scholarly journals Being Outdoors: Lived Experience on the Franklin River

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Marcus Morse ◽  
Sean Blenkinsop

Being outdoors can provide experiential possibilities not readily available indoors. In this paper we draw on phenomenological research undertaken with participants on 10-day outdoor Franklin River journeys in Tasmania, Australia, to illustrate such possibilities. By exploring multiple aspects and variations of participant lived experience outdoors we focus, in particular, on the potential ontological implications of these experiences. We detail three key findings that emerged from participant descriptions: i) a feeling of humility, ii) being alive to the present, and iii) paradox and living with the irresolvable via anecdotes, experiential structures and quotes. In doing so we highlight and discuss what, we suggest, are profound possibilities for participants’ ways of being outdoors with/in this vibrant riverscape.

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittany Stahnke ◽  
Amy Blackstone ◽  
Heather Howard

The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the overall life satisfaction of older adult women who have not had children. We explore the following questions: (1) What is the overall sense of life satisfaction of childfree women over 65 years of age? (2) What is the lived experience of being a childfree woman in U.S. society? and (3) How does being childfree inform women’s overall life satisfaction? Using a phenomenological research design to analyze data from interviews with 14 childfree women over the age of 65, we found that nearly all participants report a high life satisfaction and many report a strong sense of resiliency, though they also report an awareness of the stigma associated with their status as nonmothers. Implications for both theory and practice are considered.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Nziba Pindi

In this autoethnographic article, I am interested in theorizing about how hybridity illuminates my lived experience of identity performed across cultures, and more specifically in diasporic context, at the intersections of various facets of my selfhood: Black, female, postcolonial, African, bi-tribal, diasporic, immigrant, nonnative English Speaker, “French native speaker,” and so on. I use personal narrative as a locus of subjectivity to recount critical moments of my lived experience as a hybrid subject navigating at the borderlands of two cultural worldviews: Congolese and American. My cross-cultural journey reveals a series of challenging and triumphant episodes from my childhood back home to my life in the United States, a journey during which I have experienced both privilege and oppression. My process of identity construction results in the creation of a third space that celebrates difference through new ways of being, encompassing cultural values from both the United States and the Congo. This process is articulated through different ways of being/not being “American” and/or “African” and just being “different.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahlam Al-Natour ◽  
Samar Mohammad Al-Ostaz ◽  
Edith J. Morris

Introduction: Marital violence increases during times of war. This study aims to describe the lived experience of marital violence toward Syrian refugee women during the current war in Syria. Design: A descriptive phenomenological research methodology was used to conduct semistructured interviews with 16 purposively selected Syrian refugee women residing in displacement centers in Jordan. Colaizzi’s steps of data analysis were used. Results: Four themes identified were identified: (1) Loss, insecurity, and suffering; (2) Shame and humiliation; (3) Justifying and enduring marital violence; and (4) Ways of coping with marital violence. Conclusion: The Syrian War conflict changed women’s lifeway and created a context for marital violence. Study findings suggests addressing marital violence during wartime and allocating resources to provide care and support of victims of violence in the displaced countries.


Author(s):  
Pedro Aguas

One of the aims of human sciences seek to understand the essences and meanings of human experiences by focusing on philosophical, epistemological, methodological, and linguistic principles through transcendental phenomenology and hermeneutics, two philosophies and research methodologies central to qualitative research. Therefore, fusing approaches provides a space where both epistemology and methodology within both traditions can merge to yield meaning and understanding, and at the same time, offer a new approach to dealing with data collection and data analysis without neglecting or distorting original leading concepts. Fusing approaches comes into being as the merging of overlapping and deferring epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical assumptions that a researcher brings into play and actually puts into practice sustaining a purposeful and explicit sense of neutrality to assure methodological trustworthiness. Moved by my sensitivity to lived experience, in this paper, I explicate in a step-by-step fashion the combination of Moustakas’ modification of Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method of phenomenological analysis and Van Manen’s (1990) hermeneutic approach to phenomenology in data collection and analysis. In fusing approaches, I encourage researchers to generate knowledge and show understanding emanated from both transcendental phenomenology and hermeneutics sustaining a deep sense of neutrality, co-creation, thoughtfulness, and rigor.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 160940692094206
Author(s):  
Emma Farrell

Phenomenological research approaches have become increasingly popular in fields such as psychology, nursing, tourism, and health science but remain underrepresented in education research. This is surprising given that education, a discipline founded on attending to, and building upon, the knowledge and experiences of others, can only benefit from the insights and explication of human experience offered by phenomenological research. One reason for its disfavor may be the oft-intimidating philosophy that underpins, and is critical to the application of, phenomenological approaches to research. This article provides an overview of some of the phenomenology’s key philosophical principles. It pays particular attention to transcendental and hermeneutic phenomenology, their key proponents, and tenets and outlines some similarities and differences between these two phenomenological lineages. Efforts to translate the philosophical principles of phenomenology into an approach to research are discussed, and examples of the application of transcendental and hermeneutic phenomenological approaches to education settings are explored. Once described as more a carefully cultivated thoughtfulness than a technique, phenomenology as a methodology is examined in terms of its trustworthiness and its potential to deepen our Understanding (with a capital U) of the experiences of others. This article acts as a theoretical handrail to support researchers’ first steps into this rich philosophical and theoretical terrain with a view to encouraging increased adoption of this approach to research in education settings.


Scimetr ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Houshmand ◽  
Mohsen Adib Hajbaghery

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Rachel Bath ◽  

One defining claim that critical phenomenologists make of the critical phenomenological method is that description no longer simply plays the role of detailing the world around the describing phenomenologist, but rather has the potential to transform worlds and persons. The transformative potential of the critical phenomenological enterprise is motivated by aspirations of social and political transformation. Critical phenomenology accordingly takes, as its starting point, descriptions of the oppressive historical social structures and contexts that have shaped our experience and shows how these produce inequitable ways of being in the world (Guenther 2020, 12). For example, critical phenomenologists have provided rich descriptions of marginalized lived experience, particularly racialized experience (Ngo, 2017; Yancy, 2017), dis-abled experience and experiences of illness (Lajoie and Douglas, 2020; Toombs, 1993), gendered experience (Beauvoir, 2009; Salamon, 2010), and so forth. What is common across these accounts is the assumption that these descriptions provide means of enacting political change. First, they illuminate the existence of oppressive structures and their effects upon us, our possibilities, and our relations. Second, through increasing awareness they begin to denaturalize the oppressive historical structures that “privilege, naturalize, and normalize certain experiences of the world while marginalizing, pathologizing, and discrediting others” (Guenther 2020, 15). Third, through strategic responses (e.g., hesitation in Alia Al-Saji’s work), they produce new possibilities of action and experience, which initiates the process of creating different ways of being in the world (Al-Saji 2014).2


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wright ◽  
Semi Purhonen ◽  
Riie Heikkilä

Abstract This paper adds a comparative perspective to the study of taste, cosmopolitanism and social organisation. Drawing on material provided by two similar projects in the UK and Finland it explores the relationships between national and cosmopolitan taste cultures. Whilst there have been some recent attempts to study taste in a comparative perspective, the weight of sociological inquiry into taste is focussed on specific national spaces, including the France of Bourdieu’s (1984) seminal contribution. This tendency persists even as the production and circulation of culture is increasingly accepted as global. Global culture is assumed to be the driver of cosmopolitan ways of being, but is also interpreted as a threat to distinct national cultures. Studies of taste provide an empirical setting where the lived experience of global culture and the ambiguities of cosmopolitanism can be observed. Based on interviews and focus group discussions from the UK and Finland, the paper broadly concurs with those critics who see cosmopolitanism in the context of the maintenance of privileged political or symbolic positions of classes/status groups.


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