Earth(l)y pleasures and air-borne bodies: Elemental haptics in women's cross-country running

A rich and multi-stranded sociology of sporting embodiment has begun to emerge in recent years. Calls have been made to analyze more deeply not only the sensory dimensions of lived sporting bodies but also the values prevailing within particular physical–cultural worlds. This article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing theoretical perspectives drawn from phenomenological sociology to explore cross-country runners' sensory encounters with the elemental, contoured by the values of the running lifeworlds they inhabit. Autoethnographic and autophenomenographic data were collected via three research projects. Senses of touch still remain under-researched within the sporting sensorium, and here we focus on the “elemental haptics” of earth and air on our cross-country training runs. We also explore the rich, complex somatic experiences afforded by various of these elemental combinations. For runners, as for many sports participants, the haptic emerges as a key aspect of our sensuous running lifeworld.

Meanings of nursing professionals' experiences in the context of the pandemic of COVID-19

Objective: to understand the meanings that nursing professionals attribute to their experiences in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Qualitative study with 719 professionals. Data were collected virtually and processed by Interface de R pour les Analyses Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires. The analysis was conducted in the light of the theoretical-philosophical referential of Phenomenological Sociology. Results: four categories emerged from the discourse analysis: meanings of the experiences related to oneself; meanings of the experiences related to others; meanings of the experiences related to working conditions; and meanings of the experiences faced with the uncertainties of the future. Conclusion: the experiences are marked by suffering in relation to personal aspects, to their social networks and to the world of work itself. Strategies that support these professionals currently and in continued care in the medium and long term need to be established in order to preserve their mental health.

Media and the Social Construction of Reality

In this chapter, the authors argue that a phenomenological approach to sociology only can be preserved if a version of sociology is developed that takes seriously the existence of media and the entanglement of digital media technologies and interfaces in every aspect of daily life. That means, in turn, taking seriously the roles that data extraction and data processing play in both the operations of digital media and the production of what counts as knowledge of the social world. If so, then some adjustments to other key assumptions must be made, for example about the social world’s transparency. But those adjustments are worth making in order to preserve the project of phenomenological sociology, which still has much to contribute to a sense of the tensions at work in the social world and its forms of knowledge. To outline this, the authors first discuss the consequences of a mediated life for social theory, then reflect on how digital media and data changed processes of the mediated construction reality, and finally introduce “deep mediatization” as a “sensitizing concept” for such an analysis.

The sociocognitive approach in critical discourse studies and the phenomenological sociology of knowledge: intersections

This article argues that phenomenological sociology has great potential to provide a strong theoretical support to the Sociocognitive Approach (SCA) in Critical Discourse Studies. SCA is interested in the interconnections between knowledge, discourse and society while placing subjectivity in the centre of its framework. It looks into the correlative relationship between personal- and socially shared knowledge, and the significance of these correlations to discourse production and interpretation. Analogously, phenomenological sociology explores the interrelated structures of subjectivity, knowledge and the social world. It systematically analyses the conditions and forms of intersubjective understanding and the mutually constitutive relationship between subjective- and objective knowledge. Given the considerable overlap between the subject matter of phenomenological sociology and that of SCA, the purpose of the article is to draw the attention of critical discourse analysts to a neglected but extremely resourceful field. Following a brief introduction to SCA, the article will address some of SCA’s key concepts in conjunction with the phenomenological-sociological insight.