conference paper / 2007

Contemplation, Consciousness and the Academy

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This paper argues that contemplative practice has a place in higher education because it cultivates forms of attention neglected by conventional academic training. Sellers-Young situates meditation, breath, movement, and reflective awareness as ways of knowing that complement rational analysis and empirical observation. The aim is not anti-intellectualism, but a more complete model of inquiry.

The work extends her studio-based concerns into institutional pedagogy. If consciousness is embodied and trainable, then classrooms should not treat students as disembodied processors of information. Contemplative practices can sharpen perception, reduce habitual reactivity, deepen ethical attention, and make learning more responsive to complexity. This paper helps explain how Sellers-Young's performance philosophy becomes a broader critique of the academy's inherited mind/body split.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year2007
Era 2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy i

2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy

This period broadens and complicates the earlier positions. In belly dance studies, Sellers-Young sharpens the critique of appropriation, commercialization, and the imagined Arab body. She traces belly dance from the Chicago World’s Fair and “Little Egypt” through Arab American nightlife, second-wave feminism, goddess spirituality, and branded spectacle. Enjoyment is not denied, but it is placed inside unequal histories of representation.

In “Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body,” she identifies different pedagogical regimes: optical, somatic, and mediated. Mirror-based training produces self-objectification and visual abstraction; direct somatic apprenticeship produces incorporation into lineage and tradition; screen-based learning produces a more autonomous but more image-mediated learner. This is one of her clearest statements that pedagogy produces kinds of consciousness.

Her work on ethnographic perspective marks a decisive methodological turn. Reflexivity must include not only social identity but sensory structure, neurological pattern, and movement history. She names the genetic/structural, imaginal/social, and performance selves. This framework later becomes central to her somatic autoethnography.

The contemplation and neuroplasticity writings connect performance training to broader academic reform. Contemplative practice is framed as a third way of knowing, complementary to rational analysis and empirical observation. Neuroscience supplies a vocabulary for attention, plasticity, habit, and embodied change, though the underlying practical insight comes from performance and somatics.

Continuity: technique forms subjectivity.

Expansion: the performance studio becomes a model for higher education.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventConsciousness and the Arts, Wales, May
Rolepresenter

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Analysis

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“Contemplation, Consciousness and the Academy” belongs to a moment when a set of practices long treated as extra-academic—meditation, silence, breath awareness, reflective attention, even explicitly monastic disciplines—were beginning to seek a legitimate place within higher education. Barbara Sellers-Young’s paper does not approach that emergence as a passing educational fashion, nor as a pious supplement to ordinary study. It asks a prior question: what conception of knowledge has made such practices seem marginal in the first place? The essay’s force lies in the way it relocates contemplation from the edges of spiritual life to the center of an epistemological argument about the academy itself.

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