-11 | Published online: 21 Dec 2016
Download citation
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1262106
Crossmark
In this article
Abstract
Disability in epidemic: or, a plague of minoritization?
Separation and special education
Diagnosing and treating disability
Embracing difference, or, ‘You are different, and so is everyone else’
Notes on contributor
Disclosure statement
Abstract
In this article, I argue that children’s yoga classes can reinforce normative understandings of disability, minoritizing disabled children, but also having the potential to reconfigure disabled children’s bodies in new ways. Yoga pedagogy is multifarious and malleable enough to be adapted to the distinct classroom cultures produced by teachers and students. I focus on interview data from three teachers of children’s yoga to discuss the different ways they understand disabled children in their classes. This analysis leads me to argue that teachers of children’s yoga mobilize various narratives about disability in their classes, such as the need for inclusion, separation, diagnosis, treatment and/or correction. It is critical that students, parents and teachers are aware of how these narratives and pedagogical approaches may produce minoritizing effects, or alternatively offer means for resistance or intervention to the minoritization of disabled children.
Child's Pose: Becoming Child and the Phenomenology of Children's Yoga Classes To date there ha... more Child's Pose: Becoming Child and the Phenomenology of Children's Yoga Classes
To date there has been little theoretical consideration of how children's yoga affects students' ways of thinking
and being. Using interviews with child students of yoga and my own participant observation as a children’s
yoga teacher, this paper focuses on how a theoretical understanding of narrative may illuminate our
perceptions of how children learn to think and feel during yoga practice. Narrative is considered a tool for
students’ to view their own bodies as vehicles for storytelling, producing new conceptions of self. I read
children’s yoga practices through Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus. Using Deleuze
and Guattari’s theories of the body, I suggest that in a yoga class, children are not imagining themselves to
become other, such as a dog or tree. Instead, children are actually becoming a new entity, a mediated body
that lies somewhere between self and other (such as a dog or tree). By listening to children and engaging with
theory this research brings greater understanding of children’s experiences. Ways of being on the yoga mat
may provide a window into the ways that individuals experience childhood.
This thesis is an ethnographic study of children's yoga practices, focused particularly on the co... more This thesis is an ethnographic study of children's yoga practices, focused particularly on the complex intermeshing of the normalising and liberating potential of these practices. It draws on focus groups, interviews and/or questionnaires with fifty-one young people and nineteen adults, along with participant observation drawn from the researcher’s role as a teacher of children’s yoga. A visual component accompanies the textual account; a short ethnographic film forms an appendix to the thesis. The research tracked ways in which specific yoga practices normalise children's bodies, forcing them into standardised poses and facilitating judgment of children’s behaviour according to moralised norms. It is argued that this process of normalisation replicated and reproduced dominant understandings of childhood and children's futures. The research nonetheless found that the same yoga practices could simultaneously embrace and endorse non-dominant versions of childhood and alternative futures for individual children. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Megan Watkins and Cressida Heyes, it is argued that multiple versions of discipline affected children's experiences in yoga - from discipline within the classroom to discipline as a form of body modification and subjection. Both normative and non-normative approaches to discipline had the potential to provide children with new skills and capacities. The meanings and effects of children’s yoga are also, it is argued, highly dependent upon the contextual circumstances of children's lives, institutions and the teacher's pedagogy. Following Kerry H. Robinson, Kylie Valentine and others, this study demonstrates that children had a great deal of competency, agentic capability and power within their relationship networks. The final two chapters investigate this process through two themes that emerged from the fieldwork: disability and sexuality. They analyse how children negotiated disabled and sexualised subjectivities within yoga classrooms in both limiting and enabling ways.