The Phenomenology of the Body After 85 Years

2021 ◽  
pp. 104973232110269
Author(s):  
Brianne van Rhyn ◽  
Alex Barwick ◽  
Michelle Donelly
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Body ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Meaningful Activity ◽  
Phenomenology Of The Body ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Embodiment Theory ◽  
Depth Interviews

The aim of this study was to describe the phenomenology of the body after 85 years, addressing the following question: What is the experience of the body at this age? Within the paradigm of existential phenomenology, this study was philosophically and methodologically underpinned by embodiment theory, positioning the body as the starting point for the exploration of lived experience. In-depth interviews with 20 purposively selected individuals were analyzed using van Manen’s context-sensitive phenomenological orientation. Findings indicated that the body was experienced primarily in negative terms, as compromising engagement in meaningful activity, independence, safety, vitality, dignity, and identity. Participants coped with bodily changes through adaptation, humor, and acceptance. In addition, participants viewed their unreliable and at times unfamiliar body, as distinct from their sense of self. This research addresses the current lack of subjective accounts of bodily and embodied experiences in this group, combating assumptive views and contributing insightful understanding.

scholarly journals “This journey has definitely changed me”: An ethnographic narrative exploring disabled peoples’ lives through embodied experiences and identity negotiation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Social Model Of Disability ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Embodied Experiences

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>

scholarly journals “This journey has definitely changed me”: An ethnographic narrative exploring disabled peoples’ lives through embodied experiences and identity negotiation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Social Model Of Disability ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Embodied Experiences

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>

scholarly journals Embodied Architecture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Beth Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spatial Changes ◽  
Experiential Design ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Contemporary Architecture ◽  
Working Out

<p>The human body is what we come to know the world by. Everything is relative. Using a body centred approach, the relationships held between the Body, Clothing and Architecture are explored through the identification of Skin, Intimacy and Boundary. Beginning with the layers and skins closest to the body, a process of building around and working out is used to establish an understanding of the relationships held between the three subjects. This methodological approach is used throughout the thesis, both theoretically and by design. The body is approached from a phenomenological perspective where experiential design methodologies are employed with the intent of altering the body’s understanding of itself; its lived experience, embodied cognition and sensory perception. Photographic images capture experiential design moments, translating and expressing the theories being discussed throughout. The architectural conditions studied are contained within the parameters of the domestic. This environment represents the most intimate architectural expression of the self, grounding the body in context. A 1:1 scale structural model identifies the potentials of what contemporary architecture can be and how it can act on and with the body to alter the lived experience. It generates dynamic spatial conditions, demonstrating architectures ability to engage with the body. The interactive spatial changes experienced stimulate both physical and psychological shifts and as a result generate new embodied experiences. As the body is used to ground the generative design processes, clothing and architecture are bought together through the amalgamation of skin, intimacy and boundary, resulting in the production of the Embodied Architecture structure. The theoretical basis for the production of this architectural intervention seeks to be pushed further, challenging contemporary architecture to engage the body and enrich the lived experience.</p>

Cultures of Embodied Experience: Technology, Religion and Body Pedagogics

2007 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Shilling ◽  
Philip A. Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Technological Culture ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Large Growth ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
The One ◽  
Religion And Body

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.

scholarly journals Embodied Architecture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Beth Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spatial Changes ◽  
Experiential Design ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Contemporary Architecture ◽  
Working Out

<p>The human body is what we come to know the world by. Everything is relative. Using a body centred approach, the relationships held between the Body, Clothing and Architecture are explored through the identification of Skin, Intimacy and Boundary. Beginning with the layers and skins closest to the body, a process of building around and working out is used to establish an understanding of the relationships held between the three subjects. This methodological approach is used throughout the thesis, both theoretically and by design. The body is approached from a phenomenological perspective where experiential design methodologies are employed with the intent of altering the body’s understanding of itself; its lived experience, embodied cognition and sensory perception. Photographic images capture experiential design moments, translating and expressing the theories being discussed throughout. The architectural conditions studied are contained within the parameters of the domestic. This environment represents the most intimate architectural expression of the self, grounding the body in context. A 1:1 scale structural model identifies the potentials of what contemporary architecture can be and how it can act on and with the body to alter the lived experience. It generates dynamic spatial conditions, demonstrating architectures ability to engage with the body. The interactive spatial changes experienced stimulate both physical and psychological shifts and as a result generate new embodied experiences. As the body is used to ground the generative design processes, clothing and architecture are bought together through the amalgamation of skin, intimacy and boundary, resulting in the production of the Embodied Architecture structure. The theoretical basis for the production of this architectural intervention seeks to be pushed further, challenging contemporary architecture to engage the body and enrich the lived experience.</p>

scholarly journals Grounding Aesthetic Preference in the Bodily Conditions of Meaning Constitution

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (43) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfonsina Scarinzi
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
Aesthetic Preference ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Mind

Mark Johnson’s work The Meaning of the Body presents John Dewey’s pragmatism and pragmatist aesthetics as the forerunners of the anti-Cartesian embodied enactive approach to human experience and meaning. He rejects the Kantian noncognitive character of aesthetics and emphasizes that aesthetics is the study of the human capacity to experience the bodily conditions of  meaning constitution that grows from our bodily conditions of life. Using Mark Johnson’s view as a starting-point, this paper offers the beginning of an enactive approach to aesthetic preference  contributing to bringing human aesthetic behavior research closer to the enactive approach to human experience. Following enactive studies on bodily sense-making and embodied emotions, I identify the bodily conditions of meaning constitution in which aesthetic preference is grounded with the subject’s self-regulatory visceral embodied constitution of viable degrees of value of the environmental factors according to her bodily structure. Unlike mainstream aesthetic preference research in empirical aesthetics, I claim that the subject’s aesthetic preference constitution requires the lived experience of the bodily conditions of meaning constitution through the conscious experience of the subjectively aroused lived body. The implausibility of the mind/body dichotomy of current aesthetic preference research is highlighted.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

“Scrap-Heap Storiesˮ: Oral Narratives of Labour and Loss in Scottish Mining and Manufacturing

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-2018) ◽  
pp. 8-21
Author(s):  
Arthur McIvor
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Job Loss ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Industrial Work ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Plant Closures ◽  
The Impact

This article is an attempt to comprehend deindustrialisation and the impact of plant downsizing and closures in Scotland since the 1970s through listening to the voices of workers and reflecting on their ways of telling, whilst making some observations on how an oral history methodology can add to our understanding. It draws upon a rich bounty of oral history projects and collections undertaken in Scotland over recent decades. The lush description and often intense articulated emotion help us as academic “outsidersˮ to better understand how lives were profoundly affected by plant closures, getting us beyond statistical body counts and overly sentimentalised and nostalgic representations of industrial work to more nuanced understandings of the meanings and impacts of job loss. In recalling their lived experience of plant run-downs and closures, narrators are informing and interpreting; projecting a sense of self in the process and drawing meaning from their working lives. My argument here is that we need to listen attentively and learn from those who bore witness and try to make sense of these diverse, different and sometimes contradictory stories. We should take cognisance of silences and transgressing voices as well as dominant, hegemonic narratives if we are to deepen the conversation and understand the complex but profound impacts that deindustrialisation had on traditional working-class communities in Scotland, as well as elsewhere.

BODY PRACTICES OF WOMEN IN THE LIGHT OF FEMINIST DEBATES

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Academic Feminism ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Body Practices

The paper provides an analysis of the structuralist and phenomenological traditions in interpretation of female body practices. The structuralist intellectual tradition bases its methodology on concepts from social anthropology and philosophy that see the body as ‘ordered’ by social institutions. Structuralist approaches within academic feminism are focused on critical study of the social regulation of female bodies with respect to reproduction and sexualisation (health and beauty practices). The author focuses on the dominant physical ideal of femininity and the means for body pedagogics that have been constructed by patriarchal authority. In contrast to theories of the ordered body, the phenomenological tradition is focused on the “lived” body, embodied experience, and the personal motivation and values attached to body practices. This tradition has been influenced by a variety of schools of thought including philosophical anthropology, phenomenology and action theories in sociology. Within academic feminism, there are at least three phenomenologically oriented strategies of interpretation of female body practices. The first one is centred around women’s individual situation and bodily socialization; the second one studies interrelation between body practices and the sense of the self; and the third one postulates the potential of body practices to destabilize the dominant ideals of femininity and thus provides a theoretical basis for feminist activism. The phenomenological tradition primarily analyses the motivational, symbolic and value-based components of body practices as they interact with women’s corporeality and sense of self. In general, both structuralist and phenomenological traditions complement each other by focusing on different levels of analysis of female embodiment.

scholarly journals Heart, Mind and Body: #NoMorePage3 and the Replenishment of Emotional Energy

2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062199450
Author(s):  
Lauren McCarthy ◽  
Sarah Glozer
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
Emotional Energy ◽  
Online Abuse ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Feminist Organization ◽  
Online Misogyny

Emotional energy is key to disruptive institutional work, but we still know little about what it is, and importantly, how it is refuelled. This empirical paper presents an in-depth case study of ‘No More Page 3’ (#NMP3), an Internet-based feminist organization which fought for the removal of sexualized images of women from a UK newspaper. Facing online misogyny, actors engage in ‘emotional energy replenishment’ to sustain this disruptive institutional work amid emotional highs and lows. We introduce ‘affective embodiment’ – the corporeal and emotional experiences of the institution – as providing emotional energy in relation to disruptive institutional work. Affective embodiment is surfaced through alignment or misalignment with others’ embodied experiences, and this mediates how actors replenish emotional energy. Alignment with others’ embodied experiences, often connected to online abuse, means emotional energy is replenished through ‘affective solidarity’ (movement towards the collective). Misalignment, surfaced through tensions within the movement, means actors seek replenishment through ‘sensory retreat’ (movement away from the collective). This study contributes to theorization on institutional work and emotional energy by recentring the importance of the body alongside emotions, as well as offering important lessons for online organizing.

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