The contributors to Somaesthetics and Sport explore our embodied experiences of watching and playing sport, including sport’s beauty; the place of exercise in our sense of living a good life; and how we cope with pain and suffering.

“I regard Higuchi’s book as particularly valuable because it highlights dimensions of somaesthetics that have not been sufficiently explored. I refer not only to the various traditional Japanese somatic disciplines whose somaesthetics aspects Higuchi reveals, but also to central topics far beyond Japanese culture.” -Foreword by Richard Shusterman Higuchi, one of the pivotal scholars in introducing Shusterman’s somaesthetics to Japanese audiences in the early 2000s, provides insight into how this philosophy has developed in Japan, and the affinity it has developed with a non-Western culture. Dividing his insights into the categories of innovation, practice, and educational implications, Higuchi presents the Japanese perspective on somaesthetics, with contributions from four of his students. They develop the philosophical discussion of areas such as the aesthetics of sport, bodily knowing, learning as mimesis, and learning culture through language. In this way, the book illuminates the philosophy of somaesthetics using Japanese experience and research while presenting a unique perspective on Japanese culture. This book will be of especial interest to scholars of Japanese culture, and of the philosophy of aesthetics and education.

Shusterman’s Somaesthetics is a wide-ranging collection of penetrating essays by twelve scholars examining in rich detail the many dimensions of philosopher Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism and somaesthetics, complemented by his own chapter of responses to these scholars

Building on the unfolding and expanding embeddedness of digital technologies in all aspects of life, Interactive Sports Technologies: Performance, Participation, Safety focuses on the intersection of body movement, physical awareness, engineering, design, software, and hardware to capture emerging trends for enhancing sports and athletic activities. The accessible and inspiring compilation of theoretical, critical, and phenomenological approaches utilizes the domain of sports to extend our understanding of the nexus between somatic knowledge and human-computer interaction in general. Within this framework, the chapters in this volume draw upon a variety of concepts, processes, practices, and elucidative examples to bring together a timely assessment of interactive technologies’ potential to facilitate increased performance, participation, and safety in sports. This collection of chapters from international authors presents diverse perspectives from a wide range of academic and practice-based researchers within a comprehensive coverage of sport disciplines.

In Sounds as They Are, author Richard Beaudoin recognizes the often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music and analyzes these sounds using a bold new theory of inclusive track analysis (ITA). In doing so, he demonstrates new expressive, interpretive, and embodied possibilities and also uncovers insidious inequalities across music studies and the recording industry, including the silencing of certain sounds along lines of gender and race.

Cities are defined by their complex network of busy streets and the multitudes of people that animate them through physical presence and bodily actions that often differ dramatically: elegant window-shoppers and homeless beggars, protesting crowds and patrolling police. As bodies shape city life, so the city’s spaces, structures, economies, politics, rhythms, and atmospheres reciprocally shape the urban soma. This collection of original essays explores the somaesthetic qualities and challenges of city life (in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas) from a variety of perspectives ranging from philosophy, urban theory, political theory, and gender studies to visual art, criminology, and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Together these essays illustrate the aesthetic, cultural, and political roles and trials of bodies in the city streets.

This book provides a richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Composed of fourteen wide-ranging but finely integrated essays by Richard Shusterman, the originator of the field, Thinking through the Body explains the philosophical foundations of somaesthetics and applies its insights to central issues in ethics, education, cultural politics, consciousness studies, sexuality and the arts. Integrating Western philosophy, cognitive science and somatic methodologies with classical Asian theories of body, mind and action, these essays probe the nature of somatic existence and the role of body consciousness in knowledge, memory and behavior. Deploying somaesthetic perspectives to analyze key aesthetic concepts (such as style and the sublime), he offers detailed studies of embodiment in drama, dance, architecture and photography. The volume also includes somaesthetic exercises for the classroom and explores the ars erotica as an art of living.

This collection of essays explores the crucial connections between aesthetic experience and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, while further advancing inquiry in both. After the editor’s introduction and three articles examining philosophical accounts of embodiment and aesthetic experience in existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and pragmatism, the book’s nine remaining articles apply somaesthetic theory to the fine arts (including detailed studies of the body’s role in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music, photography, and cinema) but also to diverse arts of living, considering such topics as cosmetics and sexual practice. These interdisciplinary, multicultural essays are written by a distinctively international group of experts, ranging from Asia (China and India) to Europe (Denmark, Finland, Hungary, and Italy) and the United States.

In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, interrogating the possible contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa.

This multidisciplinary collection examines different dimensions of the interrelationships between sport and the arts. It is a consequence of the Fields of Vision initiative that challenges their typical separation into distinct realms. Whether at school or in the highest realms of public life people struggle to reconcile the two; they lack the necessary conceptual vocabulary. Worse, there are entrenched positions characterised by mutual suspicion, distrust and denigration. In contrast, the contributors to this book challenge the creativity/competition binary and highlight the potential for collaboration in theoretical discourse, policy, education and professional practice. In doing so, the authors draw strength from the Olympian ethos of the Greeks and the vison of the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin. The book seeks to ‘problematise, interrogate and provoke’. The papers shed new light on sport and the arts as representations of cultural identity and embodying processes of social change. This book is a significant new contribution to understanding both sports and the arts, not just in their separate contexts, but also in amalgam. It represents a valuable resource for researchers and advanced students of Sports, Visual Art, Literature, History, Sociology, Social Theory and Cultural Studies. It was originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.