Everyday Embodiment

Everyday Embodiment
Author: Julia Coffey
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2021-05-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 303070159X

This book offers an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to one of the most significant health and wellbeing challenges for contemporary youth: body image. The social and cultural dimensions shaping body ideals and young people’s body image concerns have not been adequately explored in the current landscape of social media and youth body cultures. The author provides a sociological reframing of body image, foregrounding the social and cultural dimensions which are critical in shaping young people’s everyday bodily experiences. Chapters explore the significance of ‘gender’ and ‘wellbeing’ norms and the ways that circumstances of hardship and inequality are significant in mediating body concerns. In this, the book complicates simplistic understandings of body image, instead showing the complex processes by which body concerns are formed through the circumstances of embodied experience. The book advocates for the non-individual dimensions of body concerns—the social and cultural conditions of young people’s lives—to be foregrounded in strategies aimed at addressing this complex youth wellbeing issue. This text will be of interest to scholars in gender studies, youth studies, and feminist sociology.

‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950

‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950
Author: Tracey Loughran
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1526170663

What is the history of ‘everyday health’ in the postwar world, and where might we find it? This volume moves away from top-down histories of health and medicine that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts. Instead, it centres the day-to-day lives of people in diverse contexts from 1950 to the present. Chapters explore how gender, class, ‘race’, sexuality, disability, and age mediated experiences of health and wellbeing in historical context. The volume foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment, offering insights applicable to scholars of times and places beyond those represented in the case studies presented here. Drawing together cutting-edge scholarship, the volume establishes and critically interrogates ‘everyday health’ as a crucial concept that will shape future histories of health and medicine.

Embodiment and everyday cyborgs

Embodiment and everyday cyborgs
Author: Gill Haddow
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2021-06-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1526114194

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Your organs are failing and require replacement. If you had the choice, would you prefer organs from other humans or non-human animals, or would you choose a ‘cybernetic’ medical implant? Using a range of social science methods and drawing on the sociology of the body and embodiment, biomedicine and technology, this book asks what happens to who we are (our identity) when we change what we are (our bodies)? From surveying young adults about whether they would choose options such as 3-D bioprinting, living or deceased human donation, or non-human animal or implantable biomechanical devices, to interviewing those who live with an implantable cardiac defibrillator, Haddow invites us to think about what kind of relationship we have with our bodies. She concludes that the reliance on ‘cybernetic’ medical devices create ‘everyday cyborgs’ who can experience alienation and new forms of vulnerability at implantation and activation. Embodiment and everyday cyborgs invites readers to consider the relationship between personal identity and the body, between humans and non-human animals, and our increasing dependency on ‘smart’ implantable technology. The creation of new techno-organic hybrid bodies makes us acutely aware of our own bodies and how ambiguous the experience of embodiment actually is. It is only through understanding how modifications such as transplantation, amputation and implantation make our bodies a ‘presence’ to us, Haddow argues, that we realise our everyday experience of our bodies as an absence.

Body/Embodiment

Body/Embodiment
Author: Phillip Vannini
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317173430

The body and experiences of embodiment have generated a rich and diverse sociological literature. This volume articulates and illustrates one major approach to the sociology of the body: symbolic interactionism, an increasingly prevalent theoretical base of contemporary sociology derived from the pragmatism of writers such as John Dewey, William James, Charles Peirce, Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead. The authors argue that, from an interactionist perspective, the body is much more than a tangible, corporeal object - it is a vessel of great significance to the individual and society. From this perspective, body, self and social interaction are intimately interrelated and constantly reconfigured. The collection constitutes a unique anthology of empirical research on the body, from health and illness to sexuality, from beauty and imagery to bodily performance in sport and art, and from mediated communication to plastic surgery. The contributions are informed by innovative interactionist theory, offering fresh insights into one of the fastest growing sub-disciplines of sociology and cultural studies.

Researching Embodied Sport

Researching Embodied Sport
Author: Ian Wellard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317644247

Despite a growing interest in the sociology of the body, there has to date been a lack of scholarly work addressing the embodied aspects which form a central part of our understanding and experience of sport and movement cultures. Researching Embodied Sport explores the political, social and cultural significance of embodied approaches to the study of sport, physical activities and dance. It explains how embodied approaches fit with existing theory in studies of sport and movement cultures and makes a compelling case for incorporating an embodied approach into the study of sporting practices and experience. The book adopts a multi-disciplinary lens, moving beyond the traditional dualism of body and mind, and incorporating the physical with the social and the psychological. It applies key theories that have shaped our thinking about the body and sport, and examines both the personal, subjective experience of sporting activities and those experiences involving engagement and contact with other people, in team sports for example. The book also explores the methodological implications of ‘doing’ embodied research, particularly in terms of qualitative approaches to sports research. Written by a team of leading international sports researchers, and packed with vivid examples from sporting contexts as diverse as surfing, fell running, korfball and disability sport, Researching Embodied Sport is fascinating reading for any advanced student or researcher working in the sociology of sport, physical cultural studies, physical education, body studies or health studies.

A Handbook of Visual Methods in Psychology

A Handbook of Visual Methods in Psychology
Author: Paula Reavey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2020-08-23
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1351032046

This comprehensive volume explores the set of theoretical, methodological, ethical and analytical issues that shape the ways in which visual qualitative research is conducted in psychology. Using visual data such as film making, social media analyses, photography and model making, the book uniquely uses visual qualitative methods to broaden our understanding of experience and subjectivity. In recent years, visual research has seen a growing emphasis on the importance of culture in experience-based qualitative methods. Featuring contributors from diverse research backgrounds including narrative psychology, personal construct theory and psychoanalysis, the book examines the potential for visual methods in psychology. In each chapter of the book, the contributors explore and address how a visual approach has contributed to existing social and psychological theory in their line of research. The book provides up-to-date insights into combining methods to create new multi-modal methodologies, and analyses these with psychology-specific questions in mind. It covers topics such as sexuality, identity, group processes, child development, forensic psychology, race and gender, and would be the ideal companion for those studying or undertaking research in disciplines like psychology, sociology and gender studies.

Visual Methods in Psychology

Visual Methods in Psychology
Author: Paula Reavey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1136812563

This comprehensive volume provides an unprecedented illustration of the potential for visual methods in psychology. Each chapter explores the set of theoretical, methodological, as well as ethical and analytical issues that shape the ways in which visual qualitative research is conducted in psychology. Using a variety of forms of visual data, including photography, documentary film-making, drawing, internet media, model making and collages, each author endeavors to broaden the scope for understanding experience and subjectivity, using visual qualitative methods. The contributors to this volume work within a variety of traditions including narrative psychology, personal construct theory, discursive psychology and conversation analysis, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Each addresses how a particular visual approach has contributed to existing social and psychological theory in their topic area, and clearly outline how they carried out their specific research project. The contributors draw on qualitative sources of verbal data, such as spoken interview, diaries and naturalistic conversation alongside their use of visual material. This book provides a unique insight into the potential for combining methods in order to create new multi-modal methodologies, and it presents and analyses these with psychology specific questions in mind. The range of topics covered includes sexuality, identity, group processes, child development, forensic psychology, race, and gender, making this volume a vital contribution to psychology, sociology and gender studies.

Methodologies of Embodiment

Methodologies of Embodiment
Author: Mia Perry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2015-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113667098X

This volume is dedicated to exploring and exposing the challenges, the possibilities, and the processes of empirical work in embodiment. Grounded in qualitative inquiry in the humanities and social sciences, the chapters describe perspectives and contexts of embodied research, but focus on the methodologies, methods, and analytic frames taken up to grapple with this ever-more theorised aspect of qualitative inquiry. The authors drawn together in this volume share an investment in the ways in which the body inscribes and is inscribed within research that foregrounds the cultural, social, affective, and political discourses that are at the core of how bodies act and are acted upon.

Embodied Working Lives

Embodied Working Lives
Author: Louise Waite
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780739108765

Both theoretical and empirical social science approaches to manual work in developing countries emphasize the infusions of power in social relations between workers and employers. But little attention has been paid to either the lived experiences of non-industrial and industrial manual workers or to the particularly physical character of their work. In Embodied Working Lives Louise Waite contributes to an expanded understanding of both. The concept of embodiment recognizes that bodies' habitual relations with the world engender subjectivities and life experiences. The most careful consideration of everyday-embodiment is found in the phenomenological tradition that theorizes 'incarnated consciousness' and 'embodied subjectivities.' This book follows such an understanding of embodiment, whose essence is to bridge the biological and the social. Waite incorporates embodiment into an ethnographic exploration of the worker-understood, in her study, to have 'personhood, ' preferences, and desires which play a part in social relations. Waite's situates the subjects of her study in a deeply dense context of social relations that sufficiently complicate our understanding of culture, work, bodies and embodiment, phenomenology, anthropology, and habit. This book is essential reading across the social sciences and in the humanities. It is a groundbreaking ethnography that raises interesting questions in applied phenomenology, humanist philosophies, and also policy studies