Materializing ecosophy – yoga as an ethical academic practice

The relationship between my personal yoga practice and academic activities is explored as one way of materializing Felix Guattari’s concept of ecosophy. Noting Guattari’s apparent lack of recognition of feminist analysis, Rosi Braidotti’s development of nomadic theory is used to articulate a more feminist inspired understanding of ecosophy. I explore yoga’s potential contribution to social and economic transformation and reconstruction by explaining how teaching yoga to a group of multiply disadvantaged women changed the nature of research undertaken with them. Central to this was negotiating our embodied researcher and researched selves and recognising an intercorporeal shared space, which called for a careful ethical response. This is applied to other academic activities, considering how practice in ‘neo-liberal’ universities relates to Guattari’s Three Ecologies. Conceptualizing yoga as a microprocess, an ethical and aesthetic practice, a practice of the self and, after Braidotti, as a way of acting with ‘faithfulness to oneself’, I explore how such ‘old’ practices may be deployed in ‘new’ contexts to contribute to Guattari’s call for a ‘massive reconstruction of social mechanisms’ through ‘innovatory practices’. The potential framework achieved through melding Braidotti’s and Guattari’s concepts could, I argue, be more widely used for feminist and environmental research.