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Purpose – This study examined the often minimized relationship between child sexual abuse and the body and asked: How, and by what means, is the body experienced by children after sexual abuse? The purpose of this work is to present children's interpretations of embodiment in their own words.

Methodology – Data include 10 years of semi-structured videotaped forensic interviews of children and youth seen for reported cases of sexual abuse. Utilizing an analytic-inductive method, children's verbal reports of sexual abuse were examined from a symbolic interactionist perspective in terms of re/productions of the body.

Findings – Discourse analyses revealed how children evaluated the body and negotiated related emotions. Youth ascribed meaning to the body as both materiality and social interaction. The body was experienced as object and somatic presence, as a marked or stigmatized body, and as a means of control and resistance. Through their own words, youth revealed how violence draws attention to embodiment, power, and subjectivity.

Value – Despite increased public and policy attention, limited research has explored how children describe their experiences of sexual abuse. This study addresses this serious gap in the literature by approaching the sexually abused body as a critical site of social meaning and social order. Of significant import, this work brings children's voices to the forefront; it shows how youth actively negotiate embodiment and expands work with child participants. It will be of value to practitioners working with children and to scholars in the fields of sexual victimization, sociology of the body and children/childhood.

This paper aims to use embodied theory to analyze consumer experience in a retail brandscape, Hollister Co. By taking a holistic, embodied approach, this study reveals how individual consumers interact with such retail environments in corporeal, instinctive and sensual ways.

The primary source of data was 97 subjective personal introspective accounts undertaken with the target age group for the store. These were supplemented with in-depth interviews with consumers, managers and employees of Hollister.

The authors offer a conceptualization of consumers’ embodied experience, which they term The Immersive Somascape Experience. This identifies four key touch points that evoke the Hollister store experience – each of which reveals how the body is affected by particular relational and material specificities. These are sensory activation, brand materialities, corporeal relationality and (dis)orientation. These may lead to consumer emplacement.

The authors propose that taking an “intelligible embodiment” approach to consumer experiences in retail contexts provides a deeper, more holistic understanding of the embodied processes involved. They also suggest that more anthropological, body-grounded studies are needed for the unique insights they provide. Finally, they note that there is growing consumer demand for experiences, which, they argue, points to the need for more research from an embodied experience perspective in our field.

The study reveals the perils and pitfalls of adopting a sensory marketing perspective. It also offers insights into how the body leads in retail brandscapes, addressing a lack in such approaches in the current retailing literature and suggesting that embodied, experiential aspects of branding are increasingly pertinent in retailing in light of the continued growth of on-line shopping.

Overall, the study shows how an embodied approach challenges the dominance of mind and representation over body and materiality, suggesting an “intelligible embodiment” lens offers unique insights into consumers’ embodied experiences in retail environments.

This study aims to offer insights into the embodied concerns that underpin men’s personal grooming practices through which they experience their body as the “existential ground of culture and self” and manage their everyday bodily presentation.

This study analyses 16 interviews with male consumers of age between 20 and 76. The interpretative analysis is informed by both Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-subject and the sociology of the body as discursively constituted.

This study proposes four bodily identity positions that link individual personal grooming practices to specific embodied concerns. These bodily identity positions underline the different ways the male body is called upon to carve out a meaningful existence.

The research findings are not intended to generalise or to be exhaustive. Rather, it is hoped that they may stimulate readers to think more deeply about the role of the body in aiding male consumers to seek maximum grip on their life-world.

The study findings provide marketers with rich narratives for brand positioning and image development beyond the traditional sexual and/or alpha male-themed marketing and advertising. They also offer preliminary insights for mental health practitioners into how the male body shapes men’s identity development and experiences of well-being.

The study identifies the different ways personal grooming can become assimilated into an individual’s system of beliefs and practices. It also offers empirical support for a definition of the body as active and acted upon, especially with respect to male grooming.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

The datafication of teaching and learning settings continues to be of broad interest to the learning sciences. In response, this study aims to explore a non-traditional learning setting, specifically two Golf Teaching and Research Programs, to investigate how athletes and coaches capture, analyze and use performance data to improve their practice. Athletic settings are well known for spurring the proliferation of personal data about performance across a range of contexts and ability levels. In these contexts, interest in athletes’ experiences with data has often been overshadowed by a focus on the technologies capturing the data and their capabilities.

This ethnographic research focuses on the data-rich experiences of golf coaches and students during two pedagogical encounters. Using Balka and Star’s (2015) concept of shadow bodies, this article explores how golfing bodies can become infused with data, creating partial representations of a lived experience that can be augmented and manipulated for pedagogical purposes, depending on the context and the individuals involved.

Interaction analysis helps the authors to examine the embodied and interactional nature of coach-golfer pedagogical encounters across two sites, a local Professional Golf Association golf course and a Swing Analysis Lab. The authors also split these encounters into two episodes to identify how coaches and golfers use partial representations of their bodies to analyze performance and interpret data.

This research suggests that as data-driven practices continue to engulf athletic settings, and teaching and learning settings broadly, emphasis needs to be placed on ensuring that athletes (learners) – from the most recreational to elite users – have an embodied understanding of their performance to improve their ability. Furthermore, this article raises questions about what data gets shared between instructors and athletes and how that data is used.

In this chapter, I explore embodiment as a multi-modal pedagogy for teacher education. I begin with a theoretical exploration of the concepts of embodiment and embodied pedagogy across a range of cultural, philosophical and research traditions and their significance in considering powerful pedagogies for contemporary teacher education. I then go on to present a lived example of ‘the image of the images’ as a drama-based embodied pedagogy for pre-service teacher reflection. Drawing on my research in Australia with a group of pre-service teachers, I unpack the potential benefits of embodied reflection as a pedagogical strategy for engaging pre-service teachers in deep, collaborative reflection on learning to teach. Finally, I offer suggestions for adapting and applying this pedagogical approach across different teacher education contexts.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to differentiate between a sociology of the body and an embodied sociology, prior to considering what this might mean in methodological terms for those wishing to conduct research into the senses and the sensorium in sport and physical culture.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken involves reviewing the work of those who have already engaged with the senses in sport and physical culture in order to highlight an important methodological challenge. This revolves around how researchers might seek to gain access to the senses of others and explore the sensorium in action. To illustrate how this challenge can be addressed, a number of studies that have utilised visual technologies in combination with interviews are examined and the potential this approach has in seeking the senses is considered.

Findings – The findings confirm the interview as a multi-sensory event and the potential of visual technologies to provide access to the range of senses involved in sport and physical culture activities.

Research limitations/implications – The limitations of traditional forms of inquiry and representational genres for both seeking the senses and communicating these to a range of different audiences are highlighted and alternatives are suggested.

Originality/value – The chapter's originality lies in its portrayal of unacknowledged potentialities for seeking the senses using standard methodologies, and how these might be developed further, in creative combination with more novel approaches, as part of a future shift towards more sensuous forms of scholarship in sport and physical culture.

This paper explores the potential of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms – specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of working life. It takes as a case study a prototype performance research method investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified self technologies to reconnect the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data were selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a 40-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The paper theorises the project as an intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools of remediation that recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data for critical self-knowledge and understanding.

The purpose of this paper is to report on research that uncovered myths about HIV and AIDS held by serodiscordant couples in Malawi, and the sources of these myths. The paper reflects on how the myths affect serodiscordant couples’ engagement with HIV and AIDS information.

Van Manen’s (1997) approach to analysis of phenomenological data was used to analyse data from in-depth interviews conducted in Malawi with 21 serodiscordant couples and three individuals who had separated from their partners because of serodiscordance.

Serodiscordant couples in Malawi believe and hold on to some inaccurate HIV and AIDS information that can be seen as “myths”. Some of these myths are perpetuated by official HIV and AIDS information when it is translated into the local languages. Other myths derive from social norms of the societies where the couples live.

The findings of this paper have practical implications for how HIV and AIDS information providers should engage with target audiences to understand the origins of the myths they hold. The findings also imply that some myths have technical, religious, moral and cultural bases which need to be addressed before challenging the myth itself.

Using real-life descriptions of experiences of HIV and AIDS information provided by serodiscordant couples, the authors reveal how myths can affect engagement with the information. The authors make recommendations on how to address myths in ways that contribute to a positive experience of HIV and AIDS information by serodiscordant couples.

People subjectively engage in the production and reproduction of what constitutes “feeling normal.” Objective standards of normalcy for the able-bodied are created and maintained by institutions (e.g., medicine, the state, business, the mass media, and family), and these standards are learned by individuals who socialize the next generation in a continuous cycle. Having a disability does not exempt a person from standards and values of “able-bodied normalcy,” nor does it prevent her/him from reproducing these standards for future generations. Thus, it is possible, if not probable, that persons with disabilities live in and reproduce the able-bodied lifeworld, sustaining, what is for the person with a physical disability, an unattainable standard of normalcy. Approximating and ultimately achieving “normalcy” in this situation or at least the presentation of “normalcy” (Goffman, 1959, 1963) may occupy a sizeable portion of everyday life. More importantly here, “feeling normal” emerges when the social constructions of reality allows the person with a physical disability to be part of a generation and everyday life. There is, in other words, a “frame” for defining normality, and physical disability is a key to changing this frame (Goffman, 1974).