scholarly journals In praise of urban walking: Towards understanding of walking as a subversive bodily practice in neoliberal space

2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022110384
Author(s):  
Kaja Poteko ◽  
Mojca Doupona

Focusing on the steps that literally and metaphorically guide us today, this paper takes walking as its main subject and establishes it theoretically as a form of subversive bodily movement. If contemporary sociological and humanistic treatments of walking show that this everyday practice has not been completely overlooked, the gap opens at the level of thinking it in relation to the dominant social order and its spatial and temporal manifestations. As we argue, in the hegemonic neoliberal context, walking has the potential to manifest itself as a practice that breaks with the existing logic of both space and time. Through the methodological application of the cat’s cradle game, we develop a theoretical argumentation to ground walking as a bodily practice that requires different space and different time. Emanating from the body, it opens to the space and time of enjoyment – a heterotopia erected in relation to the current neoliberal hegemony, but in the manner of a crack, a path that carries the projection of a possible alternative.

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-762 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Nicholas Edwards ◽  
Robyn L Jones

The primary purpose of this article was to investigate the use and manifestation of humour within sports coaching. This was particularly in light of the social significance of humour as a critical component in cultural creation and negotiation. Data were gathered from a 10-month ethnographic study that tracked the players and coaches of Senghenydd City Football Club (a pseudonym) over the course of a full season. Precise methods of data collection included participant observation, reflective personal field notes, and ethnographic film. The results demonstrated the dominating presence of both ‘inclusionary putdowns’ and ‘disciplinary humour’, particularly in relation to how they contributed to the production and maintenance of the social order. Finally, a reflective conclusion discusses the temporal nature of the collective understanding evident among the group at Senghenydd, and its effect on the humour evident. In doing so, the work contributes to the body of knowledge regarding the social role of humour within sports coaching.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 857-872
Author(s):  
Marsha Pearce

In the Caribbean, the practice of getting dressed matters because it is a practice of attending to the body. Under a colonial regime, black bodies were ill-treated and selves were negated. Clothing played an instrumental role in the abuse of bodies and the stripping of a sense of wellbeing. Attire was one key way of demarcating master and slave and rendering some members of society null and void. Enslaved Africans, who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic to the New World, were considered chattel or commodities rather than people and clothes functioned in a way that reinforced that notion. Yet, dress became a strategy of subversion – of making chattel, property or ‘non-people’ look like people. The enslaved recognised that, through clothes, it was possible to look and feel free. Today that legacy remains. Clothing is seen not only as that which can make a people ‘look like people’ but also feel like people – clothing sets up a specific structure of feeling. This paper pivots on notions of looking and feeling like people while deploying Joanne Entwistle’s conceptual framework of dress as situated bodily practice. The article locates its investigation in the Caribbean, examining the philosophy and practice of Trinidadian clothing designer Robert Young. The article establishes him as a source of aesthetic therapeutic solutions in the Caribbean. It argues that his clothing designs produce a therapeutic discourse on the Black Caribbean body – a discourse, which facilitates a practice of getting dressed that gives a sense of agency, self-empowerment and psychic security even if that sense is embodied temporarily; lasting perhaps only as long as the garment is worn.


1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Prassopoulos ◽  
D. Cavouras

The size of the normal spleen was estimated by CT in 153 children, examined with indication unrelated to splenic disease. In each patient the width, thickness, length and volume of the spleen were calculated. Measurements were also normalized to the transverse diameter of the body of the first lumbar vertebra. The spleen underwent significant growth during the first 4 years of life and reached maximum size at the age of 13. There were no differences in splenic volume between boys and girls. Splenic thickness correlated best with normal splenic volume. The strongest correlation was also found between splenic thickness and volume in a group of 45 children with clinically evident splenomegaly. Splenic thickness, an easy-to-use measurement, may be employed in everyday practice to represent splenic volume on CT.


Author(s):  
Jane W. Davidson

This article explores the fundamental role of bodily movement in the development of musical knowledge and performance skills; in particular, how the body can be used to understand expressive musical material and to communicate that meaning to coperformers and audience. The relevance to the educator is explored (whether working with a child or adult beginner, or a more advanced learner). The article is divided into six main sections, tracing the role of body movement skill in music production, expressive musical performance, developing learners to play their musical instruments with technical and expressive appropriateness, coperformer coordination, and projection for audience perception. The work builds on a growing interest in the embodied nature of musical experience. The article concludes with case study observations of practical insights and applications for the teacher.


Daphnis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 343-388
Author(s):  
Ottmar Ette

Welterleben and Weiterleben are what determine the second globalization (of four previously explored) whose constantly accelerating dynamic, vectorization, this essay explores. On the basis of selected writings of Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Adelbert von Chamisso, the author highlights the increasing speed with which knowledge, especially in the experiential sciences, is produced and disseminated following the routes of ever-widening trade speeded along by globalization. The notion of ‘vectopia’ stands for the connection of utopia and uchronia in space and time in such a way that the experience of the world, expanded worldwide, contains within it a Weiter-Leben, a ‘living-further’ that is to be understood first in a spatial, and not yet temporal, sense, of what Forster called Erfahrungswissen, or ‘experiential knowledge.’ Vectopia, as elaborated here, has a material dimension that relates to the physical person, the body, the experience of the world that cannot occur without the constant changing of place, without a journeying that is again and again recommenced. Vectopia develops the projection of a life not from space or from time alone, but by their combination. Vectopia is more than a concept, it is a thought-figure: it is vitally connected to life, and thus a life-figure. It opens itself to a type of knowledge that stands almost at the threshold of a further life, indeed, of a Weiterleben that, opening itself to a ‘living-onward,’ resides beyond space, time, and movement.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Wright

This article contributes to theory development through advancing an embodied framing of organizational routines. It addresses the absence of bodies in a literature that tends to treat the “people” involved in organizational routines as disembodied actors. One consequence of this is that progress toward a theory of “routines as practices” has tended to ignore how bodies contribute to their unfolding. Theorizing embodied communicative acts brings the body and embodiment into organizational routines research. Existing knowledge is extended by drawing from multiple empirical illustrations to explain how routines are accomplished when power is exercised through gesture and bodily movement, the spaces where routines unfold cohere with human bodies making a difference in how they are constituted and experienced, and, the routineness of routines is made manifest when mutual intelligibility is discerned in the silences that characterize how embodied actors interrelate.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Wiesława Sajdek

The objective of the article is to recall the European philosophical basis of the philosophical culture, inextricably connected with ancient Greece and its language. Plato’s philosophy is in the very core of the culture and its salient component is the doctrine of anamnesis. The elements of the doctrine are dispersed in numerous dialogues, particularly in Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, therefore they are given more attention. Platonic reflection on anamnesis is related to his view on the soul whose development is associated with the process of cognizing, being essentially tantamount to recalling of what the soul saw before its imprisonment in the body. The role of myth in Plato’s philosophy, as well as in European culture as a whole, has been discussed, along with the main subject. On the background of the Platonic thought, examples of its reception in Polish Renaissance philosophy and in the poetry of the Romantic period has been presented.


Numen ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 341-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brannon Wheeler

AbstractThe following pages examine the relationship between the prophet Muhammad's sacrifice of the camels and the distribution of his hair at the conclusion of his farewell pilgrimage just before his death. A study of the accounts of the Prophet's camel sacrifice shows that it prefigures the annual rites of the Hajj using the biblical model of Abraham's sacrifice to align other pre-Islamic practices, including those associated with the cult at Mecca, with the origins of a specifically Islamic civilization. The prophet Muhammad's distribution of his hair, detached from his body at the time of his desacralization from the Hajj delineates the Meccan sanctuary as the place of origination from which was spread both the physical and textual corpus of the Prophet's life. Whether by design or not, the traditional Islamic descriptions of this episode from the life of the prophet Muhammad are not unlike narratives found in Buddhist, Iranian, Christian and other traditions in which the body of a primal being is dismembered to create a new social order. Through the gift of the sacrificial camels and parts of his own body, the prophet Muhammad is portrayed, in this episode, as making a figurative and literal offering of himself at the origins of Islamic civilization.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-282
Author(s):  
JEFFREY WEEKS

Three obvious, superficially simple but actually intensely complex questions embodied in the title immediately confront the reader of Dagmar Herzog's important new book. First, what do we mean by the ‘sexuality’ that constitutes the subject matter? Second, what is demarcated by the Europe that provides the geo-political boundaries of this study? Third, does the ‘twentieth century’ provide a useful temporal unity for the narrative and analysis that is at the heart of the book? Such questions are not mere scholarly nit-picking or academic point scoring, but a tribute to the problematising of the body in space and time that has been a hallmark of the deconstructive and reconstructive energy of recent scholarship on the sexual, and that is now making a welcome entry into mainstream history.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document