Asia Institute - Theses
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ItemA culture of effort: Social poetics and the transnational parkour community( 2021)How do our embodied experiences affect the choices we make, and the actions we take, within our communities? How do our emotional narratives help us to produce social interventions through creative collaboration? What story do we tell about our values with our actions? Parkour training fosters a culture of effort, integrity, and altruism. This research is an exploration of parkour vision and expressions of embodied learning in the transnational parkour community. Foregrounding the experiences of practitioners in Melbourne, Edinburgh, and Tokyo, I explore notions of play, embodiment, and emotion in considering our relationship to our environment. These embodied experiences are often expressed through in-the-moment, of-the-moment responses to challenges which characterize the experience of training. Through the intimacy of participant observation and utilizing social poetics as a tool, I explore how these experiences offer insight into the relationship between values and action. Further, the dynamic between a parkour practitioner, their environment, and the challenge of training is a glimpse into how these relationships and experiences relate to creating social interventions in a wider cultural context. The final focus of this research is in creating an intervention to engage directly with the challenge of misrepresentation facing the transnational parkour community. Utilizing both the constellation of narratives in a qualitative ethnography, and the principles of applied visual anthropology, I facilitate a collaboration using an action-oriented research strategy to engage directly with this challenge. Throughout, I critically examine the nature of embodied research through my experiences in the field, and in reflection consider how my role as a researcher affects the community. The central focus of this research is on the embodied experience of parkour culture as it is changing. The pulse and texture of deep embodied experiences reveal broader cultural and social narratives written on the lives of individuals, and the strength, flexibility, and creativity needed for change.