Lived Experience

8 Key excerpts on "Lived Experience"

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  Journeys of Soviet Things

  Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India

  • Sudha Rajagopalan(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Plamper 2015 , 289). Interlocutors tell stories, and as such they narrate and give coherent form to a selection of memories for the purpose of the interview. The Lived Experience I hear about is what is crafted as such and is thus subject to the vagaries of memory; it is those aspects of the Lived Experience that the interlocutor thinks is relevant for the conversation. Below I consider this and other conceptual ‘ins’ that help us do a history that foregrounds Cold War history as Lived Experience.

  Emotions and affect

  An impulse to study Lived Experiences allows a segue into emotional geographies, underscoring how emotions underpin political mobilisation and imaginaries, and help structure narratives of historical experience. Emotions are an inner state of being which we then construct and articulate in culturally specific ways. Perhaps most usefully, it is no longer seen as incompatible with ‘reason’ but ‘essential to rationality’ (Mercer 2006 , 289–290). Because our emotions shape our choices, utterances, interactions and our very existence (Smith et al. 2009 , 2), they permeate our ideas about the world, about how we fit in it, and inform our acts and gestures in that world. Emotions inflect geopolitical imagination and yet we tend to pay no heed to these.

  Affect goes beyond emotion to suggest a pervasive feeling, something that is not articulated but nevertheless felt. Emotions are socially and culturally expressed; affect is something that has been variously described as biological, physiological, or as ‘felt atmosphere.’ This latter is the more persistent quality to how interlocutors talk about Soviet things. Because they associate them either with important transitional and transformative moments in their lives or with their memory of a past period that both personally and politically felt more secure, there is a constant allusion to feelings in interviews. These feelings can be positive, or may simply constitute a ‘sense’ that goodwill was present. This latter is articulated as something that ‘hung in the air’ or felt in the atmosphere (Brennan 2004 , 1). Sara Ahmed writes that emotions are not something one has but something that circulates, and to which we may all react differently (Ahmed 2004 , 10). In other words, when interlocutors say that there was a ‘sense’ that Soviets were friends, it is also not necessarily a personal emotion but more a pervasive sentiment or affect that circulates beyond the subject; something that is “intermittent,” switches between “foregrounding and backgrounding” and is “flickering” (Merriman and Jones 2017

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  The SAGE Handbook of Evaluation

  • Ian Shaw, Jennifer C Greene, Melvin M Mark, Ian Shaw, Jennifer C Greene, Melvin M Mark(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Summary and Future Directions The preceding pages only highlight a few sig-nificant concepts and developments that influ-ence ways of thinking about the notions Lived Experience and practice in evaluation. We make no claim to understanding precisely how these ideas find their way into various evaluators’ ways of theorizing and conducting evalua-tion. To fully understand that would require not only a fine-grained analysis of the writing of these evaluators but probably also some-thing like an intellectual biography that offered personal understandings of the sources of important ideas (cf. Alkin, 2004). It should at least be apparent from the foregoing that these notions are multifaceted and fertile and, therefore, it is not surprising that they are subject to a variety of interpretations by eval-uators who value these ideas as orientations for their inquiries. Evaluation and the Study of Lived Experience 111 As analytic concepts, Lived Experience and practice focus the evaluator’s awareness in specific ways. Attention to Lived Experience reflects deep respect for the social world and invites careful consideration of participants’ and stakeholders’ ways of experiencing a pro-gram and how they invest actions with mean-ing. This concern is firmly grounded in the notion of naturalism that underlies qualitative sociology and some forms of cultural anthro-pology. As Gubrium & Holstein (1997, p. 19) explain, naturalism “presumes that reality exists in textured and dynamic detail in the ‘natural’ environment of the social world.

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  Experiential Landscape

  An Approach to People, Place and Space

  • Kevin Thwaites, Ian Simkins(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Urban Design Compendium (2000) developed in association with English Partnerships provides an example. Of particular relevance here are messages implicit in this arena suggesting that certain spatial configurations may be beneficial to human experience of the external environment, the practical implications of which are hitherto not explored.

  Up to now we have been concerned with theoretical grounding, an intellectual and academic justification for developing experiential landscape as a way to conceptualise people-space relations in the routinely encountered outdoors. At the heart of experiential landscape is a commitment to the idea that human experience has spatial dimensions and we have tried to present some justification for this view. Experiential landscape is, though, more than a field of academic inquiry. We are also interested in investigating how to apply the philosophical and theoretical principles that underpin experiential landscape in practice. Partly this means finding ways to understand the experiential character of outdoor settings through interpretation of spatial organisation and working out what components and procedures of design processes might help to make experientially better places. Space is arguably a fundamental medium for those who design outdoor settings and the sculpting and moulding of space and the material elements that define it are central to their purpose. The concept of experiential landscape responds with a conceptual framework setting out how certain categories of human experience can be interpreted spatially. This has helped develop and consolidate our ideas about how outdoor places can be understood holistically as four spatial types called centre, direction, transition and area, which combine in an infinity of ways to make places of different experiential character. Centre, direction, transition and area can be thought of as a kind of code representing the spatial expression of these experiences in the outdoors and, through knowing something of their properties and characteristics, makes it possible to read the experiential profile of existing settings and, although to a more limited extent, those still in the planning and design process. This model provides the basic structure upon which to begin to build the components and procedures required to apply experiential landscape principles in practice and this is what this section will sketch out. Before doing so, however, we want to say a few things about why the concept of experiential landscape is structured as it is.

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  Media, Place and Mobility

  • Shaun Moores(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Everyday Environmental Experience As I noted near the beginning of this chapter, Tuan (1977, p. v) employs the term ‘environmental experience’ in dealing with matters of dwelling or habitation, but it is to David Seamon’s book, A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter (1979), that I come now for further consideration of such experience. Although he is many years younger than Tuan, Seamon was a fellow pioneer of phenomenological geography back in the 1970s, when he was doing his postgraduate research (encouraged and overseen by Anne Buttimer), which focused on the topic of ‘everyday environmental experience’ (ibid., p. 15). Crucially, as well as drawing on the philosophical writings of Heidegger, Bachelard and especially Merleau-Ponty, Seamon’s project had a strong empirical element. In the American city where he was studying, he set up a number of what he called ‘environmental experi-ence groups’ (see ibid., pp. 21–8, for his justification of the ‘process of group inquiry … in which people can come to moments of discovery’ through shared exploration, and for lists of the group participants and the themes that they discussed, such as ‘the significance of habit and routine’, ‘everyday movement patterns’ and ‘emotions relating to place’). Discussions recorded in those groups provided a basis for the analysis set out in Seamon’s book, which he characterises as a study of ‘people’s experiential involvement with their everyday geographical world’ (ibid., p. 17). I will be referring shortly to some examples of the interesting empir-ical data that emerged from Seamon’s research project, but before that I want to do two things. First, I think it is important to emphasise the ground-breaking nature of his work in A Geography of the Lifeworld (although I should add that, later in the chapter, I will also be critical of 52 Media, Place and Mobility

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  Space and Pluralism

  Can Contemporary Cities Be Places of Tolerance?

  • Stefano Moroni, David Weberman, Stefano Moroni, David Weberman(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Central European University Press

    (Publisher)

  While geometric size may determine property taxes, for the purposes of living optimally, experiential space may trump geometric space. In the case of politics, experience may count for more than geome-try. Perceptions are real not in the sense that they are veridical but in the sense that they are real mental states that determine action. Perceptions and experience constitute social reality. Third, experienced space can refer to feelings of place and placeless-ness, coherence or chaos, security or danger. These do not conflict with geometry because geometry cannot impugn categories rooted in the hu-man need to orient oneself. Even if they cannot be intersubjectively veri-fied as easily as left and right or front and back, such experiences may be widely shared by a community, given its way of life and its “construction” of space. As such it should be taken seriously. In a nutshell, then, experienced space is a real phenomenon, sometimes intersubjectively verifiable and, in any case, with a real causal impact on the way we live. It needs to be at the center of debates dealing with spatial politics and policies. Space, Place and Politics 23 4. Cultural Differences and the Question of Whose Space The preceding discussion of experiential space and place has been abstract since it addresses the nature of experiential space as such. We would like now to point to the undeniable fact that large and pervasive differences arise at the cultural level. We cannot possibly inventory, categorize and catalogue these differences. Here we only call attention to the complexi-ties so as to indicate the ways in which such diversity gives rise to the inevitable political question of “Whose space?” Let us first flag the following question. What accounts for the diversity and heterogeneity of experienced space? What causes such diversity? This is part of a sprawling question about cultural difference of all kinds—to which no definitive answer is likely to be found.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies

  • Susan J Smith, Rachel Pain, Sallie A Marston, John Paul Jones III, Susan J Smith, Rachel Pain, Sallie A Marston, John Paul Jones III(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Indeed, notions of ‘emplacement’ have become critical to under-standing the Lived Experience of disability and ill-health, as evidenced in the work of writers such as Isabel Dyck on women with multiple sclerosis (Dyck, 1995) and Robert Wilton on the ‘diminishing worlds’ of people living with HIV/AIDS (Wilton, 1995). Within this emerging research stream, landscape and environment have taken on GEOGRAPHIES OF WELLBEING 311 new emphases and meanings. With regard to the former, researchers have moved on from the medical-geographical understanding of landscape as a physical barrier to health serv-ice provision and utilisation, to consider the varied meanings of ‘landscape’ and its links to health and wellbeing. Here studies bring an enhanced awareness of the cultural impor-tance of place, an implied incorporation of emotional terrain, and the intersection of the cultural and the political in the development of place-specific landscapes of health care and health promotion. Examples include landscapes of despair (Dear and Wolch, 1987) and therapeutic landscapes (Gesler, 1992). For health geographers the idea of ‘landscape’ is a metaphor for the complex layerings of history, social structure and built environment that converge to enhance or corrode human wellbeing in particular places (Kearns and Moon, 2002). Geographers have begun to explore environment more expan-sively, including how people perceive pollution and health differently in different places, and how different places affect and reflect behav-iour related to health (Eyles, 1997; Wakefield et al., 2001; Baxter and Lee, 2004; Wakefield and McMullan, 2005). Here then, even in a former ‘fortress’ of positivistic inquiry, envi-ronment has taken on a much broader, socially and culturally constructed meaning, with concepts such as wellbeing moving to the fore in its analysis. Another hallmark of contemporary health geography is its concern with social and cul-tural theory (Litva and Eyles, 1995).

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  Conditions of Mediation

  Phenomenological Perspectives on Media

  • Tim Markham, Scott Rodgers(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  164 | CONDITIONS OF MEDIATION: PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA “Phenomenological geography” comes out of certain human geographers’ dissatisfaction with the prevalent assumptions of the 1970s, in disciplines such as environmental psychology, which saw people’s meanings of place as entirely preconditioned by space. In media cities, this would mean that the quantities of display screens in sites such as Shanghai’s Hong Kong Plaza have a direct bearing on people’s attention: the more visual stimuli, the more attentive the gaze. If this were true, however, our usual movement through such spaces would be rather dif- ficult to imagine. Indeed, David Seamon’s (1979) acclaimed study of the “everyday environmental experience” demonstrated that people’s daily spatial practices are only partly conscious. In daily rounds, spatial experience is less about “reactions”, and more about embodied inhabitancy. Through repetition, the body adopts its own series of automatic performances along a usual path (a “body ballet,” p. 54). Features such as the speed of walking and the posture are the language of our cohabitation with surroundings, analogical to the suffusion of “fish” with “water” (p. 161). People usually arrive home from work without being aware of each step or everything that surrounded them. This “basic contact” with the world-at-hand is the essence of one’s geographical lifeworld: “the daily world of taken-for-grantedness” (pp. 99, 153). This key argument generated a working distinction between space (the earth’s surface undifferentiated) and place (any physical section of space, whether a bench, a street or a house, invested with intimate meanings). Always “more than location,” place is an emotional/practical investment in space: a “habit field” (Tuan, 1996, p. 452). Because it is a largely invisible achievement, place only becomes explicit when something in it changes.

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  Thinking Geographically

  Space, Theory and Contemporary Human Geography

  • Phil Hubbard, Brendan Bartley, Duncan Fuller, Rob Kitchin(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • The Athlone Press

    (Publisher)

  This latter focus on encounter was to prove influential in geographic work on movement, space and dwelling - as, for example, in the work of David Seamon (1979) on bodies in space and Anne Buttimer (1976) on the lifeworld. When coupled with widely cited and acclaimed work on social geographies of place (Tuan, 1974; Ley, 1983), this began to suggest a more human-centred foundation for studies of human geography than was offered by behavioural theories: The purpose of the humanistic critique was to put man [sic], in all his reflective capacities, back into the centre of things as both a producer and product of his social world and also to augment the human experience by a more intensive, hence self-conscious reflection upon the meaning of being human. (Ley and Samuels, 1978, p. 7) A Brief History of Geographic Thought 41 Methodologically, however, humanistic ideas of phenomenology and existen-tialism did not translate easily into practice. For example, describing the true essences of the objects and places bought into existence through human creativ-ity and imagination involves being able to 'see' (as well as smell, hear, feel and touch) from the perspective of another human being. Given the impossibility of this (we are all unique, after all), humanistic geography thus developed by adopt-ing qualitative methodologies that relied upon the ability of people to articulate the feelings and meanings that they associated with particular places. The 'truth' of such accounts was not brought into question: rather, they were used to create a faithful representation of people's world-view and engagement with place (see Eyles and Smith, 1988). In practice, therefore, humanistic theories fuelled a geography in which quali-tative methodologies were regarded as superior in the production of meaningful knowledge.

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