Abstract: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 phenomenologi… Show more
“…It's like all parts come together, the cloud, the trees … Idin (male, young, moved to the UK from Iran within the last year).De Vet (2017, p. 141) terms these rich descriptions ‘weather relations’, which encompass not only meanings and understandings of local weather but also experiences and responses to it. They are ‘somatic experiences’ for Idin and Hadil who both cite a positive and sensed ‘weather learning’ as part of their experience of urban nature (Allen‐Collinson, Crust, & Swann, 2018, p. 69). Although the sensory qualities of weather were mostly appreciated, the limits to this (positive and negative) were tested by experiences of snowfall.…”
Section: Sensory Engagements With Weathermentioning
This paper explores ways in which first generation migrants living in a UK city engage with urban nature. Through understanding mundane connections with local nature (plants, animals and seasons), we attend to two questions 'what can narratives of urban nature tell us about experiences of migration', and inversely 'what can diverse migrant voices tell us about experiences of urban nature'? We draw on interview data with 23 participants, all born overseas, with a diverse mix in terms of age (young adults to older retired people), gender, country of origin and length of time resident in the United Kingdom. The analysis focuses on three areas: multisensory engagements with weather, care for nature and how transnational identities surface through the relational dimensions of nature narratives. We conclude by highlighting the potential of embodied nature engagement to support a sense of wellbeing and transnational identity across the life-course, with potential to more broadly reflect pluralist understandings of the urban environment.
“…It's like all parts come together, the cloud, the trees … Idin (male, young, moved to the UK from Iran within the last year).De Vet (2017, p. 141) terms these rich descriptions ‘weather relations’, which encompass not only meanings and understandings of local weather but also experiences and responses to it. They are ‘somatic experiences’ for Idin and Hadil who both cite a positive and sensed ‘weather learning’ as part of their experience of urban nature (Allen‐Collinson, Crust, & Swann, 2018, p. 69). Although the sensory qualities of weather were mostly appreciated, the limits to this (positive and negative) were tested by experiences of snowfall.…”
Section: Sensory Engagements With Weathermentioning
This paper explores ways in which first generation migrants living in a UK city engage with urban nature. Through understanding mundane connections with local nature (plants, animals and seasons), we attend to two questions 'what can narratives of urban nature tell us about experiences of migration', and inversely 'what can diverse migrant voices tell us about experiences of urban nature'? We draw on interview data with 23 participants, all born overseas, with a diverse mix in terms of age (young adults to older retired people), gender, country of origin and length of time resident in the United Kingdom. The analysis focuses on three areas: multisensory engagements with weather, care for nature and how transnational identities surface through the relational dimensions of nature narratives. We conclude by highlighting the potential of embodied nature engagement to support a sense of wellbeing and transnational identity across the life-course, with potential to more broadly reflect pluralist understandings of the urban environment.
“…Thus, the swimmers in this study began to understand and appreciate how highly nuanced changes in water temperature affected their performance, through a process of socio-cultural and physical-cultural socialisation and attunement (Allen-Collinson & Owton, 2014), learnt via embodied experience, and incorporated into their body-selves. This process of somatic and sensory learning in competitive pool swimming reverberates with research on other physical cultures, such altitude mountaineering, where qualities of air and ground, more than water, have to be rendered perceptible via socialisation, then identified, learnt, acknowledged, and their possibilities and consequences understood (Allen-Collinson et al, 2019). This mode of being-in-the-world can only be acquired through time spent in these specific environments, and also via the transmission of somatic ways of knowing between skilled and less experienced lifeworld inhabitants.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 92%
“…The research illustrates the ways in which humans learn how to inhabit and work within aquatic environments, but elements can also be generalised more widely, including to other physical-cultural environments. For specific environments and their inhabitants afford us opportunities from which to learn and develop a level of somatic knowledge (and ways of knowing) that may be unknown or unfamiliar to cultural ‘outsiders’ (Allen-Collinson et al, 2019). Thus, the swimmers in this study began to understand and appreciate how highly nuanced changes in water temperature affected their performance, through a process of socio-cultural and physical-cultural socialisation and attunement (Allen-Collinson & Owton, 2014), learnt via embodied experience, and incorporated into their body-selves.…”
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 there remains a dearth of sociological exploration into senses extending beyond the ‘classic five’ sensorium. Drawing on data from a three-year ethnographic study of competitive swimmers in the UK, our analysis explores the rich sensuousities of swimming, and highlights the role of temperature as fundamentally affecting the affordances offered by the aquatic environment. The article contributes original theoretical perspectives to the sociology of the senses and of sport in addressing the ways in which social actors in the aquatic environment interact, both intersubjectively and intercorporeally, as thermal beings.
“…As Lisa Blackman (2010: 4) has stated: ‘rather than existing as bounded, autonomous subjects, we coexist in shared ecologies’. While this journal has engaged in considering embodied weather experiences (Allen-Collinson et al, 2018), bodily experiences ‘in’ nature (Macnaghten and Urry, 2016) and the indeterminate condition of toxic embodiment (Yusoff, 2017), there is still necessity for a broader engagement with those shared ecologies, their implications for embodiment and particularly air-and-breath’s role in their lived experience.…”
Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world’s biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human–environment relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air – but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air’s contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis.
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