During the pilot study three processes of embodiment emerged. When trying to understand how BTEC in Sport students’ bodies changed within time it became evident that three different levels could be addressed. For certain phenomena the body was clearly becoming ordered - their bodies were being shaped in various ways. On a different level, each body was seen to be experiencing and perceiving their educational and social environments in very intimate ways. Finally, these bodies were always situated within contextual parameters that position the body within a space or within a prevailing discourse. From findings that related tentatively to these three areas, a multi-dimensional picture of embodiment was sketched out. On a more generic level of reflection, it is across these three planes which bodies-in-transition move. Their motion takes place in natural time (their bodies were born, have grown, will become old and die) and social time (in which the processes of embodiment unfolds, and where collectives of bodies and society are also in ‘transition’). There were some further preliminary observations that pertained to these bodies-in-transition.
The processes that order embodiment had a clear role over the transition of these BTEC students. In the reflections from this study I concluded that: student bodies fall into a habit; they become what they do; through this an order emerges that the students’ actions and reactions tended to follow. Processes that order are powerful forces that tend to reproduce embodied across times and spaces. These regularities were observed through watching these sporting bodies in practice . The form of power that orders embodiment was not limited only to 22 practices and performances, but also extended through their disciplinary techniques. Together, these processes that order embodiment draw one line that sculpts bodies into something, into somebody. This line was represented as (1) in Figure A.
Practice, in various sociological texts, has been employed to describe how bodies 22
became ‘ordered’ in predictable ways. Maller (2007) provided an eloquent description of this process of embodiment: “As performances are repeated over time, bodies are continually shaped by and through practice… these include mental patterns and corresponding bodily developments of muscles, tissues and bones” (p. 72). The thickening of muscle, the tearing of tissue, and the increased speed of reaction were all evident within the BTEC in Sport education context. What is more, the bodily processes that were tied to what the body does was also tied to social meaning that ordered the students’ social bodies.
Figure B: A enhanced image of bodies-in-transition, the processes of embodiment, taken from
Figure A.
On a different line, there were processes of the experiencing body, as marked by (2) in Figure B. A researcher concerned only with what the body does and how it behaves and responds, is condemned to miss how the body lives. The BTEC students within the pilot study were alive. Their bodies ‘possessed emergent capacities’ (Shilling, 2012) that respond in creative and unpredictable ways. Even if their behaviours were predicable through observations, through interviews it became clear that each student experienced and intimately perceived the learning environment. Intense experiences of their past and present stayed with their bodies. These students’ experiencing bodies also formed imagined trajectories (see 6.1). These consisted of visions and anticipations of their further educational and occupational prospects. These experiential aspects were seen to be the source of the students’ ‘control’ over their bodily destinies. Importantly, this process was not to be conflated with agency, it is not to be held in direct reference to structure. It is to be in service of gaining insight into how students apprehended the world they inhabit (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). It is concerned with how bodies engage with the world through their corporeal senses and physical presences as a body. The processes of the experiencing body still unfold within the same physical and social times than those of the ordering processes, but they are somewhat detached from their direct power and control. Therefore, these processes can come to the explanation of different phenomena that arise when paying attention to bodies-in-transition.
(2)
(1) (3)
Missing from this picture are the situated processes of embodiment - visually represented as 3) in Figure B. These are the demarcated zones in which these bodies are located in a time and in a space. Some of these situated zones could be on a sports field, on a stage, within a labour market that demands ‘employability skills’, and at a ‘threshold’ of an educational system. The body can be situated across many different levels. Not only is this situatedness of the body a position where processes of experiences and of order collide. Each situation contain their own internal dynamics, as well as their own mediating processes - be it, for example, through the shape and size of the physical location or the inertia and speed of change in a discourse or in a system.
From the pilot study I began to develop “a reflexivity about the theories that could be used” (Wright, 2007, p.9) in order to make sense of bodies-in-transition. These were not set in stone. I began to construct an open document of theorists that could have assisted me in coming to terms with a particular dimension of the body, or of transition. A refined version of these records are presented in Table D. In this table, the properties of each individual process of embodiment (as outlined above) is endowed with more substance through linkages with existing conceptual apparatus that have/had scope to illuminate each of these lines.
Table D offers only some of the conceptual tools that sharpened my analysis. The initial possibilities were far more numerous than could be neatly represented in a schematic. The import of the model outlined in this section could not be understated. My experiences of ethnographic research (in the pilot and in the PhD) have only been made possible through a
Table D: A conceptual toolbox to view the three processes of embodiment Process of
Embodiment Theorist Meta-Concept A Body of Concepts Processes that Order
Embodiment Butler; Bourdieu; Marx; Foucault Power Performativity; Field; Production; Surveillance
Processes of the
Experiencing Body Merleau-Ponty; Leder; Sheets-Johnstone; Rodenburg
Phenomenology of
Bodily Sensations Incorporation; Perception; Absence- Presence; Evolutionary Semantics
Situated Processes Goffman Interactions Front Region; Back Region
growing awareness of how social theory can be effectively utilised to understand the realities I have faced. In 7.1. a full defence is provided of the central role that theory played in this study. Nevertheless to bring this Chapter to a close, I reflect that,
Without my conceptual toolbox I would not be able to work; it has provided guidance in conceptualising research problems, in framing research questions and in developing an analytical framework to interrogate the data (Wright, 2007, p.10)