Abstract

This dissertation is a contribution to the development of the theory and practice of critical pedagogy. In particular the dissertation focuses upon the importance of the body as a site for critical reflection. The body here provides the dialectical linkage between the particular and the general, the individual and the social. Such a linkage is deemed necessary for understanding of one's everyday experiences as they are structured in relationship to the culture and one's life world. ;The dissertation follows recent feminist and postmodern theorizing in its demand that human knowledge be grounded in the experience of the historically and culturally situated body/subject. The notion of situated knowledge as it is incorporated by the human subject and is inscribed on the body as a lived process is the central issue of this work. In terms of this examples are given of the ways in which the body becomes a vehicle for oppression, resistance, and liberation. ;The work traces the philosophical roots of the separation of mind and body, and its influences on the notion of a critical rationality which attends to intellectual as opposed to embodied knowing. It reviews recent attempts by critical and feminist scholars to develop a discourse centered on the oppressed body. Using a phenomenological methodology the author engages in a series of personal reflections--"body memories"--through which her life-world is critically interrogated. In these she illustrates how the body mediates culture and social ideology. From these reflections the author suggests future possibilities for a curriculum concerned with the praxis of social change and human liberation. In terms of this the work argues for an expanded notion of the aesthetic in education in which the aesthetic refers to the whole region of human perception and sensation--the body experiencing