J Allen-Collinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 45785 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Allen-Collinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Allen-Collinson |
| SIGNATURE | ALLEN-COLLINSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lincoln |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2146-8000 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 885 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Relative energy deficiency in sport (REDs) and identity work in endurance athletes
Sensory pleasures and displeasures of the outdoors: Somatic Learning and the Senses
Slow learners: Body pedagogics and learning slow ways in sport and physical cultures
This article addresses recent calls for sociological investigation into the embodied incorporation of non-normative cultures, employing the emergent conceptualization of 'slow' in sports and physical cultures. In contrast to sports that valorize quantification and maximization of performance via speed, skill and/or endurance, the concept of slow helps analytically explore the pleasures and benefits of slower ways of engagement with sport and phys…
Paradoxes in Action: Lived Perspectives of Irregular, Nigerian Sex Workers in Spain
Despite highly vocal concerns regarding modern slavery, there remains a need for fine-grain research about irregular migratory phenomena, particularly the voices of those trafficked for sex work. This ethnographic study sought to address this lacuna by investigating the lived experiences of 19 Nigerian Edo women working as streetwalkers and madams in Spain. We discuss the women’s perspectives on irregular migration and resettlement, which span wi…
“Standing out like a sore thumb”: Exploring socio-cultural influences on adherence to cardiac rehabilitation
Exercise-based rehabilitation forms a key part of the UK National Health Service patient-care pathway for cardiac rehabilitation (CR).Only around half of all eligible patients attend core CR, however, with social inequalities affecting participation.Few qualitative studies have explored indepth the key factors influencing engagement with CR, specifically from a sociological theoretical, and ethnographic perspective.Utilising an ethnographic appro…
‘At least you got to see people when you went out for a walk’: Older adults’ lived, embodied experiences during Covid-19 times in the United Kingdom
The COVID-19 pandemic presented myriad global challenges, placing unprecedented pressure on health services. Currently, there is limited qualitative research exploring the ‘felt’ impact of the pandemic on older adults’ health experiences and wider social life. Here, we report on the embodied experiences of older adults (65 and above), before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in the UK, to chart the physical, social, and mental-hea…
I’m here for the water’: Sensory dimensions of slow sporting embodiment through seascapes in northern France
In this article, the authors explore the interconnections of aquatic embodiment and seascapes, drawing on phenomenological perspectives and the emergent concept of “slow” sports and physical cultures. Whilst many traditional aquatic sports and activities have sought the maximization of speed, strength, or skill, in recent times, the concept of “slow” has been taken up by those participating in recreational sea-based activities. This perspective v…
How Person-Centred Is Cardiac Rehabilitation in England? Using Bourdieu to Explore Socio-Cultural Influences and Personalisation
The National Health Service (NHS) cardiac rehabilitation patient care pathway has remained largely unchanged for many years despite, on average, half of all eligible patients declining to engage. To investigate reasons for non-engagement, we explored the experiences of ten cardiac patients who participated in cardiac rehabilitation, dropped out, or declined, as well as experiences of seven people deemed significant others by participants. Our eth…
Intercorporeality in visually impaired running-together: Auditory attunement and somatic empathy
Given their salience in many sports and physical cultures, it is surprising that the practices, processes and production of intercorporeality and 'doing together' remain under-explored from a sociological perspective. The ongoing achievement of 'togethering' can be particularly important for the embodied partnership between a visually impaired (VI) runner and a sighted guide (SG) runner: a specific sporting dyad whose experiences are currently un…
Dangerous Fieldwork: Reflections on Ethnographic Research with Irregular, Nigerian Streetwalkers and Madams in Spain
Recent calls have been made to investigate the lived experience of migrant sex workers, to broaden the scope and inclusivity of macro-level conceptualizations, and to develop contextually grounded forms of understanding. Our ethnographic study sought to explore the lived perspectives of an under-researched occupational group: migrant women working as irregular streetwalkers in a European city. Nineteen Nigerian Edo women working as prostitutes an…
Older adults’ and service providers’ experiences of a settings-based health promotion initiative in English football
The study was undertaken to explore the experiences of older adults and service providers in a settings-based health promotion initiative in a football club. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 older adults attending an ‘Extra Time Hub’ (ETH) and two staff delivering the initiative. Our reflexive thematic analysis generated six themes. Findings revealed the brand of the sports club attracted some to join the ETH, but through partnersh…
Breathing battles and sensory embodiment in sports and physical cultures
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Feeling good, sensory engagements, and time out: Embodied pleasures of running
Despite considerable growth in understanding of various aspects of sporting and exercise embodiment over the last decade, in-depth investigations of embodied affectual experiences in running remain limited. Furthermore, within the corpus of literature investigating pleasure and the hedonic dimension in running, much of this research has focused on experiences of pleasure in relation to performance and achievement, or on specific affective states,…
‘The agenda is to have fun’: Exploring experiences of guided running in visually impaired and guide runners
The partnership between a visually impaired runner (VIR) and sighted guide runner (SGR) constitutes a unique sporting dyad. The quality of these partnerships may profoundly impact the sport and physical activity (PA) experiences in visually impaired (VI) people, yet little is known about the experiences of VIRs and SGRs. This study aimed to explore qualitatively the running experiences of VIRs and SGRs. Five VIRs and five SGRs took part in in-dep…
Pleasure and danger: A running-woman in ‘public’ space
The French existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, long ago signalled the potentially empowering force of outdoor exercise and recreation for women, drawing on feminist phenomenological perspectives. Feminist phenomenological research in sport and exercise, however, remains relatively scarce, and this article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing a feminist phenomenological theoretical framework to analyse lived …
Beyond life-skills: Talented athletes, existential learning and (Un)learning the life of an athlete
Following developments in educational discourse more broadly, learning discourses in youth sport have been shaped by outcome-based and instrumental goals of developing useful life-skills for ‘successful’ lives. There is, however, a need to expand such traditional understandings of sport-based youth development, which we undertook by exploring existential learning in sport through encountering discontinuity. We conducted in-depth qualitative resea…
‘I like to run to feel’: Embodiment and wearable mobile tracking devices in distance running
Many experienced runners consider the use of wearable devices an important element of the training process. A key techno-utopic promise of wearables lies in the use of proprietary algorithms to identify training load errors in real-time and alert users to risks of running-related injuries. Such real-time ‘knowing’ is claimed to obviate the need for athletes’ subjective judgements by telling runners how they have deviated from a desired or optimal…
Somewhere Between a Stopwatch and a Recording Device: Ethnographic Reflections From the Pool
As has recently been highlighted, despite the prevalence of methodological “confessional tales” in ethnography generally, the challenges of undertaking ethnographic research specifically in institutional sports settings remain underexplored. Drawing on data from a 3-year ethnographic study of competitive swimming in the United Kingdom (UK), here we explore some of the practical challenges of balancing different elements of the researcher’s role w…
‘I guess I was surprised by an app telling an adult they had to go to bed before half ten’: A phenomenological exploration of behavioural ‘nudges’
In recent years, the role of self-tracking technologies has been investigated, debated and critiqued within qualitative research circles. The principal means by which self-tracking technologies seek to promote health-related behaviours and behaviour change is through the use of ‘nudges’. Despite the increasing prevalence of nudge-style modes of body-mind governance, there remains little in-depth qualitative research on people’s embodied responses…
Evaluation of an integrated care model using the RE-AIM framework: A case study of a community-based lifestyle service in rural Lincolnshire, UK
The International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC) is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes original articles in the field of integrated care on a continuous basis.IJIC has an Impact Factor of 2.913 (2021 JCR, received in June 2022)The IJIC 20th Anniversary Issue was published in 2021
Earth(l)y pleasures and air-borne bodies: Elemental haptics in women's cross-country running
A rich and multi-stranded sociology of sporting embodiment has begun to emerge in recent years. Calls have been made to analyze more deeply not only the sensory dimensions of lived sporting bodies but also the values prevailing within particular physical-cultural worlds. This article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing theoretical perspectives drawn from phenomenological sociology to explore cross-country runners' sens…
Researching retired ex-servicemen: Reflections on ethnographic encounters
The opportunities and challenges that younger, female, civilian researchers can encounter when undertaking ethnographic research with predominantly male military veterans are relatively underexplored sociologically. This is despite a growing literature on reflexivity in military studies over the past decade. To address this gap, we draw on symbolic interactionist insights to examine the reflective account of a British, female researcher in her mi…
‘Ploughing on’: A sociological investigation of ‘endurance work’ in competitive swimming and distance-running
Despite a burgeoning corpus of qualitative studies of sport and physical cultures, in-depth and embodied investigations of those requiring sustained engagement with ‘endurance work’ remain relatively under-developed. These physical cultures are sociologically interesting as they often demand of practitioners intense commitment in terms of time, energy, and (for many) finances devoted to endurance-training regimes. They also require substantial sa…
Sensoriality, Social Interaction, and “Doing sensing” in Physical–Cultural Ethnographies
As recently highlighted, despite a burgeoning field of sensory ethnography, the practices, production, and accountability of the senses in specific social interactional contexts remain sociologically under-explored. To contribute original insights to a literature on the sensuous body in physical–cultural contexts, here we adopt an ethnomethodologically sensitive perspective to focus on the accomplishment, social organization, and accountability o…
Sensory sociological phenomenology, somatic learning and 'lived' temperature in competitive pool swimming
In this article, we address an existing lacuna in the sociology of the senses, by employing sociological phenomenology to illuminate the under-researched sense of temperature, as lived by a social group for whom water temperature is particularly salient: competitive pool swimmers. The research contributes to a developing 'sensory sociology' that highlights the importance of the socio-cultural framing of the senses and 'sensory work', but where th…
Sporting embodiment: Sports Studies and the (Continuing) Promise of Phenomenology
Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls 'to bring the body back in' to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the 'promise of phenomenology' remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the 'flesh' of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded and interpretatively contested persp…
Feeling the way: Notes toward a haptic phenomenology of distance running and scuba diving
Along with a resurgence of interest in 'the body' within the social sciences generally over the last two decades, in recent years a corpus of sociological research specifically on sporting embodiment has started to develop. Calls have been made to analyse more fully and deeply the sensory dimension of the lived sporting body, including via phenomenological perspectives. This article contributes to this developing literature by bringing to bear in…
Working Out' Identity: Distance Runners and the Management of Disrupted Identity
This article contributes fresh perspectives to the empirical literature on the sociology of the body, and of leisure and identity, by analysing the impact of long-term injury on the identities of two amateur but serious middle/long-distance runners. Employing a symbolic interactionist framework, and utilising data derived from a collaborative autoethnographic project, it explores the role of 'identity work' in providing continuity of identity dur…
Intense Embodiment: Senses of Heat in Women’s Running and Boxing
In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the 'sensuousities' of 'intense embodiment' e…
Grasping the Phenomenology of Sporting Bodies
The last two decades have witnessed a vast expansion in research and writing on the sociology of the body and on issues of embodiment. Indeed, both sociology in general and the sociology of sport specifically have well heeded the long-standing and vociferous calls 'to bring the body back in' to social theory. It seems particularly curious therefore that the sociology of sport has to date addressed this primarily at a certain abstract, theoretical…
The Sensorium at Work: The Sensory Phenomenology of the Working Body
The sociology of the body and the sociology of work and occupations have both neglected to some extent the study of the 'working body' in paid employment, particularly with regard to empirical research into the sensory aspects of working practices. This gap is perhaps surprising given how strongly the sensory dimension features in much of working life. This article is very much a first step in calling for a more phenomenological, embodied and 'fl…
Running the Routes Together: Corunning and Knowledge in Action
The mundane, concrete practices of social life have remained underanalyzed, unproblematized, even taken for granted by some social theorists, despite their being constitutive of the very foundation of social life. Despite a growing corpus of ethnographic studies within the sociology of sport, little analytic attention has been devoted to the concrete practices of actually "doing" sporting activity. Based on data derived from a collaborative auto-…
Emotions, Interaction and the Injured Sporting Body
Based on a collaborative autoethnographic research project, this article explores the emotional dimension of the injured sporting body. It takes as its analytic focus the journey, rehabilitative, emotional and narrative, of two middle-aged, non-elite, middle/long-distance runners who experienced serious, long-term knee injuries. The study examines the interactional and narrative elements of the rehabilitative journey, focusing on dimensions of th…
Close But Not Too Close: Friendship as Method(ology) in Ethnographic Research Encounters
Friendship as method" is a relatively underexplored-and often unacknowledged-method, even within ethnographic inquiry. In this article, we consider the use of friendship as method in general, and situate this in relation to a specific ethnographic research project, which examined the lived experience of asthma amongst sports participants. The study involved researching individuals with whom the principal researcher had prior existing friendships.…
Just 'non-academics: Research administrators and contested occupational identity
Surprisingly perhaps, knowledge about occupational groups within academia is relatively scant, with an almost exclusive concentration upon teaching staff. The research upon which this article is based aims to fill this gap by focusing upon one specific group, which, to date, has been under-researched: research administrators. Utilizing primarily symbolic interactionist analyses, and based upon qualitative interviews, the project sought to investi…
Occupational limbo, transitional liminality and permanent liminality: New conceptual distinctions
This article contributes new theoretical perspectives and empirical findings to the conceptualization of occupational liminality. Here, we posit ‘occupational limbo’ as a state distinct from both transitional and permanent liminality; an important analytic distinction in better understanding occupational experiences. In its anthropological sense, liminality refers to a state of being betwixt and between; it is temporary and transitional. Permanen…
Sensing the outdoors: A visual and haptic phenomenology of outdoor exercise embodiment
In recent years, there has been a burgeoning of academic interest in exercise embodiment issues, including a developing field of phenomenologically inspired analyses of the lived body experience of physical activity and exercise. Calls have been made for researchers to explore the sensory dimension of such embodiment, and a corpus of sensory ethnographic studies is now beginning to grow, focusing on the ways in which people engage in ‘making sens…
Occupational Identity on the Edge: Social Science Contract Researchers in Higher Education
Throughout the higher education sector in the UK, recent decades have witnessed the increasing use of fixed-term and part-time labour, to the extent that around 50 percent of academic staff are currently employed on fixed-term contracts and in excess of 90 percent of researchers are employed on fixed-term contracts. Despite the importance of their contribution to the sector as a whole, relatively little research has been undertaken on the lived e…
Running into Injury Time: Distance Running and Temporality
Despite a growing body of research on the sociology of time and, analogously, on the sociology of sport, to date there has been relatively little sports literature that takes time as the focus of the analysis. Given the centrality of time as a feature of most sports, this would seem a curious lacuna. The primary aims of this article are to contribute new perspectives on the subjective experience of sporting injury and to analyze some of the tempo…
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-altitu…
From a Certain Point of View: Sensory Phenomenological Envisionings of Running Space and Place
The precise ways in which we go about the mundane, repetitive, social actions of everyday life are central concerns of ethnographers and theorists working within the traditions of the sociology of the mundane and sociological phenomenology. In this article, we utilize insights derived from sociological phenomenology and the newly developing field of sensory sociology to investigate a particular, mundane, and embodied social practice, that of trai…
Endurance Work: Embodiment and the Mind-Body Nexus in the Physical Culture of High-Altitude Mountaineering
The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, here we investigate the lived experience and social 'production' of endurance in this sociologically under-researched physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-socio…
Take a deep breath: Asthma, sporting embodiment, the senses and 'auditory work
There has been a veritable efflorescence of interest in sporting embodiment in recent years, including more phenomenologically inspired sociological analyses. A sociology of the senses is, however, a very recent sub-discipline, which provides an interesting new dimension to studies of sporting embodiment, focusing inter alia upon the sensory elements of 'somatic work': the ways in which we go about making sense of our senses within a socio-cultur…
Sensory sociological phenomenology, somatic learning and 'lived' temperature in competitive pool swimming
In this article, we address an existing lacuna in the sociology of the senses, by employing sociological phenomenology to illuminate the under-researched sense of temperature, as lived by a social group for whom water temperature is particularly salient: competitive pool swimmers. The research contributes to a developing 'sensory sociology' that highlights the importance of the socio-cultural framing of the senses and 'sensory work', but where th…
Social Science Contract Researchers in Higher Education: Perceptions of Craft Knowledge
The past two decades have witnessed a trend towards the use of fixed-term and part-time contracts in higher education in the UK, where over a third of routine academic work is now carried out by staff on fixed-term contracts (Ainley 1994). As Kogan et al. (1994: 53) have noted, this increased casualisation of academic labour has been driven by the need for universities and colleges to reduce labour costs. The move towards a more ‘flexible’ and ch…
Learning in sport: From life skills to existential learning
Youth sport is habitually promoted as an important context for learning that contributes to a person’s broader development beyond sport-specific skills. A growing body of research in this area has operated within a life skills discourse that focuses on useful, positive and decontextualised skills in the production of successful and adaptive citizens. In this paper, we argue that the ideological discourse of life skills, underpinned by ideas about…
Exploring Lived Heat, "Temperature Work," and Embodiment: Novel Auto/Ethnographic Insights from Physical Cultures
Drawing on sociological and anthropological theorizations of the senses and "sensory work," the purpose of this article is to investigate via phenomenology-based auto/ethnography, and to generate novel insights into the underresearched sense of thermoception, as the lived sense of temperature. Based on four long-term, in-depth auto/ethnographic research projects, we examine whether thermoception can be conceptualized as a distinct sense or is mor…
From ‘just a swimmer’ to a ‘swimming mother’: Women’s embodied experiences of recreational aquatic activity with pre-school children
Increased academic attention on the gendering of leisure pastimes in recent years has highlighted the centrality of the gendered body in influencing how leisure is accessed, experienced and transformed. To date, however, little attention has been paid to how women experience aquatic leisure activity, the second most popular form of leisure activity in the UK, and where female participation predominates. This paper presents results from research i…
Get yourself some nice, neat, matching box files!' Research administrators and occupational identity work
To date, qualitative research into occupational groups and cultures within academia has been relatively scarce, with an almost exclusive concentration upon teaching staff within universities and colleges. This article seeks to address this lacuna and applies the interactionist concept of ‘identity work’ in order to examine one specific group to date under-researched: graduate research administrators. \nThis occupational group is of sociological i…
Working at a Marginal 'Career: The Case of UK Social Science Contract Researchers
Contract researchers constitute a significant occupational group within the UK higher education system, and the products of their labour are crucial to the research profile of the institutions in which they work and to the sector as a whole. Given the 'marginality' of the contract researcher role, with its attendant insecurities and inferior employment conditions in comparison with 'permanent' faculty, it is perhaps not surprising that relatively…
Capturing Contracts: Informal activity among contract researchers
Contract researchers constitute an expanding occupational group in UK higher education and contribute significantly to national research output. Despite recent concern and debates over their marginal status and inferior conditions of employment, little is known about the actual complexities of contract researchers’ working lives. Drawing upon qualitative interviews, an attempt is made to remedy this lacuna, by portraying certain kinds of occupati…
Social Science Contract Researchers in Higher Education: Perceptions of Craft Knowledge
The past two decades have witnessed a trend towards the use of fixed-term and part-time contracts in higher education in the UK, where over a third of routine academic work is now carried out by staff on fixed-term contracts (Ainley 1994). As Kogan et al. (1994: 53) have noted, this increased casualisation of academic labour has been driven by the need for universities and colleges to reduce labour costs. The move towards a more ‘flexible’ and ch…
Running into Injury Time: Distance Running and Temporality
Despite a growing body of research on the sociology of time and, analogously, on the sociology of sport, to date there has been relatively little sports literature that takes time as the focus of the analysis. Given the centrality of time as a feature of most sports, this would seem a curious lacuna. The primary aims of this article are to contribute new perspectives on the subjective experience of sporting injury and to analyze some of the tempo…
Working at a Marginal 'Career: The Case of UK Social Science Contract Researchers
Contract researchers constitute a significant occupational group within the UK higher education system, and the products of their labour are crucial to the research profile of the institutions in which they work and to the sector as a whole. Given the 'marginality' of the contract researcher role, with its attendant insecurities and inferior employment conditions in comparison with 'permanent' faculty, it is perhaps not surprising that relatively…
Occupational Identity on the Edge: Social Science Contract Researchers in Higher Education
Throughout the higher education sector in the UK, recent decades have witnessed the increasing use of fixed-term and part-time labour, to the extent that around 50 percent of academic staff are currently employed on fixed-term contracts and in excess of 90 percent of researchers are employed on fixed-term contracts. Despite the importance of their contribution to the sector as a whole, relatively little research has been undertaken on the lived e…
Identity Change: Doctoral students in art and design
For over a decade, practice-based research degrees in art and design have formed part of the United Kingdom research degree education portfolio, with a relatively rapid expansion in recent years. This route to the PhD still constitutes an innovative, and on occasion a disputed, form of research study and students embarking upon the practice-based doctorate find themselves in many ways undertaking pioneering work. To date there has been a dearth o…
Artistry and analysis: Student experiences of UK practice‐based doctorates in art and design
During the last decade, doctoral education has been the focus of much international academic attention. This period has also witnessed the rapid growth of practice‐based research degrees in art and design in the UK. To date, however, there has been no extensive empirical research on the subjective experiences of students undertaking this form of doctorate in art and design. This paper, based on qualitative interviews with 50 UK students at 25 dif…
Emotions, Interaction and the Injured Sporting Body
Based on a collaborative autoethnographic research project, this article explores the emotional dimension of the injured sporting body. It takes as its analytic focus the journey, rehabilitative, emotional and narrative, of two middle-aged, non-elite, middle/long-distance runners who experienced serious, long-term knee injuries. The study examines the interactional and narrative elements of the rehabilitative journey, focusing on dimensions of th…
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 th…
Just 'non-academics: Research administrators and contested occupational identity
Surprisingly perhaps, knowledge about occupational groups within academia is relatively scant, with an almost exclusive concentration upon teaching staff. The research upon which this article is based aims to fill this gap by focusing upon one specific group, which, to date, has been under-researched: research administrators. Utilizing primarily symbolic interactionist analyses, and based upon qualitative interviews, the project sought to investi…
Working Out' Identity: Distance Runners and the Management of Disrupted Identity
This article contributes fresh perspectives to the empirical literature on the sociology of the body, and of leisure and identity, by analysing the impact of long-term injury on the identities of two amateur but serious middle/long-distance runners. Employing a symbolic interactionist framework, and utilising data derived from a collaborative autoethnographic project, it explores the role of 'identity work' in providing continuity of identity dur…
Get yourself some nice, neat, matching box files!' Research administrators and occupational identity work
To date, qualitative research into occupational groups and cultures within academia has been relatively scarce, with an almost exclusive concentration upon teaching staff within universities and colleges. This article seeks to address this lacuna and applies the interactionist concept of ‘identity work’ in order to examine one specific group to date under-researched: graduate research administrators. \nThis occupational group is of sociological i…
Grasping the Phenomenology of Sporting Bodies
The last two decades have witnessed a vast expansion in research and writing on the sociology of the body and on issues of embodiment. Indeed, both sociology in general and the sociology of sport specifically have well heeded the long-standing and vociferous calls 'to bring the body back in' to social theory. It seems particularly curious therefore that the sociology of sport has to date addressed this primarily at a certain abstract, theoretical…
Running the Routes Together: Corunning and Knowledge in Action
The mundane, concrete practices of social life have remained underanalyzed, unproblematized, even taken for granted by some social theorists, despite their being constitutive of the very foundation of social life. Despite a growing corpus of ethnographic studies within the sociology of sport, little analytic attention has been devoted to the concrete practices of actually "doing" sporting activity. Based on data derived from a collaborative auto-…
Intimate Intrusions Revisited: A Case of Intimate Partner Abuse and Violations of the Territories of the Self
Intimate partner abuse is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon, highly situated and “locally-produced” by intimate partners in the domestic interactional milieu. Adopting a symbolic interactionist approach, this article uses a limited topical life-history case study to investigate the interactional experiences of a male victim of female-perpetrated intimate partner abuse. The theoretical analysis utilises Goffman’s conceptualisation of the “territ…
Sporting embodiment: Sports Studies and the (Continuing) Promise of Phenomenology
Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls 'to bring the body back in' to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the 'promise of phenomenology' remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the 'flesh' of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded and interpretatively contested persp…
Negative 'marking'? University research administrators and the contestation of moral exclusion
With the exception of academics, occupational groups within universities remain relatively under‐researched. Based upon qualitative interviews with 27 research administrators in 19 UK universities, this article reports on a small‐scale qualitative project to investigate the workday worlds of these ‘boundary‐crossing’ and ‘occupationally hybrid’ staff. The article focuses specifically upon the organisational constraints imposed upon research admin…
The Sensorium at Work: The Sensory Phenomenology of the Working Body
The sociology of the body and the sociology of work and occupations have both neglected to some extent the study of the 'working body' in paid employment, particularly with regard to empirical research into the sensory aspects of working practices. This gap is perhaps surprising given how strongly the sensory dimension features in much of working life. This article is very much a first step in calling for a more phenomenological, embodied and 'fl…
Intention and epochē in tension: Autophenomenography, bracketing and a novel approach to researching sporting embodiment
This article considers a novel approach to researching sporting embodiment via what has been termed ‘autophenomenography’. Whilst having some similarities with autoethnography, autophenomenography provides a distinctive research form, located within phenomenology as theoretical and methodological tradition. Its focus is upon the researcher’s own lived experience of a phenomenon or phenomena. This article examines some of the key elements of a soc…
Assault on Self: Intimate Partner Abuse and the Contestation of Identity
The complexities of intimate partner abuse and violence have been studied from a range of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives. It is argued here that symbolic interactionist analyses offer specific and powerful insights into this particular interactional domain. This article is based on data generated by a topical life-history case study of a well-educated, middle-class, middle-aged man, whose wife subjected him to sustained …
Feeling the way: Notes toward a haptic phenomenology of distance running and scuba diving
Along with a resurgence of interest in 'the body' within the social sciences generally over the last two decades, in recent years a corpus of sociological research specifically on sporting embodiment has started to develop. Calls have been made to analyse more fully and deeply the sensory dimension of the lived sporting body, including via phenomenological perspectives. This article contributes to this developing literature by bringing to bear in…
I'm a Reddie and a Christian! Identity negotiations amongst first-year university students
Currently, there exists relatively scant sociological research on the identities of first-year UK university students, and specifically those holding a strong Christian identity. Employing a symbolic interactionist framework, this article explores issues of identity construction amongst a group of first-year undergraduate students based at a UK university, who self-identify as committed Christians. Based on a qualitative, exploratory study of the…
The Lived Experience of Diagnosis Delivery in Motor Neurone Disease: A Sociological-Phenomenological Study
Relatively few previous studies of individuals receiving a diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease within the UK health care system have employed qualitative approaches to examine the diagnostic journey from a patient perspective. A qualitative sociological study was undertaken, involving interviews with 42 participants diagnosed with MND, to provide insight into their experiences of undergoing testing and receiving a diagnosis. Adopting a sociologica…
A phenomenological exploration of exercise mental toughness: Perceptions of exercise leaders and regular exercisers
Although elite sport has provided an ideal context for exploring mental toughness (MT), currently, there is scant research examining how this construct might be equally applicable in exercise settings, where high rates of attrition have been reported. The present research, therefore, aimed to address this gap, and to understand and conceptualise exercise mental toughness (EMT) through in-depth phenomenological interviews with a range of exercise …
‘What it takes’: Perceptions of mental toughness and its development in an English Premier League Soccer Academy
The purpose of this qualitative study was to undertake an in-depth exploration of coaches’ and support staff perceptions regarding mental toughness and its development in the pressurised and distinctive sub-cultural milieu of an English Premier League (EPL) Soccer Academy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight key staff responsible for a range of different roles in the development of young players. From the analysis, four general d…
Sociology (64 works) · Psychology (60 works) · Social science (36 works) · Social Psychology (35 works) · Epistemology (30 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (28 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (24 works) · Medicine (23 works) · Qualitative research (23 works) · Sport Psychology and Performance (23 works)