Venue: The conference is hosted by the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, Campus Copenhagen, Denmark.
When: 8 - 11 June 2026.
The 2nd International Conference on Embodied Education aims to bring together communities of scholars working in the field of Embodied Education (EE), with the interest of sharing knowledge and strengthening the burgeoning networks of research and practice of embodied teaching and learning. The concept ‘embodiment’ includes emotional, embedded, enactive, extended and embodied approaches to understanding human nature and experience. Theoretical, empirical and practical proposals related to the interfaces and transactions between embodiment and education are welcome.
Over the past decades, work in embodied education has reaffirmed and expanded upon ideas first articulated decades ago by thinkers such as John Dewey, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Margaret Floy Washburn. Their pioneering work emphasized the close interconnectedness between mind, body and world, and the fundamentally embodied nature of human experience and learning. Today, research across many fields with relevance to education continues to validate these insights, demonstrating that human development and mental activities are distributed across the brain, body, environment, and social dimensions. At the same time, we still have much to learn from the rich work of earlier practitioners and theoreticians who explored bodily approaches to the understanding of our engaged being in the world.
An ongoing, central pursuit of the conference is to understand how insights from the frontier of research in embodied approaches to education and learning contribute to developments in theoretical foundations and transforming contemporary pedagogical practice. At the same time, we seek to learn from those practices that break new grounds in education and pedagogy by transgressing traditional dichotomies. Hence, with this conference, we want to set an interdisciplinary stage by bringing together researchers, practitioners, artists, teachers, and pedagogues to exchange knowledge, experience and ideas, thus enabling an extension of the understanding of EE in theory and practice.
Currently, embodied education also emerges as a promising framework for rethinking inclusion, equity, and diversity within educational and pedagogical practice. Both research and practical experience indicate that bodily practices offer challenges to normative assumptions and create more inclusive educational environments. Embodied inclusion is not the adaptation of individuals to contexts, but rather a transformation of those contexts through engagement with diverse embodied experiences. This enables us to learn from the periphery—engaging with perspectives shaped by marginalized positions and make us recognize how social realities are experienced differently across diverse bodies and identities. Being situated outside the mainstream subjects can contribute with valuable insights by participating in transformative, collective projects aimed at social change.
From the first conference in 2024, we learned that embodied education is being explored in a far wider range of fields and practices than we had anticipated. A rich plurality of accounts revealed how educators, researchers, artists, and practitioners engage with the body in diverse ways—across disciplines, institutions, and cultural contexts. We invite you to join us in holding space for people across traditional divisions of labour, dedicated to questions of how the body might take on new roles in educational contexts.
We welcome proposals in the following theoretical as well as practical areas:
We invite submission of abstracts of 200-250 words (excluding references) for individual presentations or workshops. Presentations are intended as traditional academic talks. Workshops aim at involving the audience in bodily, experiential and interactive activities.
We also invite proposals for round tables addressing EE. Proposals for roundtables must include a general initial description of the roundtable (around 200-300 words - excluding references) and descriptions of the (3 to 5) individual contributions (250-300 words each - excluding references). The name of a chair and/or a discussant (discussants may be researchers, practitioners, or other experts) must also be included. Please note that all abstracts should be submitted with the proposal and not separately. The total time for presentations is 70 minutes. Following each roundtable session there will be 20 minutes for Q&A.
