Researching “experience”: Embodiment, methodology, process

Abstract

In this paper, we explore some of the tensions involved in the process of engaging with embodiment research. Although a significant volume of discursive work on 'the body' and its role in social relations now exists, there is little in the way of empirical research that moves the focus away from discourse alone to concentrate on other modalities, such as embodied feelings, sensations and engagements with the world. We begin by briefly reviewing the turn to embodiment across the social sciences and the manner in which this has been taken up in psychology. We then outline our attempts as a research collective to develop methodologies and research activities that can produce meaningful data on embodied experience. The outcomes of one of these tasks are then described in detail, along with reflections on the difficulties and limitations that emerged. Finally we attempt to conceptualise the challenge of researching embodiment by returning to the late nineteenth century psychology of John Dewey, which, we argue, neatly summarises some of the problems to be addressed by any researchers engaged in the 'turn to the body'.

Swimming against the Stream?: Mindfulness as a Psychosocial Research Methodology

“…for expectations about what is expected to happen, and assumptions about what is happening, to overshadow inquiries (Brown et al, 2011). Mindfulness training may help researchers to momentarily suspend their expectations and to more intimately encounter the actual moments of psychosocial life, as they are lived.…”

“…clothes, equipment); and the physical spaces people occupy (Finlay & Langdridge, 2007). Such research often requires innovation, such as visual methods (Reavey, 2011), autoethnography and memory work (Langdridge, et al, 2012). The present study is influenced by recent innovations in mindful research (Nugent et al, 2011) and adventures in qualitative experimentation (Brown et al, 2009).…”

Discursive and Psychosocial? Theorising a Complex Contemporary Subject

“…Social psychoanalytic research, like the work of Hollway and Jefferson discussed earlier, tends to follow therapeutic traditions in focussing on a particular individual. Brown et al (2011) similarly aimed to explore specific experiences of relations and an occasion or event rather than attempting some reduction to the generic or general (p.512). In contrast, discursive research in the tradition I have outlined aims to go beyond particular individuals and instances, looking across a larger dataset.…”

“…This point is particularly pertinent because attempts to develop alternative approaches often return to the analysis of language data. For example, Brown et al (2011) in a project to go beyond 'discourse alone' (p.493) in order to explore another 'modality', embodied experience, found The ways in which language use is both burdened with old meanings and sufficiently fluid to establish new ones has notably been the focus of discursive studies of racism and prejudice. 'The first principle for innovative discursive research is that in place of fixed method abstracted from context, we are concerned from the beginning of our work with the phenomena we study as historically constituted.…”

Embodying Teaching: A Body Pedagogic Study of a Teacher’s Movement Rhythm in the ‘Sloyd’ Classroom

“…Over the past two decades, embodiment research in philosophy (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1999;Johnson 2007;Sheets-Johnstone 2011;Sullivan 2001), psychology (e.g., Todres 2007;Brown et al 2011), sociology (e.g., Shilling 2012ScheperHughes and Wacquant 2002;Sennett 2008) and education (e.g., Evans et al 2009;Shilling 2007;Hockey and Allen-Collinson 2007) has contributed to an expanded recognition of the embodied dimension of teaching and learning. Furthermore, embodiment research highlighting learning and movement has itself been enhanced by frameworks that recognise lived experience and the interactions between human beings and their social, material and symbolic world (Crossley 2006;Calhoun and Sennett 2007;Lefebvre 2004).…”