Jen Southern

AAG Session (ID 8686)

Convenors: Susan Buckingham*, Monica Degen*, Jen Petersen#

(*Brunel University, UK; # NYU, USA)

Embodied methodologies: using the body as a research instrument

The body is a crucial tool in developing research. While recent years have witnessed a surge in research on the body in the social sciences, researchers have remained conspicuously silent on the role and implication of their own bodies in the research process. This session follows Wacquant’s call to interrogate research “not only of the body, in the sense of object, but also from the body, that is deploying the body as a tool of inquiry and vector of knowledge” (Wacquant 2004:viii). As the body becomes a ‘research instrument’ (Longhurst 2008) in its own right it outlines the importance of physicality in the “theorising of the social flesh”(Beasley and Bacchi 2000:349). In particular we want to interrogate what a focus on sensory perceptions, emotional experiences or embodied practices reveals about the social world that words can not? Furthermore we aim to explore the various intercorporeal relationships that emerge and are articulated through the connections between embodiment, subjectivity and spatial and material practices. We are therefore looking for papers that account for how the body is implicated and integral in research processes and explore the multiple and sometimes conflicting territories of the embodied self in fieldwork.

Please send abstracts to susan.buckingham@brunel.ac.uk by 20^th October 2009

Professor Susan Buckingham
Centre for Human Geography
Director, Social Work, School of Health Sciences and Social Care
Brunel University
Uxbridge, UB8 3PH

I just read “Windsurfing: An extreme form of material and embodies interaction?” by Tim Dant and Belinda Wheaton.

The main discussion is around the lifestyle and physical investment involved in Windsurfing, and whether it can be described as ‘extreme’. But the part that most interested me was about the physical engagement of the sport. the embodied physical capital, and bodily skill. “the control of the sailboard is wholly achieved by fine-tuning the orientation of the body to the object. At the highest level, all sports require a very high investment of physical capital, but with windsurfing () in order to participate at the lowest levels, the ability to achieve control must become virtually intuitive: it must happen without conscious thought so that the equipment becomes like a prosthetic extension of the sailor’s body.”

“the meaning of participation is articulated as the embodied performance of the activity, around the felt experience of doing it. The sport has a participatory ideology that promotes fund, involvement, ‘living for the moment’ and other intrinsic rewards.”

“The meaning of windsurfing for the participants is found in the body, in their creative and self-actualizing potential.”

“The motivation to engage in the action and the pleasure derived from engagement are linked to how the body has learnt to be in the world. this is indeed a cultural process in the sense discussed by Mauss as a ‘technique of the body’ (1973) that may be acquired through particular circumstances.”

“Rinehart and Sydnor (2003) have termed activites like windsurfing ‘expressive’ sports in contrast to what they see as the more reward-driven ‘spectacle’ sports, as they are rarely conducted for spectators or competitive practice, but rather emphasize the aesthetic realm in which one blends with one’s environment.”

this posting will turn into all quotes soon, but the thing that interested me is about the physical engagement in the sport, its aesthetic or expressing elements.

“Parlebas includes windsurfing in the class of sports that he labels ‘ludomotricité: that is, they are characterized by the pleasure achieved through the play activity itself (1999a: 225). the sorts of modern sport practices that he includes in this category are scramble-biking, hot-air ballooning, hang-gliding, surfing and white-water canoeing. they have, he suggests, a series of featurs in common: they take place in wild environments beyond social control and management; the subject acts as an individual and interaction with others is not essential; the locomotive force is external to the body, although the pleasure is in the motor and decision-making skill in relation to that force; they involve a visceral response to the normal mode of posture and movement which is thrown vertiginously into confusion (parlebas 1999a).”

These quotes speak directly to some of the things we were thinking about when we were using kiting in our work, to reference physical engagement with the world through the kite.

I noticed these images in the library. I was interested in them because they look like they’ve been there for years, and one of the photo credits is to the climber Chris Bonnington. The climbers, clinging to the rockface,  in an intense physical engagement with the world, hidden away in a library where people have an intense intellectual engagement with books. It reminded me that part of what I’m thinking about is how to do a PhD that is about practice, how to bring the physical into an academic setting.