Pedagogies of Salvation

Pedagogies of Salvation asks questions that yoga studies and the emergent social sciences of yoga rarely confront: what actually happens in yoga studios? How do people practice, and how does yoga shape the wider lives of teachers and practitioners? What forms of embodied selfhood emerge through these routines? The book takes you inside classes, trainings, and everyday practice to show how yoga becomes a pedagogy of attention, discipline, and care. Drawing on close ethnographic access, discourse analysis, and practitioners’ voices, it reveals yoga’s ambivalent role in a post Fordist neoliberal world and its therapeutic logics. It offers one of the first micro sociological analyses of modern yoga’s teaching methods within the broader yoga industry.

Matteo Di Placido, Ph.D (2021) in Sociology and Social Research (University of Milan – Bicocca), is Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Turin, Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology of Health and Sociology of Culture at the University of the Sacred Heart (Turin) and in Sociology of Cultural Process at the University of Padua. Matteo was Visiting Scholar at the Department of Political Science and the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California Riverside (UCR) and Academic Associate at the Cardiff School of Sport and Health Sciences at the Metropolitan University of Cardiff, Wales. His work has been published in Journals such as Current Sociology, Social Compass and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, among others.