The German rediscovery of messianism in the first decade of the twentieth century gave voice to a new way of thinking about the utopian future that privileged redemption in its denunciation of progressivist notions of Enlightenment rationality. Profoundly uneasy with the growing anti-liberal and anti-Semitic upper classes of the Weimar Republic, the German-Jewish “generation of 1914” drew inspiration from the figure of the Messiah in answer to the nineteenth-century utopian-socialist dream of scientific rationality. “Messianism of our era,” as Gershom Scholem (...) wrote, “proves its immense force precisely in this form of the revolutionary apocalypse, and no longer in the form…. (shrink)

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 sociological phenomenological approach to studying sporting embodiment in general before portraying how autophenomenography was utilised specifically within two recent research projects (...) on distance running. The thorny issues of epoche and bracketing within phenomenological and autophenomenographical research are addressed and some practical suggestions tentatively posited. (shrink)

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 perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. Key words: phenomenology; existentialist phenomenology; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); sporting embodiment; the lived-body; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Cycle of Seminars led by philosopher & professor Mario Perniola.