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This study aims to use place identity theory to examine the concept of physical environment design (PED) and its effects on consumers’ emotional well-being (EWB) dimensions such as sensorium, behaviour and happiness.

The authors used a qualitative approach. Thirty interviews were conducted among participants drawn from the city of London, which is one of the flourishing and world’s most famous international trade centre, providing paramount access to the global market. The data was analysed using thematic analysis.

The findings suggest that PED is defined precisely using the terms like atmosphere, appealing, attractive, impressing, inviting, ambient, compelling and design cues. The findings also suggest that PED has a positive effect on consumers’ sensorium, behaviour and happiness. However, these effects are lower when the retail stores have unwelcoming themes than when they have mesmerising PED. The different names can also be advantageous, specifically when online shopping dominates today’s retail industry. The findings also illustrate that the theoretical model used in this study is valid and suggest that PED has positive effects on consumers’ sensorium, behaviour and happiness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, while other authors tried to identify the effect of PED on consumers buying behaviour, this study is the first one to show how PED effects consumers’ sensorium, behaviour and happiness. The results of personal interviews highlight the importance of design elements and a gap in the application of novel elements to improve consumers’ sensorium, behaviour and happiness.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to differentiate between a sociology of the body and an embodied sociology, prior to considering what this might mean in methodological terms for those wishing to conduct research into the senses and the sensorium in sport and physical culture.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken involves reviewing the work of those who have already engaged with the senses in sport and physical culture in order to highlight an important methodological challenge. This revolves around how researchers might seek to gain access to the senses of others and explore the sensorium in action. To illustrate how this challenge can be addressed, a number of studies that have utilised visual technologies in combination with interviews are examined and the potential this approach has in seeking the senses is considered.

Findings – The findings confirm the interview as a multi-sensory event and the potential of visual technologies to provide access to the range of senses involved in sport and physical culture activities.

Research limitations/implications – The limitations of traditional forms of inquiry and representational genres for both seeking the senses and communicating these to a range of different audiences are highlighted and alternatives are suggested.

Originality/value – The chapter's originality lies in its portrayal of unacknowledged potentialities for seeking the senses using standard methodologies, and how these might be developed further, in creative combination with more novel approaches, as part of a future shift towards more sensuous forms of scholarship in sport and physical culture.

In these times of globalisation, distances are getting smaller, enhancing the interactions between people of different cultural backgrounds. This is especially true in the area of tourism, a field that is shaped by manifold communication activities. The enormous increases in the numbers of Chinese tourists visiting Europe and other Western destinations require building up intercultural competencies to minimise conflicts and promote mutual understanding. It is therefore necessary to question one’s own cultural view, which is why the debate surrounding de-Westernisation is of crucial importance. The metaphor of the atmosphere – in Chinese qifen – offers a helpful access point to strengthen mutual understanding, because it creates a bridge between eastern and western thinking. Paul Watzlawick (1967) developed his well-known five axioms of communication, the second of which states that every communication has both content and a relational aspect, and the latter classifies the former. This chapter shows why the atmospheric dimension of communication should be established as the third axiom in order to understand communication holistically.

Mohammad Azharuddin's arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin's life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men's cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin's presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics.

Authors’ experiences encourage teachers and learners to consider the impact of integrating an intersensory transformative curriculum that explores how the senses interact with each other in different combinations and hierarchies (see Howes, 2003). Such efforts may require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of the senses in understanding self with a focus on increasing consciousness, meaning-making, and embodied experiences (Boske, 2011b; Burns, 1978; Eisner, 1994; Noddings, 1984). All human experiences are essential to interpretation of the senses. Attending to the sensorium, which embeds the senses throughout learning, may encourage connectedness among self and others; and ultimately, provide spaces to promote equity in schools. Teachers and learners, in developing this socioecological perspective by designing curricula to include readings and activities centered on deepening personal knowings, can work to collectively engage in making connections among self, social justice and equity, and addressing larger societal issues (Furman, 2012; Jean-Marie et al., 2009).

This introductory chapter opens up with the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’ and the appropriation of trauma as a cultural form in modernity aided by technologies of vision and sound. Trauma in modernity has been intimately welded with witnessing and testimony, illuminating an inter-relationship with technologies which simulates our senses and affect, with its capacities to re-present past events through present consciousness, and its ability to produce a moral economy in their own right. Humanity's reliance on technologies to narrate and circulate trauma as a cultural form of exchange and transaction articulates a moment of transcendence in which media as cultural artefacts reconfigure trauma as a cultural form. The notion of second-hand witnessing and the simulation of trauma as a shared and popular genre unleashes trauma as a resonant genre bound with technologies which renew human bonds. Equally it can be reduced to fiction or give way to compassion fatigue. In historically tracing the movement of technologies of trauma as a cultural form over time from televisual witnessing to its aesthetic or perverse renditions in the digital age, the chapter discerns trauma's machinic bind and its enactment as a cultural artefact couched within the sensorium of affect and ethics. The development of mass technological forms over time, from print to the digital age, also concerns the rise of trauma as a cultural form in terms of witnessing, testimony, memorializing, mourning and commemoration. Within these configurations the traumatized human figure is submerged through time as one equally enacted and abstracted through the formats of technology and consumption.

The purpose of this study is to reflect on and analyse the sensory experiences related to the transition to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research seeks to understand how these experiences have influenced the integration of work practices into home and family life and the subsequent adaptations and embodied learning that arise in response.

The authors' research approach incorporates autoethnographic methods to explore the sensory, affective and emotional experiences of transitioning to remote work. The authors draw on principles of embodied learning, as influenced by Gilles Deleuze, and utilise a range of ethnographic tools including note-taking, audio memos, photography, shared conversations and written reflections to gather their data.

The study illuminates the ways bodies learn to accommodate the new organisational contexts that arise when the spaces, affects and forces of home and work intersect. It demonstrates how the integration of work into the private domain resulted in new affective and material arrangements, involving novel sensory experiences and substantial embodied learning.

This study provides a distinct, sensory-oriented perspective on the challenges and transformations of remote work practices amid the pandemic. By focussing on the affective resonances and embodied learning that emerge in this context, it contributes to the emerging discourse around post-lockdown work practices and remote work in general.

In madrasahs around the world, teaching and learning methods regarding the memorisation of the Qur’an follow the same notion of repetition and the need for embodiment, going beyond rote memorisation, to include a form of active learning. The process of memorisation for automaticity and inculcation of the Qur’an is seen when an individual can accurately recite the text in an illuminating way. This approach of repeatedly reciting, reading and writing Qur’anic texts is seen as an enduring method for achieving accuracy, fluency and automaticity. The purpose of this study is to extend the existing body of knowledge in the field by proposing that memorisation in the Islamic context is evident through embodied interactions in the spiritual and physical realm. Educational research on madrasahs is scarce, and the limited research that has been conducted focuses primarily on children’s madrasahs. This study is unique, in that its focus is British madrasahs for adults.

After conducting observations and interviews at three British adult madrasahs, a narrative analysis using a “holistic-form” approach to gain complete narratives of recitation, oral repetition and embodied learning in the Islamic context was performed. It was found that memorisation and the desire for embodied learning were an integral part of madrasah life and the foundation of the pedagogical approach and of students’ relationship with the teachers. This study concludes that the pedagogical approach used in the madrasahs reflects deep learning through an action-oriented methodology. This study’s fieldwork provides insights into the distinctiveness of the madrasah approach.

The study provides insights into the characteristics of the memorisation process as represented in the embodied actions of the learner. The results indicate that, in the future, the Islamic memorisation methodology must continue to support deep learning where rote memorisation is integral to an iterative process of practice.

The Islamic memorisation methodology needs to retain an approach that supports higher learning where rote memorisation is integral to an iterative process of practice and in this study, some, in achieving embodied learning. This in turn is instrumental in sustaining an Islamic epistemological perspective of the inseparable nature of knowledge and the sacred. This study provides some insights into the “heart” of the Islamic approach towards memorisation for embodiment that represents a complex process of individual renewal based on the notion of adab through an approach to deep learning.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights on the interconnectedness of the Muslim community, madrasah and memorisation in realising the process of embodiment.

Our anthropological study was conducted in 2011 at a prominent madrasah for higher education in England. The madrasah has approximately 400 adult learners that are studying Islamic studies programme. For our anthropological study, the notion of Islamic teaching and embodiment was integral to each other and was illustrative of a long educational tradition of the pedagogy of Islam. For this research, we follow a sensory narrative style in expressing our descriptions.

The findings provide an insight into the nature of memorisation for embodiment. The research suggests that the madrasah was teaching memorisation with a purpose to support the process of personal embodiment. Moreover, what we also see when considering madrasah life is that the notion of the “walking Qur’an” endures, and it transcends in the form of locally flavoured articulations of embodiment. To reiterate, the Islamic approach to memorisation for embodiment was found to be a practice relevant to all of us, as individuals, communities and institutions, reflexively engaging in the world around us. For the British madrasah, this was seen to be pivotal to the Islamic pedagogy shaped by the interplay between orality, facilitating memorisation and the didactic approach towards the sacred. From our observations, embodiment has a physical and spiritual dimension where prophecy is retained and is inherent to existence and daily madrasah practice.

Our narrative experiences bring a spiritual order to the pedagogical matters of memorisation represented by the inseparable nature of knowledge and the sacred. The interweaving of experiential narrative with a theoretical perspective brings forth our understanding towards the nature of memorisation for embodiment.