Commentary on Rosie Jones McVey “Learning from the Herd?:Intercorporeality and Ethics in Equine-Assisted Learning for UK Youth”

In this paper Rosie Jones McVey presents analysis of her ethnographic study of Equine Assisted Learning (EAL), a contemporary form of care based upon the finding that horses are “an invaluable ally in helping to improve human health and wellbeing” (Jones McVey, undated). In the paper Rosie, herself an EAL practitioner, focuses on a specific charitable centre, Paddock Farm, and on how EAL with young people who have been excluded from mainstream education is practiced and participated in there. The descriptions are of interaction between the young people, the workers, the horses, and all they bring with them into those interactions – histories, discourses, lived experience, habits, beliefs, ideologies, stuff.