Engaging bodies and places online: Studying young people’s lifeworlds through phenomenological and online ethnographic approaches

In this paper, we suggest that embodied learning forms the backdrop for young people’s digitally mediated practices. In line with the early studies of Miller & Slater, we approach online engagements as ‘continuous with and embedded in other social spaces’, happening ‘within mundane social structures and relations that they may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness’ (Miller & Slater, 2000:5). Through explorations of everyday life embodied practices, we discuss how young people’s embodied and emplaced learning processes unfold in the interwoven space of online and offline aspects of everyday life.With theoretical point of departure in the philosophical writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and phenomenologically oriented work on embodiment and place (Casey, 1999; Ehn & Löfgren, 2006, 2010; Frykman, 2012; Frykman & Gilje, 2003; Ingold, 2000, 2011; Jackson, 1996; Miller, 2008, 2010; Winther, 2006), we discuss how everyday life experiences of young people transgress online-offline distinctions. The presentation focuses on an important concept of thought in the oeuvre of Merleau-Ponty, the sedimentation, and on how this notion has inspired the analysis of our empirical material from settings in which online and offline experiences to various degrees interweave.