A PHENOMENOLOGY OF FITNESS FROM CONSUMPTION TO VIRTUOUS PRODUCTION

Although our imagination as policy-makers, legislators, academics, and members of the general public has been captured by the promise of fitness, what is meant by it and whether or not its individualising emphasis is a good thing is much less clear. In response to this question of cultural significance, this thesis provides a phenomenology of fitness. It does so in two important senses and in the context of two distinct parts.The first half of this thesis (Chapters One and Two) is given to the task of bracketing the natural attitude with respect to fitness; that is, contextualising the question of its cultural embeddedness within processes of reflexive embodiment that are at play in modern society. “Being fit,” it is argued in this context, implies “being fit for something” (something other than health) or “being fit for someone” (someone other than oneself). And, having lost some (if not all) of its modernist illusions and its progressivist convictions to social regeneration, the task of “being fit” is framed as an ambivalent one, akin to the modern-day Sisyphus, and gestural of the self-reflexivity inherent in late-modern consumer society.By shifting the organisation of attention from ambivalence, the second half ofthis thesis (Chapters Three and Four) examines the possibilities for a positive appropriation of fitness beyond mere consumption activity. By focusing on fitness at the level of action and interaction (where meaning relates to use and practice) the second half of this thesis opens up the possibilities for a re-description of fitness (of Sisyphus) on the basis of the following proposition: fitness is something we negotiate, despite it being something we never really achieve. Findings from twelve elaborative phenomenological interviews emanating from an ethnographic orientation over a two and a half year period are given towards this end. They indicate that this thesis (Chapters Three and Four) examines the possibilities for a positive appropriation of fitness beyond mere consumption activity. By focusing on fitness at the level of action and interaction (where meaning relates to use and practice) the second half of this thesis opens up the possibilities for a re-description of fitness (of Sisyphus) on the basis of the following proposition: fitness is something we negotiate, despite it being something we never really achieve. Findings from twelve elaborative phenomenological interviews emanating from an ethnographic orientation over a two and a half year period are given towards this end. They indicate that consigning fitness to mere consumption activity overlooks the importance of participants’ meaning-making activities, their motivations, and the pleasures that accrue on the basis of ongoing activity and increased experience. They indicate that, if “doing fitness” enables individuals to become acquainted with these internal goods, then “being someone through fitness” can operate as an indexical marker of virtue.The possibilities for a Complemental Model of Health and fitness and for a novel approach to talking about the fit body are discussed in conclusion (Chapter Five) and in the context of aligning the findings of this thesis to future research and practice

The Fitness Tourist: Goal Content of Exercisers in the Wellness Tourism Industry

abstract: The fitness and wellness industry is expanding at a rapid pace, and part of this expansion includes wellness tourism. Within wellness tourism, fitness related activities and programs are sought by wellness tourists or more specifically, fitness tourists. Wellness tourism is defined as a journey by people whose motive, in whole or in part, is to maintain or promote their well-being, and who stay at least one night at a facility that is designed to enable and enhance physical, psychological, spiritual and/or social well-being. Inevitably, fitness related activities are offered within wellness tourism, and seem to attract these fitness tourists. The purpose of this study is two-fold. It is first to examine the goal content fitness tourists possess in this non-traditional exercise context. Second, this study aims to examine the goal pursuits within the promotional content produced by the wellness tourism industry. This study is informed by goal content theory (GCT) which is a mini-theory within self-determination theory (SDT). Developed by Kasser and Ryan (1996), GCT examines how goals pursued by individuals, in this case fitness tourists, whether related to extrinsic or intrinsic content, account for variations in wellness. Extrinsic goals include elements like wealth and appearance, while intrinsic goals include dimensions like community contribution and health management. Participants were targeted through their consumption of fitness services at wellness tourism resorts in the southwestern United States. The goal content for exercise questionnaire (GCEQ) was distributed to these targeted participants to determine the types of exercisers, intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, who are consuming these services. Additionally, a content analysis was conducted to examine the elements portrayed by the industry within a fitness context. Understanding goal content can allow organizations to create programs supportive of participants’ autonomous motivations which research suggests lead to higher levels of well-being. Using a sample of 100 GCEQs, the study implies fitness tourists are more likely to be white, high income females with stronger intrinsic goal content. Health management, image, and skill development were among the highest ranked goals. A total of 182 images were examined in addition to extensive narrative content on the webpages of these sites suggesting this industry promotes holistic wellness rather than appearance. The results of this study should be used to program physical activity interventions made accessible to low and middle class individuals.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Community Resources and Development 201

Explaining with Counter Visual Attributes and Examples

In this paper, we aim to explain the decisions of neural networks by utilizing multimodal information. That is counter-intuitive attributes and counter visual examples which appear when perturbed samples are introduced. Different from previous work on interpreting decisions using saliency maps, text, or visual patches we propose to use attributes and counter-attributes, and examples and counter-examples as part of the visual explanations. When humans explain visual decisions they tend to do so by providing attributes and examples. Hence, inspired by the way of human explanations in this paper we provide attribute-based and example-based explanations. Moreover, humans also tend to explain their visual decisions by adding counter-attributes and counter-examples to explain what is not seen. We introduce directed perturbations in the examples to observe which attribute values change when classifying the examples into the counter classes. This delivers intuitive counter-attributes and counter-examples. Our experiments with both coarse and fine-grained datasets show that attributes provide discriminating and human-understandable intuitive and counter-intuitive explanations.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1910.07416, arXiv:1904.0827

Publishing? : You can count on knowledge, experience, and expectations

The study based on an online survey covering 655 researchers from hard and soft sciences addresses the infuence of diferent conditions on academic publishing. Results show that (1) hard sciences academics publish more than soft sciences; (2) there are resemblances in academic publishing; (3) there are diferences in the sufcient conditions sets for the two groups of sciences which may be explained by diferences in scientifc conceptual frameworks and research methods applied in each group of disciplines; (4) conditions leading to the absence of publishing reveal similarities and diferences among hard and soft sciences academics. The study contribute to: (1) the debate on the questionable generalization of scientifc publications indexes and rankings due to the nature of research published coming from diferent scientifc universes; (2) identify pathways for achieving higher performance in academic publishing; (3) allow research centers’ managers to better manage the centers aiming to achieve upper output levelsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio