A Brief History of the Communicative Body
Mark G. Wagner, PhD
The body influences and creates social fields and common spaces; This knowledge has been submerged and marginalized throughout history. Yet despite this submersion and marginalization, interrelational and interrelational synchrony and dis-synchrony centered on and by the communicative body occur on and create immediate fields that can be considered from both historical and observational perspectives.
Building on recent theory by Damasio, Donald, Noddings, Grumet, Terdiman, and Nussbaum, the historical concepts and classroom observations presented here find that social values such as caring, loyalty, and generosity are implicitly and explicitly understood through the exchange, perception, and interpretation of the communicative signs and vibrations of the body. This book defines The Immediate Field to recover submerged knowledge and in doing so offers a new logic for understanding social communication and process. In turn, my hope is our understanding of immediate fields will further transformational practice in the learning and teaching of arts and sciences.
