Drawing on methodological approaches used by visual anthropologists, film theorists and debates prevalent in the cultural studies literature, this paper is interdisciplinary in approach and attempts to tackle the challenge of collecting and analyzing embodied, sensuous and pre-reflective ‘data’ by advocating the value of integrating videography into research methodologies. The paper is illustrated with an examination of underwater videography footage, featuring scuba divers coming to terms with their surroundings. By considering the ways in which those featured in the film relate to the onscreen images, upon watching the footage, the paper explores how we might begin to study and represent the ‘unrepresentable’ senses of, for example, touch and the somatic senses, including proprioception, in addition to the heightening or modification of these.
The desire to escape from land-based bodily constraints, to become enchanted by the spectacle of technicolour reefs, sunken ships and otherworldly creatures, is growing in popularity despite the expense and training required to explore the ocean depths. This dense water world, where a person’s resistance to gravitational pull results in differing feelings of weightlessness, where sound travels about five times faster yet more unevenly than in air, and where verbal communication is impractical such that visual cues are necessary, calls for a different ‘way of being’ to the everyday spaces of the home or the workplace. It is these different ways of being and feeling that I explore in this paper. To do this I present a sensual phenomenology that pays particular attention to the reorganization of the sensoria of a group of novice divers as they start to gain an awareness of the different perceptual means by which they move through and sense underwater space. The paper concludes by highlighting that phenomenological accounts of tourist space can shed light on the intricacies of tourists’ lived experiences, which in turn could prove useful in the structure and organization of tourist activities.
This paper provides an introduction to the concept of creative participatory mapping of human-environment relations. It is identified that within human geography, artistic practice and urban design, biomapping and similar community mapping tools and methodologies are increasingly being embraced. However, within sports and leisure research the concept has yet to gain academic attention. Consequently, this paper provides a basis for thinking about how researchers and research participants in the fields of sport and leisure research might benefit if mapping human-environment relations was to be embraced and integrated into research design practices. Referencing recent turns to studying space and affect within sport and leisure studies, mapping is argued to offer innovative methodological opportunities for studying how people relate to and understand the urban environments in which they practice physical activity and leisure forms of embodiment. The paper concludes by arguing that, along with offering up new avenues for conceptual research, mapping human-environment relations, if readily embraced, can go a long way to fostering community engagement in: the identification of (un)safe urban routes for sport/leisure practice (e.g. running, cycling), the development and site identification of health/physical activity initiatives and the design of urban landscapes of sport/leisure.
In this auto-ethnographic narration, I tell the story of learning to run with an "other", my canine companion 'A'. Together we have built a routine, a conjoined habitus, connected by equipmental prosthetics and a shared history of the landscapes we have traversed. In drawing on the experiences of our journey from beginners to amateur competitors through a series of ethnographic insights, I seek to highlight the importance of thinking about significant others in sport and leisure activities. The paper highlights shifts in human and dog perception, behavior and attitude to running landscapes and concludes by arguing that, by being attentive to the influence and action of "others" in sporting contexts, we are able to discover a plethora of new and exciting calibrations of how human-landscape negotiation takes place, and indeed, what it may mean in terms of troubling traditionally defined categorizations of sporting/leisure experience, presence and responsibility.
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