Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-05T16:23:25.703Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Language, Discourse and Ecosomatic Awareness

from Part II - Language Awareness in Business and the Professions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2022

By
Arran Stibbe
Edited by
Erika Darics
Erika Darics
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the ways that language constructs our view of our bodies and the relationship between our bodies and the environment around us. It considers whether we ‘have a body’ or ‘are a body’, whether we live ‘in the world’ or ‘on earth’, and how shifts in perspective might influence not only our thoughts but also our behaviour. The chapter explores how everyday texts from weather forecasts to Men’s Health magazine construct the body and its relationship to the environment. As well as promoting critical awareness of the linguistic construction of the body and environment in popular culture, the chapter also promotes direct personal exploration of the experience of being a body in the world. This experience can stretch to empathy with other people and other animals who all equally have an existence as moving bodies intrinsically linked with and part of the wider physical environment. Finally, the chapter explores the physical environment as a text – one which has been constructed not with words but with buildings, concrete, tree planting, crop growing etc.

Keywords

ecolinguisticsembodimentsomaticsecosomaticscritical language awareness
Type
Chapter
Information
Language Awareness in Business and the Professions , pp. 118 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abram, D., 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Pantheon.Google Scholar
Addiss, S., Yamamoto, F. and Yamamoto, A., 1996. A Haiku Garden: The Four Seasons in Poems and Prints. Weatherhill.Google Scholar
Anderson, J., 2004. The ties that bind? Self- and place-identity in environmental direct action. Ethics, Place & Environment, 7 (1/2), 45–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, S., 2008. Body and Earth as One: Strengthening our Connection to the Natural Source with EcoSomatics. Concious Dancer (Spring).Google Scholar
Beauvais, J., 2012. Focusing on the natural world: An ecosomatic approach to attunement with an ecological facilitating environment. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 7 (4), 277–291.Google Scholar
Berman, M., 2015. Coming to Our Senses: body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Cella, M .J. C., 2013. The ecosomatic paradigm in literature: Merging disability studies and ecocriticism. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 20 (3), 574–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cella, M. J. C. and Anderson, J., eds., 2017. Disability and the Environment in American Literature: Toward an Ecosomatic Paradigm. Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N., 2006. Language and Mind. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarkson, J., 2019. Extinction Rebellion forget tents, yoga mats & dole money all come from oil [online]. The Sun. Available from: www.thesun.co.uk/news/10117504/extinction-rebellion-london-forget-dole-money-tents-yoga-mats/ [Accessed 7 March 2020].Google Scholar
Connell, R., 2005. Masculinities. 2nd ed. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cresswell, T., 2000. Falling down: Resistance as diagnostic. In Sharp, J. P., ed. Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance. Routledge, 256–268.Google Scholar
Crown, S., 2012. Kathleen Jamie: A life in writing. The Guardian, 6 Apr.Google Scholar
Danvers, J., 2009. Being in the world. In Stibbe, A., ed. The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World. Green Books.Google Scholar
Dychtwald, K., 1986. Bodymind. J. P. Tarcher; Distributed by St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Eddy, M., Williamson, A. and Weber, R., 2014. Reflections on the spiritual dimensions of Somatic Movement Dance Education. In Williamson, A, Batson, G, Whatley, S, and Weber, R, eds. Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives. Intellect.Google Scholar
Eddy, M. H., 2017. Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action. Intellect Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N., ed., 1992a. Critical Language Awareness. Longman.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N., 1992b. Discourse and Social Change. Polity Press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N., 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. Longman.Google Scholar
Feldenkrais, M., 1990. Awareness through Movement: Health Exercises for Personal Growth. 1st Harper Collins pbk. ed. Harper San Francisco.Google Scholar
Giddens, A., 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hanna, T., 1988. Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health. Da Capo Life Long.Google Scholar
Hanna, T., 2019. What is Somatics? [online]. Somatic Systems Institute. Available from: https://somatics.org/library/htl-wis1 [Accessed 2 Nov 2019].Google Scholar
Harrison, M., 2016. Rain: Four Walks in English Weather. Faber & Faber.Google Scholar
Ingold, T., 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kingsnorth, P. and Hine, D., 2009. The Dark Mountain Project Manifesto. Online. http://darkmountain.net/about/manifesto. Lakoff, G. and Turner, M., 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. and Wehling, E., 2012. The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Leopold, A., 1979. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
MacFarlane, R., 2015. Landmarks. Hamish Hamilton.Google Scholar
MacFarlane, R. and Morris, J., 2017. The Lost Words: A Spell Book. Hamish Hamilton.Google Scholar
Meyerson, D., 2001. Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work. Harvard Business School Press.Google Scholar
Mueller, M. L., 2017. Being Salmon, Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild. Chelsea Green Publishing.Google Scholar
Okri, B., 1996. Birds of Heaven. Phoenix.Google Scholar
Olsen, A., 2002. Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Middlebury College Press: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Purser, R. E., 2019. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater.Google Scholar
Roberts, A., 2013. What Makes Us Human? BBC.Google Scholar
Rosen, M., 2012. Dignity past and present. In Waldron, J. and Dan-Cohen, M., eds. Dignity, Rank, and Rights. Oxford University Press, 79–98.Google Scholar
Schwartz, R., 2014. This indivisable moment: A meditation on language, spirit, magic and somatic practice. In Williamson, A, Batson, G, Whatley, S and Weber, R, eds. Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives. Intellect, pp. 305–326.Google Scholar
Selby, D. and Kagawa, F., eds., 2015. Sustainability Frontiers: Critical and Transformative Voices from the Borderlands of Sustainability Education. Budrich.Google Scholar
Seligman, L. and Reichenberg, L.W., 2010. Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy: Systems, Strategies, and Skills. 3rd ed. Pearson.Google Scholar
Stibbe, A., 2015. Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. Routledge.Google Scholar
Stibbe, A., 2019. Discovering the Weatherworld: Combining ecolinguistics, ecocriticism and lived experience. In Slovic, S., Rangarajan, S. and Sarveswaran, V., eds. Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication.Routledge, 71–83.Google Scholar
Vannini, P. and McCright, A. M., 2007. Technologies of the sky: A socio-semiotic and critical analysis of televised weather discourse. Critical Discourse Studies, 4 (1), 49–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, A., Batson, G., Whatley, S. and Weber, R., eds., 2014. Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives. Intellect.Google Scholar
Yates, C., 2012. Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature. Collins.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×