Making Well-being an Experiential Possibility: The Role of Sport

Whilst the relationship between active participation in sport and well-being has been widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to actually understand this relationship from the perspective of the individual. Our paper draws upon phenomenological philosophy and the existential life-world view of well-being, in order to explore how the experience of sport can help facilitate possibilities for multiple kinds and levels of well-being. In doing so, our paper highlights the multiplicity of the dimensions of well-being, and offers examples of the different paths to well-being provided by sport, thus providing ways of describing well-being experiences within a sports context that are more complex than those offered by more traditional approaches to study in this area. Within this conceptual analysis we adopt a humanistic approach that considers the multiple ways well-being can be experienced through sport as a sense of dwelling, mobility or dwelling-mobility within the life-world dimensions of temporarily, spatiality, mood, embodiment, inter-subjectivity and identity

The social, cosmopolitanism and beyond

First, this article will outline the metaphysics of ‘the social’ that implicitly and explicitly connects the work of lassical and contemporary cosmopolitan sociologists as different as Durkheim, Weber, Beck and Luhmann. In a second step, I will show that the cosmopolitan outlook of classical sociology is driven by exclusive differences. In understanding human affairs, both classical sociology and contemporary cosmopolitan sociology reflect a very modernist outlook of epistemological, conceptual, methodological and disciplinary rigour that separates the cultural sphere from the natural objects of concern. I will suggest that classical sociology – in order to be cosmopolitan – is forced (1) to exclude non-social and non-human objects as part of its conceptual and methodological rigour, and (2) consequently and methodologically to rule out the non-social and the non-human. Cosmopolitan sociology imagines ‘the social’ as a global, universal explanatory device to conceive and describe the non-social and non-human. In a third and final step the article draws upon the work of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde and offers a possible alternative to the modernist social and cultural other-logics of social sciences. It argues for a inclusive conception of ‘the social’ that gives the non-social and non-human a cosmopolitan voice as well

Achieving equity through 'gender autonomy': the challenges for VET policy and practice

This paper is based on research carried out in an EU Fifth Framework project on 'Gender and Qualification'. The research partners from five European countries investigated the impact of gender segregation in European labour markets on vocational education and training, with particular regard to competences and qualifications. The research explored the part played by gender in the vocational education and training experiences of (i) young adults entering specific occupations in child care, electrical engineering and food preparation/service (ii) adults changing occupations

“Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz”: Auto/Ethnographic Improvisation as Educational Event in Doctoral Supervision

Through exchanges within a doctoral supervision, the authors explore a range of dilemmas and challenges for reflexive inquiry. These include the problematic business of naming, the impossibility of objective separation of self from research, the merging of researcher subjectivities, and differences between performance and performativity. We note the educational potential in what can conventionally be considered “unprofessional” approaches to qualitative inquiry: neologisms, personal experience, stories, conversations, music, poetry, paintings, and film. We engage in reflexive interactions with each other and with such “data.” This was undertaken in the spirit of jazz improvisation—an unrehearsed performance—something that “happened,” an unplanned educational event but also an agency enabled by structure

Worlded object and its presentation: A Māori philosophy of language

In an era concerned with the survival of Indigenous languages, language as a general phenomenon needs to be thought of as thoroughly connected to one’s worldview. In this article, I propose a different conception of language that sides more with what I call ‘the worlding of things’ than linguistics. To foreshadow my speculations on language, I consider the possibility that, within the representation of one entity in perception, there exist all other entities. An entity is hence ‘worlded’—a key aspect of the term ‘whakapapa’. I then turn to think about language as a general phenomenon for Mäori, and its complex ability to world an entity even as it adumbrates that thing’s backdrop. I consider the verb ‘to be’ in that light, arguing that Mäori identify language as a sort of gathering of entities rather than an instrument for singling out one thing as thoroughly and separably evident. This article is therefore as much about the full participation of the world as it is about language; it also aims to counter the belief that language is merely a conveyor of ideas

Anarchism, Utopianism and Hospitality: The Work of René Schérer

René Schérer (born 1922) is lamentably almost unknown to the Anglo-American world as his work has, as yet, not been translated . He is one of the main specialists of the French “utopian socialist”, Charles Fourier (1772-1837), and a major thinker in his own right. He is the author of more than twenty books and co-editor of the journal Chimères. Colleague and friend at Vincennes university (Paris 8) of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, François Châletet, Alain Brossat, Georges Navet, Miguel Abensour, Pierre Macherey… he continues to host seminars at Paris 8 (now located at St. Denis). He is a living testimony to a radical past, and a continuing inspiration to a new generation of young thinkers. This article aims to convey the original specificity of his understanding of anarchism. By so doing, it will stress the importance of his work for any thinking concerned with a politicised resistance to social conformity and the supposed “state of things” today

Issues and challenges in the application of Husserlian phenomenology to the Lived Experience of Hate Crime and Its Legal Aftermath

The field of hate crime research addresses the presence, sources and impact of particular types of expressions of prejudice, often perceived as particularly damaging and hurtful forms of interpersonal abuse and violence. Little, if any, credible academic research seeks to vindicate the specific racist, gendered and other vicious prejudices articulated by many perpetrators of hate crime. In turn, this raises the reflexive question of the possibilities of researchers themselves ever being able to adopt a truly "unprejudiced" approach to the presence of such damaging prejudices. Can this goal be realised without a researcher necessarily losing an experientially-grounded understanding of what these meanings, values and purposes have come to mean, and how they are themselves interpretatively re-constituted anew, including within the lived experience of victims, witnesses, police, prosecutors, judges and victim support workers? A possible philosophically-informed approach to the dilemmas posed by this topic is offered by Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl's perpetually unfinished philosophical methodology strives, with concerted if sometimes tragic reflective rigor, to "suspend," "bracket out" and "neutralise" those core presuppositions constitutive of the research field that typically pre-judge precisely whatever demands to be questioned and explored in a radically non-prejudicial manner. This study critically explores the possibilities, reflective stages and theoretical limitations of a sympathetically reconstructed Husserlian approach to hate crime, itself understood as a would-be qualitative "science of consciousness." It argues that despite its manifest tensions, gaps, ambiguities and internal contradictions, aspects of the Husserlian philosophical approach directed towards the different levels of experienced hate crime still retain the potential to both challenge and advance our understanding of this topic. It is the "instructive" part of "instructive failure" that this article highlights