Intercorporeality in visually impaired running-together: Auditory attunement and somatic empathy

Abstract

Given their salience in many sports and physical cultures, it is surprising that the practices, processes and production of intercorporeality and ‘doing together’ remain under-explored from a sociological perspective. The ongoing achievement of ‘togethering’ can be particularly important for the embodied partnership between a visually impaired (VI) runner and a sighted guide (SG) runner: a specific sporting dyad whose experiences are currently under-researched. To address this lacuna and contribute original insights to sensory sociological studies, here we explore the accomplishment of running-together by VI runners and sighted guides, focusing on the auditory dimension. To illustrate how these runners put the sense of hearing ‘to work’ in achieving finely attuned intercorporeality, often at considerable speed, we draw on qualitative data from a research project on VI running in the UK, involving five VI runners and five SGs. Here, we focus on auditory attunement in two domains identified as highly salient in the running-partners’ intercorporeal experiences: (1) Listening out – auditory attention to non-linguistic sounds; and (2) Tuning in – the importance of attending to team-talk between VI runners and SG runners.

Sensing inclusion among visually impaired and guide runners

“…Parkrun, a community participation running event, functions as a site for 'actions for change in relation to the challenges of engaging marginalized groups' (Fullagar et al, 2020(Fullagar et al, : 1199, like visually impaired runners. A small but growing body of work explores the relationship between runners with visual impairments and their sighted guides (most notably Hall et al, 2022;Allen-Collinson et al, 2023). However, those studies on visually impaired running and co-running experiences have not explored in-depth how a running ensemble constitutes and experiences a sense of inclusion.…”