Phenomenology & Practice (Journal)
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Experiences of “Hospitality” by Racialized Immigrant Pre-service Teachers on Canadian School Landscapes: A Phenomenological Perspective
No full textThrough a phenomenological perspective, we frame the experiences of “hospitality” of racialized immigrant student teachers as they recount their field placements in a number of Canadian schools. This article presents the following themes which emerged from the study, and which also serve as section titles: 1) The classroom door as threshold: Crossing workaday and festive worlds; 2) More foreign than foreign; Stranger than strange; 3) You are who I think you are; Not who you know you are; 4) Actively inviting the threshold; Passively accepting the barrier; 5) Sensing the cold: The hostility in hospitality as hostil/pitality?; 6) The hiddenness of potential: Growing in foreign soil; 7) The strangeness of Canadian students: Hospitality beyond hospitality; 8) Inspiriting the festive: Pedagogy as hospitality. The paper concludes by showing that living hospitably with the foreign-other on the Canadian school landscape is not so much a problem as it is an invitation for teachers to realize the call of their vocation
Performing the Nation: Pedagogical Embodiment as Civic Text
No full textThis paper explores the ways in which narratives speak to issues of national identity - its production, reproduction, and contextual performance. Drawing first upon literature in history education, the paper explores the multivoiced nature of the historical narratives which structure American national identity projects. The paper next employs phenomenological methodology in order to explore the narratives produced by students in speaking about school experiences, which they found to have a national component. In this section, there is a particular focus on the teacher as a powerful text as read by students - a curriculum of its own right. The paper concludes by moving to theorize, using phenomenological and post-structural analyses, the relationship between the personal and the national, lived and historical experiences - while maintaining a focus on the civic and pedagogical implications of the data analysis
Embodied Pheno-Pragma-Practice - Phenomenological and Pragmatic Perspectives on Creative "Inter-practice" in Organisations between Habits and Improvisation
No full textThe purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of creative practices in organisation from a phenomenological point of view. To develop such an understanding of practice, this paper will first outline a phenomenological understanding of creative practice, understood particularly with Merleau-Ponty as an embodied and situated nexus of action. Subsequently, the paper will show the contribution of pragmatism to an interpretation of practice as an experience-based reality and will describe the significance of habits. After briefly comparing common characteristics of both pro-experiential philosophies, some perspectives on a creative "inter-practice" and an inclusive "pheno-pragma-practice" will be explored. Furthermore, improvisation is discussed as a form and medium for the actual realisation of an embodied, situational inter-practice. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on creative pheno-pragmatic practices in organisation will be outlined
Faith in Technology: Televangelism and the Mediation of Immediate Experience
No full textThis paper seeks to illuminate the experiential structures implied in the viewing of televangelistic programming – with particular focus on programming of the charismatic faith-healing variety that culminates in the televangelist’s appeal to viewers to “touch the screen” and consummate a communion that transcends the separation implied by the televisual medium. By way of a “techno-phenomenological” analysis of this marginal media scenario, faith-healing televangelism is shown to involve experiential paradoxes that are tied to processes of social marginalization as well. Thus, it is argued, faith-healing televangelism functions as a call to viewers to mount a head-on confrontation with the technological infrastructure of secular modernity and thereby to effect a specifically material negotiation of evangelical culture’s precarious balancing act between an entrenchment in and a self-marginalization from the secular mainstream
Rhetorical Caricature: An Educational Reading of Nabokov\u27s Treatment of Freud
No full textVladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-American novelist and lepidopterist, was neither a didactician nor a moralist. His images, which he painted with his words, are deceptive and contradictory. But the strangest thing happens. It turns out that Nabokov disliked Freud and painted images of the psychoanalyst that seem to become stale and mechanical. Literary critics, philosophers, and others have had a tendency to criticize Nabokov for suffering from influence-anxiety when it comes to Freud, hence making Nabokov into a dull paternalist with strong and prejudiced convictions. My suggestion is that we go beyond the ‘anxiety of influence’ viewpoint and address the issue through a phenomenological study and base our judgments on the experiences of the phenomena that shine through different texts of Nabokov. Thus it will be possible to see, I argue, that Nabokov’s rhetorical caricature may evoke experiences that are educative. At the same time, Nabokov’s treatment of Freud can be cast in a new light
Becoming Horse in the Duration of the Moment: The Trainer\u27s Challenge
No full textLanguage skirts the somatic fringes of the moment, particularly in practices where the powers of human speech and writing seem nullified. Horse training is one such practice. We tell stories of horse training that sensitize us and bring us close to creatures whose movements, resonating with our own, connect us to a prelinguistic, animate world. In so doing, we bridge the gap between the reflective detachment of our customary, wordy practices and the wordlessness of pre-reflective animality. Yet a phenomenological discursiveness shows us how vital moments of “becoming animal” can be consciously and linguistically sustained. “Becoming horse in the duration of the moment” addresses the corporeally-charged consciousness of being with horses on the ground and in the saddle. This paper describes a relationality and temporality that, though mostly wordless in strictly human terms, speaks a sophisticated language of moment resonance. In so doing, it contests the dualisms of verbal and non-verbal discourses, the separation of humans and other animals, and the divisions that keep somaticity on the fringes of consciousness. It responds to the ecological challenge to get beyond the linguistic appropriation of the other, human speciesism and anthropomorphic projections, in order to discern the kinesthetic and energetic expressivities of connecting with other beings and with the elements of animate existence. Horse training provides a case for “living” in the somatic fullness of the moment
Facing the Ugly Face
No full textUgliness is largely considered an aesthetic, cultural construct and, though infrequently defined, is often seen as the opposite of existing conceptions of beauty. This definition of ugliness, however, provides little understanding of the lived experience of encountering it, particularly when that ugliness is found upon the face of another. This article explores the questions: what is ugliness? And what does it mean to experience another person as ugly? Through describing the experience of encountering an ugly face, ugliness is explored as a highly embodied, interpersonal experience that implicates the person who sees and recognizes another’s ugliness as much as it involves the ugly person, him- or herself
Whose Eyes?: Women’s Experiences of Changing in a Public Change Room
No full textFitness and recreation centres populate today’s modern urban communities and cater to a wide range of people seeking health, fitness and social connection through physical activity. While women’s experiences in these spaces have received some scholarly attention from feminist scholars and scholars of the body, little research has explored women’s lived experiences of the change room. In this paper, I argue that everyday spaces such as change rooms and locker rooms are important spaces in which social understandings of the female body manifest. In such spaces, the materiality of the body and the social meanings ascribed to the female body are illuminated and negotiated by those who inhabit and move through them. Using Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as theoretical guides, I discuss how it is for women to see and be seen in a public change room, and how these spaces illuminate the complex relationship women have with their bodies in contemporary society
Awakening Movement Consciousness in the Physical Landscapes of Literacy: Leaving, Reading and Being Moved by One’s Trace
No full textPhysical literacy, a concept introduced by Britain’s physical education and phenomenological scholar, Margaret Whitehead, who aligned the term with her monist view of the human condition and emphasis that we are essentially embodied beings in-the-world, is a foundational hub of recent physical education curricular revision. The adoption of the term serves a political purpose as it helps stakeholders advocate for the educational, specifically literacy, rights of the whole child. Yet, one might wonder what impact conceptual shifts of becoming “physically literate” in lieu of becoming “physically educated” have on physical education research and practice. Terms such as “reading” the game and metaphors that describe the body as an “instrument of expression” are entering the lexicon of physical education but from a seemingly cognitive frame of reference. Arguably, the extent to which the adoption of physical literacy has on dissolving Cartesian views of the body and the mechanization of movement it performs has yet to be questioned. This article thus acts as an invitation to explore physical literacy in a Merleau-Pontian inspired act of inscribing the world through movement and how a reading of a reversible imprint might awaken a more fluent sense of what it means to become physically literate as new curricular pathways in the field of physical education emerge