This Pain in My Neck: Living Conscientization and/as Paradox of Praxis

This article offers a series of autoethnographic reflections on suffering from physical symptoms associated with a paradox of praxis. More specifically, it mediates on the musculoskeletal pangs that come with a raised critical consciousness—or what Paulo Freire refers to in his teaching as conscientização—that stands as directly incongruent to living (in) the embodied politics of an incessantly aspirational working class habitus (and various machinations of social mobility).