Seeing the way: visual sociology and the distance runner's perspective

Employing visual and autoethnographic data from a two‐year research project on distance runners, this article seeks to examine the activity of seeing in relation to the activity of distance running. One of its methodological aims is to develop the linkage between visual and autoethnographic data in combining an observation‐based narrative and sociological analysis with photographs. This combination aims to convey to the reader not only some of the specific subcultural knowledge and particular ways of seeing, but also something of the runner's embodied feelings and experience of momentum en route. Via the combination of narrative and photographs we seek a more effective way of communicating just how distance runners see and experience their training terrain. The importance of subjecting mundane everyday practices to detailed sociological analysis has been highlighted by many sociologists, including those of an ethnomethodological perspective. Indeed, without the competence of social actors in accomplishing these mundane, routine understandings and practices, it is argued, there would in fact be no social order

Embodiment in High-altitude Mountaineering: Sensing and Working with the Weather

In order to address sociological concerns with embodiment and learning, in this article we explore the ‘weathering’ body in a currently under-researched physical-cultural domain. Weather experiences too are under-explored in sociology, and here we examine in-depth the lived experience of weather, and more specifically ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, in one of the most extreme and corporeally-challenging environments on earth: high-altitude mountains. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and an interview-based research project with 19 international, high-altitude mountaineers, we investigate weather as lived and experienced both corporeally and cognitively. We are particularly interested in conceptualising and theorising the ways in which embodied beings relate to the environment through different aspects of their being. The novel concepts of ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, we argue, provide salient examples of the mind-body-world nexus at work, as an embodied practice and mode of thinking, strongly contoured by the physical culture of high-altitude mountaineering

Rupture and Rhythm: A Phenomenology of National Experiences

This article investigates how people make sense of ruptures in the flow of everyday life as they enter new experiential domains. Shifts in being-in-time create breaks in the natural attitude that offer the opportunity to register national—or, for example, religious, gender, or class—experiences. People interpret ruptures in perception and proprioception by drawing connections with domains in which similar or contrasting kinds of disruption are evident. Normalizing the transition, rhythm—as both cadence and overall flow—helps people adjust to new circumstances, align action, and smooth subsequent ruptures. Based on extensive qualitative fieldwork, I examine the specific case of how novice and experienced tea ceremony practitioners in Japan move into, interpret, and normalize action within tea spaces