Flesh mapping: cartography of struggle, renewal and hope in education

Flesh Mapping is a journey to map and make visible the personal impacts of institutional exclusionary practices. And through personal narrative, to investigate the material, emotional and social wounds inflicted, by today’s dominant epistemology of education. An epistemology that rejects the multiple worlds that co-exist and imposes a pedagogical stance that is persistently static, symmetrical and fixed. This thesis maps my struggle to unlearn the mythical story of civilization, in the daily practice of living life aware, awake and participant in the re-naming and remaking of my identity and community. To be educated is to be able to see the world as it is, to unravel our co-created worlds of words, texts, concepts that underpin our actions and to make meaning of our lived experience. In this thesis the wound (and wounded) is at once a site of pain, and renewal. To narratively map the injuries, is to speak, of the material, emotional, and spiritual impact of poverty, displacement, hunger and war on an individual life. Flesh Mapping holds a woman’s desire to make her story known and recognized not solely as an individual’s unique journey, but the one possible story of many that call to attention how we welcome and engage the presence and aspirations of others. Flesh mapping is an attempt to create a Pedagogy of shared narrative, place, and politics to connect our private lives to the affects of political and economic scripts that today constitute our lives around structures of inequity. To write my narrative is to situate myself as a concrete subject, inscribed by a wider cultural and historical continuum, which Said (1983) called “wordly self-situating.” Aware of this historical process the journey is not travelled alone, aware also that our private lives are not only social, they are biased, by our political, cultural, communal, and economic positions, we take the journey, travelled through the writing and sharing of our stories.