*draft text version published in Somaesthetics and Design Culture, edited by Balint Veres and Richard Shusterman (Brill: 2023) Can That Be Taught? Lessons in Embodied Knowledge from Memoir Writing for Craft & Design Education Jessica Hemmings (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden) 1. Introduction This chapter considers examples of self-education that rely on embodied knowledge described in memoir writing that may hold useful lessons for design and craft education. Embodied knowledge is commonly thought of as held within the body and typically recognised as difficult (if not impossible) to articulate verbally. In design and craft education, the term tacit knowledge is often used. Michael Polanyi, credited as the first to mention tacit knowledge, recognised that “we can know more than we can tell.” 1 Polanyi situates tacit knowledge firmly within the body, “the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical.” 2 Scrutiny of the body has been taken up by researchers such as Richard Shusterman whose concept of somaesthetics “highlights and explores the soma – the living, sentient, purposive body – as the indispensable medium for all perception.” 3 Shusterman’s somaesthetics seek alternatives to bodily communication that do not revert to language en route back to the body. In contrast, the admittedly eclectic range of examples I have drawn together from memoir writing attend to the very challenge of articulating the knowledge that begins within our bodies. Shusterman challenges the stance that the accumulation of tacit knowledge, from the familiar example of learning to ride a bicycle onwards, is always positive. Instead he draws attention to the bad habits “many of which go unnoticed not only because of their implicit character but also because their detrimental effects are usually not so extreme as to call our attention to them.” 4 Once ingrained, potentially bad habits, 1 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith Publisher, 1966), 4. 2 Ibid., 15. 3 Richard Shusterman, Thinking Through the Body: essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. 4 Richard Shusterman, “Muscle Memory and the Somaesthetic Pathologies of Everyday Life”, Human Movement, 2011, vol. 12(1), 5.