Experiencing The Space: Visiting Cemeteries On All Saints’ Day and an Ordinary Day

Authors

Krzysztof T. Konecki, University of LodzFollow

Abstract

This paper is a description of collaborative research that was done together with students during the class “Contemplative Sociology. Experiencing Self, No-Self and the Lifeworld.” The goal of the research was to introduce the students to the contemplative methods that could be used to research lived experiences and the vision of the lifeworld through contemplation of the mind, bodily sensations, and emotions. A project was started on experiencing the cemetery space. The space for experiencing was chosen to sensitize the students to concerns (such as death, religious holidays, everyday life, suffering, etc.) that could be investigated from the first-person perspective by using contemplation as an alternative to survey-sociological methods, psychological methods and ethnography. The students learned the contemplative techniques of meditation, body awareness, self- observation, and self-description to face their concerns, including the ultimate ones. However, the main concern was the role of the mind, body and emotions in cognition and creating the mood.

Keywords

contemplation, grounded theory, lived experiences, emotions, bodily sensations, cemetery, self-descriptions

Author Bio(s)

Krzysztof T. Konecki, Ph.D., is Chief of the Department of Sociology of Organization and Management at the University of Lodz (Poland), Editor-in-chief of Qualitative Sociology Review, and President of Polish Sociological Association. He is actually a member of the Board of European Society for Study of Symbolic Interaction. He has published extensively on qualitative methods and grounded theory methodology and has done the study on symbolic interactions. His research interests include the sociology of organization and management, human and non-human animal interactions, qualitative methodology of social research, visual grounded theory, contemplative inquiry, hatha-yoga and contemporary forms of spirituality. Please direct correspondence to krzysztof.konecki@gmail.com.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my students for participating in this research project. I am also grateful to Mark Muirhead for his invaluable help in preparing the last version of the paper.

Publication Date

3-12-2021

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2021.4332

Recommended APA Citation

Konecki, K. T. (2021). Experiencing The Space: Visiting Cemeteries On All Saints’ Day and an Ordinary Day. The Qualitative Report, 26(3), 832-860. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2021.4332

ORCID ID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7370-3490