Physical literacy, a concept introduced by Britain’s physical education and phenomenological scholar, Margaret Whitehead, who aligned the term with her monist view of the human condition and emphasis that we are essentially embodied beings in-the-world, is a foundational hub of recent physical education curricular revision. The adoption of the term serves a political purpose as it helps stakeholders advocate for the educational, specifically literacy, rights of the whole child. Yet, one might wonder what impact conceptual shifts of becoming “physically literate” (...) in lieu of becoming “physically educated” have on physical education research and practice. Terms such as “reading” the game and metaphors that describe the body as an “instrument of expression” are entering the lexicon of physical education but from a seemingly cognitive frame of reference. Arguably, the extent to which the adoption of physical literacy has on dissolving Cartesian views of the body and the mechanization of movement it performs has yet to be questioned. This article thus acts as an invitation to explore physical literacy in a Merleau-Pontian inspired act of inscribing the world through movement and how a reading of a reversible imprint might awaken a more fluent sense of what it means to become physically literate as new curricular pathways in the field of physical education emerge. (shrink)

My intention in writing this article is to illustrate how I engage with the process of orienting to the meaning of pedagogy by inquiring into several moments in my life where I am able to fully experience its um. I begin this phenomenological inquiry by plunging into my experience on a teeter-totter as a young child, and use the sense of ups and downs as a metaphor for the tensions of weight and weightlessness, comfort and challenge that characterize the pedagogical (...) world. I then attempt to gain a more perceptual understanding of pedagogy by narrowing in on the suspended moment, which becomes a metaphor for the pedagogical moments of support, vulnerability, and opening that emanate from this tension. In these particular moments, I am able to dwell in the spaces in-between my everyday ups and downs and become existentially conscious and pedagogically connected to the world around me. By metaphorically connecting each of these moments to my teeter-totter experience, I illustrate how embracing the tensions of life and allowing myself to dwell in a suspended moment, deepens my perceptual understanding of pedagogy and influences my current pedagogical practice as a new teacher and master’s student. (shrink)

Leibniz's widely influential account of time provides a significant puzzle for those seeking to locate this account within his hierarchical ontology. Leibniz follows his scholastic predecessors in supposing that there are different grades of being, with substances being the most real and all other things possessing their reality via their relationships to substance. Following this picture, Leibniz suggests that phenomenal bodies only possess the being that they derive from the substances (i.e., monads) that ground them. Some would argue that time (...) likewise only possesses its being based on the bodies that it relates. Contrary to this suggestion (i.e., that time is twice removed from substances), I will argue that time is derived directly from rational souls. Thus, I will argue that time is on an ontological par with the phenomenal world of bodies. (shrink)

Salsa dancing, a partnered dance premised on the felt sense of connection, is well suited to an exploration of Henry’s radical phenomenology of immanence and Heidegger’s facticity of life. Birthed in social celebratory contexts, salsa carries a particular motile freedom. What matters most is not how the dance movements are created from an outer frame of reference, but the experience of interactive responsiveness that emerges from unanticipated acts of giving life to another. Connecting to one’s partner and exuding a presence (...) filled with life is revealed in an indepth interview with two-time world champion salsa dancer, judge, choreographer and coach, Anya Katsevman. This interview attempts to invoke the kinetic, kinesthetic and affective registers of the lividness and livingness of salsa dancing. As a phenomenological inquiry into factical life, the inter-view is presented not so much as a matter of shared perspectives or viewpoints, but more in the way of an inter-feeling, a practice of life engagement. This affectively-oriented approach provides both promise and challenge to the field of phenomenology. It invites us to delve more deeply into feeling acts of seeing. It also helps us understand how, through attending more fully to acts of seeing, we can increase the intensity with which we feel the upsurge of life. (shrink)

The “life phenomenology” theme of the 35th International Human Science Research Conference challenged participants to consider pressing questions of life and of living with others of our own and other-than-human kinds. The theme was addressed by keynote speakers Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Ralph Acampora and David Abram who invoked a motile, affective and linguistic awareness of how we might dwell actively and ethically amongst human communities and with the many life forms we encounter in the wider, wilder world we have in common. (...) Conference participants were provoked to consider the following questions: “How might phenomenology have us recognize a primacy of movement and bring us in touch with the motions and gestures of the multiple lifeworlds of daily living? What worlds from ecology to technology privilege certain animations? What are the affects and effects of an enhanced phenomenological sensitivity? What senses, feelings, emotions and moods of self-affirmation and responsiveness to others sustain us in our daily lives? And to what extent might the descriptive, invocative, provocative language of phenomenology infuse the human sciences and engender a language for speaking directly of life?”. (shrink)

Review of Mariella Greil's (2021) Being in Contact: Enountering a Bare Body, published by De Gruyter.