Rytmen bor i mina steg : En rytmanalytisk studie om kropp, stad och kunskap

Sammanfattning: This thesis brings together a fascination with the city and a keen interest in the knowledge process. The point of departure is the bodily, sensory and emotional experience. That the author uses her own perceptions and experiences and is preoccupied with her own knowledge process means that she writes herself into an autoethnographic context. She also experiments with the writing and allows it to take on a more literary form as she writes about her own sensory impressions and feelings.The term rhythmanalysis is employed as a way of assessing, exploring, interpreting and understanding the world that embraces the embodied experience. Human beings are embodied beings, a claim we can make by referring to our own experiences as well as how we perceive, communicate and interact. The study delves into two aspects of rhythmanalysis, first as a way of describing the knowledge process as rhythm-analytical, which implies that bodily experiences are equally important as intellectual ones, and secondly as a way of talking about the city as polyrhythmic. It follows upon the latter that embodied rhythmanalysis of the city is possible.The rhythmanalysis may ultimately be seen as a project aimed at overthrowing the Cartesian dualism between body and mind. That we are embodied has a methodological consequence that is as simple as it is essential: the scholar exists in the world she studies. The researcher is not a neutral observer. She is a co-creator. She is a body, placed in time, space and history. She is situated, which means that her knowledge is also situated. Thus, the rhythmanalysis encompasses the body, the senses and feelings, and can be described with one key word: movement. It finds support in theories that acknowledge the fluid, the becoming, the situated, the performative, the relational, the dynamic, the material. It seeks methods that experiment, that focus on practices rather than discourses, that are preoccupied with a movable world rather than a static one.