Articulating Embodiment in Knowledge-Intensive Institu-Situations

As the title of this dissertation suggests, its central concern is articulating embodiment in what I call knowledge-intensive institu-situations: academic and cultural environments in which knowledge production and circulation, organizational structures, and lived experience are deeply entangled. Rather than treating institutions as stable, bounded entities, knowledge as progressively linear, or embodiment as an individual attribute, the dissertation approaches institutional life, knowledge, and embodiment as relational, contingent, and emergent processes lived in practice. It questions how bodies, knowledge, and institutions co-constitute one another in situated ways, and how carefully attuning to this co-constitution can ethically and methodologically re-organize the conditions for knowledge-intensivity to emerge. The dissertation’s title is meant to provoke a generative, practice-led gesture rather than signal a mere thematic focus. This articulating gesture simultaneously seeks to describe, map out, and analyze embodiment as a contingent, relational, and emergent phenomenon, taking form in practice through situated accounts and experiences while also performing the very form of embodiment I theorize: a processual articulating rather than anatomically dissecting mode of inquiry, as in dissertating a dissertation. As a methodological orientation, the dissertation develops an approach that resists a “view from nowhere” (e.g. Haraway) and instead starts from the middle (e.g. Merleau-Ponty). This methodological approach and its ethics acknowledges the researcher’s implication in analyzing phenomena and treats analysis as an embodied, situated practice rather than a detached operation. Articulating, rather than anatomically dissecting, becomes the modus operandi. Speaking from this position, my educational background in the humanities involved learning to integrate the rigor of critical distance with a stance of remaining ethically responsible in situations where cultural phenomena and their analysis are mutually implicated. Methodology of Glowing Concepts A key methodological contribution of the dissertation is the development of working with glowing concepts. Drawing on Maggie MacLure’s (2010) notion of data that glows, I introduce a framework for conceptual engagement that is responsive, situational, and attuned to the unfolding of embodiment in knowledge-intensive institu-situations. Just as institu-situations foreground the situated, relational, and affective nature of knowledge work, glowing concepts provide a methodological apparatus for engaging with these phenomena without prematurely fixing or reifying them. They allow me to attend to moments of intensity, relationality, and material resonance, and to navigate the indeterminate dimensions of embodiment, temporality, and affect that are at stake within them. Rather than applying pre-given analytical categories, glowing concepts emerge from fieldwork encounters as felt intensifications—moments where something begins to “glow” because it matters, resonates, or exerts force across bodies, practices, and institutional structures. In this sense, concepts glow through the researcher’s situated engagement.