Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health

ISSN: 2159-676X (Print) 2159-6778 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqrs21

Dancing my scoliosis: an autoethnography of

healing from bodily doubt through somatic
practices

Weronika Grantham, Ejgil Jespersen & Maciej Płaszewski

To cite this article: Weronika Grantham, Ejgil Jespersen & Maciej Płaszewski (2020): Dancing my
scoliosis: an autoethnography of healing from bodily doubt through somatic practices, Qualitative
Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2020.1724190

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2020.1724190

Published online: 16 Feb 2020.

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QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH
https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2020.1724190

Dancing my scoliosis: an autoethnography of healing from bodily

doubt through somatic practices
a b b
Weronika Grantham , Ejgil Jespersen and Maciej Płaszewski
a
Faculty of Physical Education and Health, Department of Sport for All in Biała Podlaska, Józef Piłsudski University of
Physical Education, Warsaw, Poland; bFaculty of Physical Education and Health, Department of Rehabilitation in
Biała Podlaska, Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education, Warsaw, Poland

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

When I was twelve years old, I attended a routine school posture screen- Received 15 April 2019
ing. Following an orthopaedic examination, I was diagnosed with adoles- Accepted 28 January 2020
cent idiopathic scoliosis. Although it turned out for me that it was not KEYWORDS
a serious and progressive form of scoliosis, the diagnosis impacted my life Scoliosis; experience; bodily
in a disabling way, resulting in feelings of fear, anxiety, and losing a sense doubt; bodily awareness;
of trust in my own body. I experienced bodily doubt. This was also living body; somatic
accompanied by me negatively objectifying my body. This article is an practices; dance;
evocative autoethnography presenting my personal story of experiencing autoethnography
a medical diagnosis of scoliosis. The health of my spine was evaluated
purely by comparison to a desired aesthetical straight line. The way I felt in
my body was never taken into consideration during this process. It is also
a story of finding my own ways of healing, which was possible through
engaging in dance and somatic practices. They allowed me to experience
my body as a living subject – a soma. I was able to find ways to positively
objectify my body through practices of deep body listening and develop-
ing greater bodily awareness. My healing was also connected to re-
gaining a sense of bodily certainty and trust, through experiencing
moments of wholeness in spontaneous expressive self-movement.
Dance is also vital in my story. The personal evolution of approaching
dance presents a healing potential of this art, allowing for the conscious,
expressive, and therapeutic nature of the living body to be unveiled.

When approached as a somatic physical meditative practice, dance honours inner sensation and knowing. Such
an approach asks the dancer to go inside and make decisions about what is healthy and what will lead them to
wholeness and happiness. Though not intentionally therapeutic, the result is often just that.

(Debenham and Debenham 2008)

Introduction
On the edge of puberty, with all the other children from my school, I was sent to attend a routine
posture screening. Even though I did not have any known health issues or symptoms at the time
(I was ‘asymptomatic’ as I would learn later on), as a result, at the age of twelve, I was eventually
diagnosed with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) by an orthopaedist. In medical terms, AIS is
defined as an abnormal spine curvature (see Figure 1) of an unknown origin that varies in

CONTACT Weronika Grantham weronika.grantham@awf-bp.edu.pl Faculty of Physical Education and Health,

Department of Sport for All in Biała Podlaska, Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education, Akademicka 2, Biała Podlaska 21-
500, Poland
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 W. GRANTHAM ET AL.

Figure 1. Scoliosis. Original source: Wikipedia – Blausen.com staff (2014). ‘Medical gallery of Blausen Medical 2014ʹ. WikiJournal of
Medicine 1 (2). DOI:10.15347/wjm/2014.010.

severity as well as in the risk of progression and is diagnosed in children older than ten years old
(Weinstein et al. 2008; Hresko 2013). The branch of medicine that deals with scoliosis is
orthopaedia. Remarkably, this term was first coined in the eighteenth century by French pro-
fessor of medicine Nicolas Andry which he presented in his 1741 book Orthopaedia or the art of
correcting and preventing deformities in children (Ponseti 1991). The literal meaning of the term is
‘straight child’. This is why the symbol of orthopaedia to this day is the Tree of Andry (see
Figure 2).
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 3

Figure 2. Tree of Andry – a symbol of orthopaedia since 1741, presented in Nicolas Andry’s book entitled Orthopaedia or the art
of correcting and preventing deformities in children (Ponseti 1991). Original source is: Nicolas Andry, Orthopedie, 1741;
immediate source is: [http://books.google.com/books?id=__oDQ6yDO7kC&pg=PA316&dq=%22nico].

This diagnosis was a significant turning point in my life. From feeling healthy and well I was told
I have a potentially serious health condition. It impacted my personal development, perception, and
experience of my body. Further – possibly and indirectly – my career choices, and recently – my
research interests and practice. Thus, this autoethnography presents not only my personal experi-
ences and life events but also both the theoretical and cultural meaning-making from today’s point
of view as a researcher, which is further summed up in the ‘My healing revisited’ section. This is why
4 W. GRANTHAM ET AL.

this work does not include a methodology section as such, but the methodological elucidations can
be found in the text throughout, as they are actually part of the story.
The creation of this paper was influenced and prompted by two main issues. Firstly, in my
experience, the diagnosis itself had consequences connected to developing profound bodily
doubt (Carel 2013) I was left to deal with for many years. The experiences related to scoliosis
diagnosis and management were traumatic for me in that special transitional period of a girl growing
into a woman. Reflecting back on my memories, I found that they were powerful ‘epiphanies’ (Ellis,
Adams, and Bochner 2011, 275) that had a huge influence on my life.
Secondly, this paper explores my journey towards healing from this bodily doubt which for me
was possible through engaging in improvised dance and somatic movement practices. The writing
of this autoethnography is also part of the personal healing of my wounded self (Frank 2000) and an
invitation for dialogue, searching for other people’s experiences and responses. This work is thus
aimed as a contribution directed not only to the researchers and practitioners but also, importantly,
to other people touched by scoliosis.
I have been living with scoliosis/diagnosis question for over twenty years, in a sense, since I was
diagnosed. The first few years after the diagnosis were spent on actively trying to get medical help,
as the problem was presented as something very serious to me and my parents. Indeed, when
severe, AIS may be a difficult medical problem, impacting respiratory and cardiac functions
(Weinstein et al. 2008; Hresko 2013). However, what I did not know at the time was that the majority
of cases of mild scoliosis remain non-progressive and do not require active treatment (Weinstein
et al. 2008; Hresko 2013; UK NSC 2016), which also turned out to be the case for me. Nevertheless,
AIS, possibly the diagnosis, and treatment, may influence psychosocial functioning (Sanders et al.
2018; Tones, Moss, and Polly 2006).
I experienced negative consequences of the diagnosis, not the condition itself. However, when
researching other people’s experiences of scoliosis and diagnosis, I found very little (Linker 2012;
Wisniewski 2008). Personal accounts on social media and blogs are full of people’s stories but they
are currently not recognised as sources of scientific evidence (Ng et al. 2017; Kjellberg, Haider, and
Sundin 2016). The body of research on scoliosis is mostly purely biomedically oriented (US PSTF
2018). Medicine, however, as Schües (2014) reminds, is always embedded in culture. The culture I live
in is a perfectibility culture in which the visual is dominant (Orbach 2016) and that was also the case
with my scoliosis diagnosis which was a result of evaluating the appearance of my back. Hence, it
became clear to me that it was also an image-cultural issue. Scoliosis is mostly presented as an
aesthetical problem: a spine not being straight enough in terms of symmetry. However, to begin
with, I experienced it as a problem for others, and not for me. I was told how my spine should look
like but nobody asked me how I felt like in my body, whether I had any health issues or experiences
connected to this, and whether I even had a problem at all. Hence, I felt the need to express my
experiences, and to, using the words of Ravn and Høffding, express ‘what it feels like to be
a particular kind of, for example, sporting body’ (2017, 59). In my case – a living dancing body
diagnosed with scoliosis. This is why autoethnography, particularly the evocative autoethnography,
seemed the most suitable choice of methodology.
Evocative autoethnography is a way of conducting research, recognised to unite personal
experiences with the wider cultural and societal contexts. In this form, the author’s voice is the
main focus and he or she is both a subject and an object of examination (Hammersley and Atkinson
2007). It welcomes including ‘concrete action, dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and self-
consciousness’ (Ellis and Bochner 2000, 739) when presenting the narrative. The subjective, personal,
autobiographical experiences are at the heart of my inquiry. Both scoliosis medical diagnosis and
healing are specific cultural contexts in which my story is situated. They will be elaborated upon
further in the text. Moreover, in this form of autoethnography, unlike in the analytical form, it is the
story itself that has pivotal meaning. As Bochner and Ellis present, ‘stories can function as theory’
(2016, 210–211) rather than be theoretically explained or analysed.
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 5

A first-person language is used in this work when referring to both the emotive descriptions of
personal memories, and to personal journal entries from my movement sessions, which are written
in italics. These are followed by sections of discussion, offered as reflections from my current
standpoint, intertwined and in dialogue with relevant literature, to shed light upon and critically
evaluate my personal experiences and present them in a wider perspective. To further contextualise
my story, I use my age, the years, and the places where the events had happened, together with
relevant snapshots (Muncey 2005) in the form of photographs and images.
Importantly, my story brings about an embodied dimension often overlooked even in phenom-
enology of medicine (Goldenberg 2010) and disability studies (Hughes and Paterson 1997; Hughes
2009). Moreover, as noted by Sparkes (2019) in our culture largely dominated by the visual, what is
offered by embodied ways of knowing which includes somatic work, is often neglected. Thus, my
story is about both having and being a body. Hence, the strategy of embodied self-awareness (Finlay
2006) was used when recalling memories. Felt-sense (Gendlin 1982) was also actively accessed, when
re-visiting those memories, in order to immerse myself in the emotional and embodied realms, gain
insights, and make deeper connections between personal and cultural contexts. Finally, the text also
includes embodied writings and images (created as part of somatic work), as creative practices to
represent my experiences (Sparkes 2019). As noted by Spry, in autoethnography ‘[t]he living body/
subjective self of the researcher is recognized as a salient part of the research process’ (2001, 711),
which was vital when creating this autoethnographic account.
This autoethnography, embracing the issues from medical, philosophical, and movement fields,
fits in with other autoethnographies taking up related subjects. For instance, Scarfe and Marlow in
their autoethnography about running with epilepsy aimed to ‘provide a voice that is absent from
research area dominated by statistics’ (2015, 688). Likewise, Smith-Tran (2018), used the same
methodology to present her health condition of polycystic ovarian syndrome, as well as her ways
of coping with it, contributing a wider view to what is mostly described in medical and psychological
terms.
Hence, this study is not primarily a methodological contribution but rather aims at widening the
perspective of AIS diagnosis and its consequences, by adding the dimension of personal experience,
as well as introducing potential ways of coping and healing. It also offers an expression of an
embodied voice towards a better understanding of the role of the body in both medical and somatic
practices and, thereby, offers a cultural critique of established notions.

The story of a healthy and ill body

A dancing child
Dancing is one of my first memories. I was three maybe four years old. We were at a family gathering
with my mum, dad, and my siblings. At one point, I invited my whole family and friends, to see my
improvised dance performance. I asked for the music to be put on. It was my favourite song, with the
rhythm I could not resist. My parents, siblings, aunties, uncles, cousins, and friends, created a circle
around me, curious and amused by what was about to happen. I was in the middle of the room.
I tuned into the music and I felt it with my whole being . . . I let it move me and I began dancing. My
dance did not know set steps or figures. I was not directing this dance. I was the dance. I was my
sensations, movements, feelings, and emotions. I was the movement. The movement was flowing
through me. I felt at one with myself, with the world around me and with the people who saw me,
giving me their full attention. I felt totally alive and flowing without time and space. I could sense the
awe in the air sent by those who loved me. I could truly sense that they enjoyed seeing this dance.
I could sense their smiles. I knew they truly saw me, for who I was, my full expression of life. It felt
incredible. I danced because I felt the need for it. I danced for joy. I danced because this was my
expression of self. I also danced for those loving people around me. I was part of a bigger whole.
6 W. GRANTHAM ET AL.

I could also feel a waterfall of sensations from within my body . . . my movements changed organically with the
music . . . I turned . . . I jumped . . . I opened . . . I closed . . . I twisted . . . I moved in all directions, exploring infinite
ways of moving as if I was being moved from within. I resolved to become a dancer.

Today, when coming back to this memory and experience, I can sum it up as follows:
‘I move, therefore I am. I am being truly seen, therefore I am. I am at one with my living body.’

This memory of dancing became my personal myth. A symbolic moment of feeling well, healthy,
whole, alive, and connected to other people. My moving body was a place connecting the physical,
the mental, the spiritual, and the social, encompassing them all, my whole being in the world.
In the moments of my spontaneous dance, I was not consciously reflecting upon my experience
of dancing but was fully immersed in it. I also experienced moments of oneness – a unity, the lack of
dualism between my body and mind. I felt as one, moving, flowing and expressing myself. That self-
movement was a moment of both perception and action, where I felt an underlying sense of ‘I can’
which Carel (2013, 181) connects to bodily certainty, and feelings of ‘possibility, openness, and
ability’ (Carel 2013).
I felt fully alive then, experiencing a moment of being in movement. The moments of my body
appearing to my consciousness were mostly connected to experiences like unrestricted dancing.
This can be seen as an example of ‘cultivated pleasures, admired skills, health, sport’ (Leder 1990,
150) – a positive presence of the body. For me, that moment was not only an experience of normality
and stability, as Carel (2013) discussed it when talking about bodily certainty. Through the sponta-
neous witnessed expression of my moving dancing self, it felt extraordinary and sacred, allowing me
to feel complete, whole and integrated. The feeling of life was enhanced.

School-based posture screening

Some years later that feeling of oneness – body-mind-soul-the world, as well as the feeling of
freedom in movement, of being able to experience myself as a moving, living body, slowly faded
from my experience. At the age of twelve, I participated in a scoliosis school screening programme.
I was then sent to an orthopaedist and was finally given a diagnosis of scoliosis. It was a very difficult
time in my life (Grantham, Jespersen, and Płaszewski 2019). Consequently, I gradually developed
a feeling of a split and a breakdown of continuity in my bodily sense of self. My attention was
brought to my spine. I was told I was not straight and have a potentially dangerous health condition.
I was not straight any longer. Not because I felt like that in the first place, as I have never had any pain, back
issues or functional problems; I have never noticed anything strange; but because I was told so on numerous
occasions by medical experts. I was very young so I did not have a choice but to believe them. Gradually, I lost
a sense of trust in my body and into my spine. I lost a sense of confidence, which was connected to my moving
body, felt powerless and helpless. I did not have any say surrounding my condition, my needs, my feelings, my
doubts, and my worries about my health. I was simply left with them all and had to deal with them on my own. It
touched my sense of self-esteem very deeply.

I was being shown my x-rays, in which I could clearly see the ‘S’ shape of my spine. There was tangible proof of
my spine not being straight even though I did not feel crooked at all! I loved my body as a child, I did not even
think about how it looked like, as it was my home from which I was able to express myself and experience the
world (see Figure 3).

Now, however, I was able to see this scoliosis with my own eyes. It became known to me, creating a problem in
my mind. My back became an object to me, as it was for the doctors. I now started to worry that my spine was
not as it should be. ‘Your left leg is shorter than your right one’ I was told by one of the doctors. ‘Am I disabled?
Am I going to become an anomaly?’ I thought in my young head. I never felt like that before. But now I felt I was
not like most other straight children. My back was looked at by numerous specialists, checking how big my
hump was. Before, I did not even know I had a hump. It felt dreadful to me to have a hump.

Being diagnosed with scoliosis, most possibly combined with the time in which it happened –
puberty – weakened the sense of experiencing my body as a whole. My body was objectified and the
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 7

Figure 3. At ten years old, before the diagnosis. I was really happy to climb this magnificent tree. It never crossed my mind this
tree was not straight enough.

appearance aspect became paramount. I experienced a sort of psychological alienation of my back,

my spine. The doctors had brought my attention to my ‘deformity’. As a result, I also started focusing
on the appearance of certain body parts, especially those I was able to see myself.
This was particularly magnified for me not only because I was a teenager (and during puberty the way
one looks really matters), but also by the culture around me at that time. It was the beginning of the 2000s.
I was fourteen years old. The media were bombarding me and my friends with images of perfect-looking
models and celebrities. We listened to Spice Girls or Britney Spears. We wanted to look and be like them.
What we saw on the screens and in the magazines, the whole visual culture, was calling us to imitate what
we saw, creating a sense of belonging. They were role-models for the way we viewed our bodies and
ourselves (Orbach 2016). At the same time, we were often comparing ourselves to our pop icons. Thus, just
like the image of a completely ‘straight’ spine had nothing to do with my real spine, it was similar here: my
friends and I were more than aware that we were less-than-perfect when compared to our idols.
In medicine, the aspect of comparing oneself to a visual or imagined ‘straight’ or ‘desired’ ideal is
a common practice, blurring the distinction between normality and perfection (Schües 2014). In our
culture, the visual aspects dictate how all bodies should look like and that they actually are
perfectible (Orbach 2016). This brings about the philosophical discussion about humans as always
somehow ‘deficient beings’ (Schües 2014). Thus, the feelings of deficiency and ‘lacking’ something,
give rise to improvement, enhancement, and perfectibility. It is very difficult to make the distinction
between what is ‘normal’ and going beyond that – what is ‘perfect’. This tendency can also be seen
within the fields of movement and exercise. The recent call that ‘Exercise is Medicine’ seems also to
8 W. GRANTHAM ET AL.

support this hyperactive orientation towards gaining ‘best health’ in terms of perfection and never-
attainable goals (Cairney, McGannon, and Atkinson 2018). However, perfectibility, ideals that can
never be reached, especially when applied to a bodily self, can give rise to feelings of inadequacy,
self-hatred, and unhappiness (Orbach 2016).

Indeed, the doctors were right. I was not perfectly symmetrical. I was not able to see my own back directly, so
I looked in the mirror and noticed that I could actually see that barely noticeable hump on the right side of my
back when I bent down. My ribs were also not identical when I drew my belly in: one was sticking out a little
more than the other. I had never noticed those imperfections before! It felt scary. I started having a relationship
with them. I did not want them there, I wanted to be healthy. And my impression was that a healthy body was
presented as perfect symmetry.

I experienced then what Carel calls bodily doubt, where ‘[t]he focus shifts from experiencing oneself
primarily as an intentional subject to experiencing oneself as a material object’ (2013, 190). As noted
by her, in times of lack of illness or a health disorder, our embodied life is characterised by tacit bodily
certainty, or as Drew Leder (1990) called it – our body is absent, and its abilities are often taken for
granted. When one feels well, one trusts one’s body, without usually reflecting on it. As Carel
suggests, when one is faced with a serious disease or illness (whether physical or mental), this
sense of certainty and continuity is broken down and one may experience bodily doubt: a sense of
distrust into one’s body, accompanied by feelings of helplessness, anxiety, uncertainty, and detach-
ment. Interestingly, as it turned out in the following years, as the 'deformity' did not progress,
I experienced a sense of bodily doubt not so much through the condition itself, but through the
diagnosis. I was told I had scoliosis and I started to ‘worry about aspects of (my) body that are
normally invisible’ (Carel 2013, 91). Over time, I internalised it, which resulted in a long-lasting sense
of bodily doubt and a negative approach towards my own body. My senses of bodily confidence,
familiarity, and continuity, were disturbed.
Remarkably, as Carel (2013) stated, with bodily doubt, there might be a turn from ordinary life and
the world towards focusing upon one’s own body. And this is what I experienced very strongly. My
attention started to be drawn to my body, in an objectifying way. At first, this focus was external and
negative, as I was trying to somehow influence the appearance of my body. I kept trying to correct
those parts of my body that were shown to me to be incorrect by the doctors. After all, they
recommended – as they called it – corrective exercises to me. I was now somehow seeking to
straighten my curved spine and its appearance, or at least to stop the potential progression of
scoliosis, not to develop a deformed trunk. However, as Ingerslev (2013) points out, there are
different ways for the self-objectification to be experienced, not all of them connected to pathology.
For me, with time, this focus had shifted to also experience the positive way of objectifying my body,
which occurred through conscious dance and somatic practices.

Back to the body itself: my healing

The beginning of healing and regaining some sense of bodily certainty was connected to my work
with a chiropractor. Not only was he able to treat me in a respectful, person-centred way (Grantham,
Jespersen, and Płaszewski 2019) but he also introduced some therapeutic exercises to me. I was able
to practice these exercises at home, in a slow manner, which allowed me to consciously feel my
breath and to focus on my inner sensations, developing bodily awareness. It was also the beginning
of the process of rediscovering my inner bodily experiences, feeling my body as a subject, and not
only focusing on the outer appearance of the body and its imperfections. That sort of work intuitively
felt rich, fruitful, and beneficial to my sense of bodily self. It also allowed me to enter into deeper
contact with my body in a positive way, experiencing moments of living through my body again. It
offered me a perspective and an experience of the body very different from the biomedical,
objectifying, diagnosis-focused approach.
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 9

Becoming a professional dancer

The way I viewed and experienced dance in my life evolved over the years. Firstly, dance was present
for me in indulging in spontaneous, expressive movement as a young child. During my school years,
I was part of a modern ‘show’ dance group for a couple of years.
I was nearly seventeen years old when I decided to leave home and live in a boarding school, in
a distant city of Cracow, in order to study ballet professionally. I did this because I really wanted to
become a professional dancer, and this was, as I thought then, a necessary step towards making my
dream come true. Paradoxically, however, while studying in a ballet school, I felt I was actually never
really dancing, as to me dance was connected to experiencing freedom in movement.
The ballet school I attended was a professional dance training institution, led by an ex-ballerina,
who trained and performed in USSR (Belarus) for many years and then moved to Poland to start her
own school. Her methods were based upon strong bodily discipline to gain greater control over the
body, and, as I experienced it, to learn to ignore signals originating from within it, such as constantly
present pain. This is confirmed by McEwen and Young (2011), who present professional ballet as
a risk-culture, where pain is so normalised, that it often leads to health problems. My own experience
was similar to this. Over the period of three years of intense training six times a week, ignoring my
body’s signals, most likely combined with dieting in order to keep a ballet figure, I developed several
health problems, including amenorrhoea and severe acne. I trained intensely and worked hard,
trying to ‘instil’ the discipline into my body (Owton and Allen-Collinson 2017) but felt I was not able
to express myself via the ballet technique. I was not able to experience the unity of my moving self
I remembered as a child. Similarly as in the medical approach to scoliosis that I had experienced, here
I also felt a negative objectification of my body, with the focus towards aesthetic perfection, where
the presence of mirrors and an ‘all-knowing’ pedagogue reminds one about constant striving
towards the unattainable and mythical ‘ideal body’ (Green 1999).
Eventually, I decided to quit ballet school and search further. Through ballet and other forms of
aesthetically-driven dance, I was not able to feel the expressive and healing force of dance and
movement. Moreover, my psychophysical health was actually getting worse. I was also not
a teenager anymore, I was gradually growing into a young adult, seeking also personal
development.
At the age of twenty, I decided to move to Belgium. I spent one year studying contemporary
dance and dance improvisation at the Higher Institute for Dance, Antwerp. It was also an intense
training programme that demanded a lot of work and control over my body. However, because of
a variety of subjects offered, I was also able to experience other ways of dancing there as well. For
instance, dance improvisation classes helped me to rediscover my natural ways of moving and to
allow my moving self to be expressed via spontaneous dance, which felt healthy and inspirational.
I started feeling moments of freedom again; of not having to fulfil somebody else’s ideas of
perfection, and as a result, experiencing moments of acceptance of the way that I was. It was also
there that I was introduced to the practice of yoga, which allowed me to nourish my body with
attention and care through conscious somatic practice that focused on the breath, as well as
respecting my inner bodily needs. I was getting to re-experience those rare moments of oneness
I so much desired.
The practice of yoga was interesting in itself. For me, it served as a gateway, or a stepping stone,
towards greater bodily awareness and honouring my bodily experiences and needs. Having the
safety of structure within specific yoga poses, I was able to focus on my breath and discover
a variety of rich bodily sensations that I was becoming more attuned to. Somewhat similar to
research participants described in Halsall, Werthner, and Forneris' (2016) article on focus in yoga,
I also experienced that through becoming aware of my breath and of my inner sensations in
particular yoga poses, often performed with my eyes closed to help me maintain that inner focus,
I was able to feel myself as a more embodied being and started to experience more moments of
well-being.
10 W. GRANTHAM ET AL.

I began noticing once more that my body speaks the non-verbal language of feeling,
sensation, and movement. I was intuitively seeking to re-educate myself about this forgotten
language of my body. Looking back now I know this was a turning point towards my healing. It
was a turn from active, outward movement, to a more passive, receptive, and reflexive inner
movement.

Becoming a Somatic Movement Educator

When I was twenty-one, I moved to the UK and completed a Bachelor programme in Dance and
Movement Studies and Healing Arts at the University of Derby. Thereafter, I also graduated with
a Master’s degree in Dance and Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the Living Body at the University
of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). There, as part of my research project, I began an embodied heuristic
self-inquiry (Sela-Smith 2002) study into my experience of scoliosis, focusing on the bodily dimen-
sion and working with increasing my awareness. The research question was literally inside of my
body and was calling from within.
For many years that inner question laid dormant. It was tacit, sleeping inside of my body. During
the years spent on seeking treatment, then becoming intensely engaged in some active forms of
dance training, I did not have time and space to notice my question. It was through dance
improvisation and yoga that I started to make and feel that space for reflection and sensing,
discovering what was really inside of me. I now knew that I longed to explore this profound healing
potential found in giving my body time and space to be and to express itself, which was the main
focus of my studies in England. There, the conditions of time, space, bodily receptivity, and expres-
sion were cultivated. Moreover, I discovered qualitative research methods. And so, my research
question eventually emerged to my consciousness naturally.
The embodied self-search process, personally very rich and deep, allowed for collecting what
Morse called soft data (2018) that are subjective and experiential, often unique to a person and
context, such as experiences, stories, values, beliefs or perceptions. This process was non-linear and
exploratory. I started gathering my insights in the form of a personal journal during the research
project at UCLAN. They encompassed self-reflections, memos, poetry, dreams, images created during
somatic work, free writing, as well as references to the relevant literature. Eventually, these were
presented as my Master’s degree research project report.
After graduating I became a Somatic Movement Educator. The term ‘soma’ in the word ‘somatic’ is
used here after being firstly referred to by Thomas Hanna. He wanted to distinguish it from the term
‘body’, which is often perceived from the outside and is seen as an object. A ‘body’ refers to the third-
person point of view. However, ‘when this same human being is observed from the first-person
viewpoint of his own proprioceptive senses, a categorically different phenomenon is perceived: the
human soma’ (Hanna 1986, 4). Thus, ‘somatic practices’ or ‘somatics’ is a field of various types of
educational and/or therapeutic practices that work from and with the living body. They assist in
developing bodily awareness and focusing on allowing the body to express itself, communicate,
move with more ease or coordination, or to come back to wellness after a period of stress or trauma
(Williamson 2009). There are different branches of somatic work, such as somatic psychology,
somatic bodywork, and somatic movement (Eddy 2009). To specify what practices I was engaging
with, I refer to the latter form, specifically Somatic Movement Dance Education in which the elements
of movement and dance are vital.
Education in this context is based upon the philosophical perspective of ‘internalization of
authority, self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-education’ (Williamson 2009, 30), pointing first
towards finding one’s own embodied inner empowerment, and then to also assist others to be
actively involved in creating their own embodied lives, as well as to be ‘co-actively engaged with our
world’ (Williamson 2009). Somatic movement practices, often used in a community setting, have the
aim of ‘helping people move into life again after a period of stress, fatigue, world-weariness, and
disillusionment’ (Williamson 2009).
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 11

Those practices allowed me to experience healing on many levels, which is challenging to

describe, explain or reduce to some single elements. However, for the purpose of this study,
I would like to now present two aspects of that healing process. One of them was experiencing
my body as a soma, sensing and consciously reflecting upon my bodily processes, which was related
to gaining somatic self-awareness. The other was connected to spontaneous bodily expression via
dance and movement, which can be linked to experiencing self-movement and through that, feeling
those important moments of oneness: body, mind, and soul, as well as seeking and experiencing
connections with others and the world. I will discuss those two aspects below.

Somatic self-awareness
Somatic Movement Education is based on a premise of ‘”listening to the body” and responding to
these sensations by consciously altering movement habits and movement choices’ (Eddy 2009, 7).
During my scoliosis-related and self-directed somatic work, I discovered that the left and right sides
of my back are experienced by me as different from each other (see Figure 4). They had different
qualities and different habitual movements. I noted in my personal journal:

I am kneeling. My head feels like scales. Its weight tipping to the right, to the left, I am exploring different
sensations that this movement brings.

I feel an impulse for sneak-like movements in my spine. The left side of my back likes it. The right one less so . . . it
doesn’t yield . . . it’s more tense . . . I decide to try a bit more with the right side. It feels like it is trying a bit more
also . . .

Figure 4. One of my drawings created as part of my self-directed somatic practice related to experiencing scoliosis.
12 W. GRANTHAM ET AL.

I move standing up now. A lot of twisting and spiralling. I discover I feel that my body is slightly twisted to the
left. I can naturally twist much more to the left, the range of movement is bigger. Twisting to the right feels
harder, there is more tension and a much smaller range of movement . . . less flow . . . I can’t twist as much on this
side. There is some RESISTANCE. But I want to give it a go. I twist gently . . . wave-like movements bring me a bit
more ease and freedom to the right side of my back.

Thus, somatic movement practices have taught me to tune into my bodily experiences connected to
scoliosis, allowing me to learn more about it. Through self-directed Somatic Movement Education,
I was first able to become more aware of my bodily experience of scoliosis, by intentionally paying
attention to the inner sensations within my living body. Then, I was able to notice how this self-
awareness influences my bodily experience, which allowed me to make conscious choices related to
movement and my bodily habits.
I was able to experience my ‘body as organ of perception’ (Behnke and Ciocan 2012, 11) as
I sensed into and touched my soma, as well as sensed and touched others’ somas. At the same time,
I was a touching and sensing subject, but I was now also objectifying my body in a more positive,
beneficial way. As Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk remind us, ‘[t]he senses emerge through a process
of objectification of one’s sensation. In short, somatic experience is mediated by reflexivity – at both
symbolic and alinguistic levels’ (2013, 19). Thus, I was using my felt-sense, rather than just purely
focusing on the visual appearance of the body. Via increased bodily awareness, I was able to
distinguish between different levels of muscular tension in different parts of my body. This allowed
me to decide for myself whether I needed rest, or whether I needed active movement. I was now
finding my own ways of releasing some of this unnecessary tension, finding more ease, and feeling
better as a result. I was actively responding to my body’s needs. I knew how to take care of my body
a bit better.
This important aspect of bodily self-care is clearly explicated in Shusterman’s somaesthetics
(2008), where he calls for more sensitive reflection upon the body. Somatic practices encourage
one to attend to the living body precisely also in the times of ease and quiet joy, whether during
formal practice, or in every-day life, such as conscious walking, eating, stretching, enjoying
a beautiful sunset, or feeling the movements and inner processes of the body. In this way, a new
way of bringing attention to one’s body can be awoken – a more positive, potentially therapeutic,
more balanced relationship to his or her body. Somatic Movement Education is also based on the
philosophical assumption that ‘we have the capacity and personal agency to direct and/or redirect
our lives through gentle self-reflexive processes; becoming active agents in our experience, sensually
alive, and co-actively engaged with the world’ (Williamson 2009, 30), thus being able to actively
participate and direct our own healing processes.

Self-movement
Self-movement is when one’s own body is moving. Merleau-Ponty (2001, 70) questions a taken-for-
granted viewpoint of progressive movement from one place to another by referring to ‘inner
movement’ and a kind of moving in place. My body does not move as things do, but moves only
in itself: ‘it being here and it being there are not two objective positions: the two positions are
internal to it’ (Merleau-Ponty 2001). Thus, no matter how we move, we never approach nor move
away from ourselves. Hence, for the mover, all movement is nothing else than self-movement, which
I was able to experience through somatic practices of spontaneous movement and improvised
dance. I was not concerned with how I was moving or where I was moving, but I was self-moving
with my body always in the centre of my movement.
Through dance and somatic practices I once again felt moments of being in movement – I was
able to actually experience self-movement, feeling my body as a ‘central here’ and a place from
which I can direct ‘my own movement in unparalleled immediacy’ (Behnke and Ciocan 2012, 11),
experiencing moments of wholeness, and fully expressing my living body, which felt somewhat
similar to when I was a dancing child. I could really allow myself to fully enjoy dancing and moving
spontaneously. My movements were flowing through my body, which helped to take my focus away
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 13

from the appearance of those movements. In those moments, I was focusing on how it felt to move
freely, bringing a sense of trust back. It felt healing. It felt cathartic.
Moreover, since feeling a sense of alienation of my back following my diagnosis, feeling those
moments of wholeness again was vital in my healing process. Bodily doubt can often bring one
a sense of loss of spontaneity in everyday life (Carel 2013). Through the fluid and improvised nature
of movement, the moments of spontaneity can be experienced over and over again. When I dance
spontaneously and improvise, I experience wholeness, the separation of the mind and body ceases
to exist, and the only existing time frame is what Sheets-Johnstone (2009, 30) called ‘an ongoing
present’ where I feel ‘the moving flow of its creation’. I experience moments of freedom and
possibilities, regardless of my bodily ability or dis-ability.

Becoming a researcher
After completing my Master’s thesis, I had a period of rest from formal research. I focused on life
itself. However, even when not actively engaging with formal writing, the research questions have
been alive for me constantly, as I was engaging with them in both reflexive and intuitive ways, which
allowed for the formation of more layers of understanding and a desire to know more.
A few years later, I started working as a lecturer-researcher at a physical education university and
the scoliosis research naturally came back to the fore of my interests. I was mentored into the world
of qualitative research methods and discovered autoethnography.
Thus, I dived right back into my personal exploration of scoliosis. I started with the technique of
free writing. I allowed myself to write without judgement, including significant moments, both the
beautiful ones and the tough ones, recollections, memories, emotions, feelings, and life events. This
in itself, was a very healing process for me. In a sense, I felt I had to become a researcher, not only to
express what I went through but also to share it with others, those touched by scoliosis as well as
medical and other practitioners. Writing about one’s experience of illness is seen as potentially
therapeutic for both the author and the readers (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011). As reminded by
Frank (2000), those who share their stories of illness long to be heard and responded to.
Alongside this personal work, I was researching the literature (autoethnography methodology,
scoliosis research, somatic movement practices). This process included numerous re-writings, re-
readings, clarifying, relating to the existing literature, refining: a process of self-reflection and
analysis.
As to the analysis of the data, rather than systematically analyse my experience and related
literature using a specific method, which is often a feature of more analytical forms of autoethno-
graphy (McMahon 2019), as suggested by Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011), the personal text is being
compared to, contrasted, and actively dialogued with the existing literature. This is mainly an
evocative autoethnographic account, a form of creative analytical practice, and in this form of
research, the theoretical analysis of the text is ‘resisted’ (McMahon 2019, 307). I follow Frank’s
understanding that ‘[h]owever valuable analysis can be, analysts risk misunderstanding if they
move too quickly outside the storytelling relation as they transform the story into a “text” for
analysis’ (2000, 355). Writing in itself is a ‘way of “knowing” – a method of discovery and analysis.
By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and
content are inseparable’ (Richardson 1994, 516).
As suggested by Duncan (2004), for autoethnography to be scholarly, it should not only be based
on the author’s opinions but also on other evidence to support those opinions. Hence, the way to
triangulate my research was to engage in sound self-reflection of my retrospective accounts (Duncan
(2004)) and to include references and active dialogue with related literature from different fields.
Moreover, as suggested by Burke (2019), to aid this qualitative account’s validity and transparency,
the co-authors served also as critical friends, examined the first author’s interpretations and explora-
tions, offering alternative reflections and explanations.
14 W. GRANTHAM ET AL.

My healing process revisited

All these stages in my life on one side appear, at the most superficial level, as my career and
development choices. And they were, especially when looking from a biographical, chronological
time perspective. However, in all of those life choices, I was led by my intuition, my ‘I-Who-Feels’
(Sela-Smith 2002), which led me towards conscious spontaneous dance, movement, and bodywork,
as means for personal healing and regaining my sense of embodied subjectivity.
What stands out the most for me is how crucial in this process was simply the time and space
given to being and experiencing my living body. Through engaging in practices encouraging ‘non-
doing’ (not as a passivistic way of being but rather as allowing myself to be receptive, reflexive, and
reflective), I was developing self-awareness and experiencing self-acceptance. This ‘non-doing’ in
itself was a powerful healing tool and something that is often forgotten when discussing a potential
therapeutic value of exercise and movement.
Coming back to my main questions, I have experienced bodily doubt as a result of a medical
diagnosis, which truly impacted my life. I experienced a negative objectification of my body, leading to
feelings of alienation, and focusing only on the appearance of my body and its imperfections. These
resulted in a loss of trust into my body. Through somatic practices (including dance, yoga, somatic
movement, and the everyday moments of being aware of my inner bodily states), unlike other forms of
aesthetically driven dance, such as ballet for instance and as the ‘corrective’, or ‘scoliosis-specific’
exercises, (Bettany-Saltikov et al. 2014), I was able to re-find a sense of balance. I started to feel my inner
somatic life, including movements and sensations of my living body. I experienced being a moving
subject. This allowed me to respect and express my feelings and emotions, actually coming to accept
my imperfection(s). I learnt to trust more the ever-changing, transformative nature of the bodily self.
Additionally, my bodily awareness increased and that turned out as a crucial part of being able to take
care of my body and staying well which for me means feeling well, regardless of how I look.
Not a disease, but a diagnosis-illness, caused me to objectify my own body in a pathological way.
I experienced a critical medical gaze that was almost dissecting my experience of a whole body into
parts and pieces that potentially did not fit very well together. Strikingly, the experience in a ballet
school was in some way similar: I was being watched (and I also watched my own body in a mirror),
also checking for faults and imperfections during ballet exercises and poses. After some time, I was
starting to internalise this critical gaze and was losing both a sense of trust into my own bodily-self,
as well as a sense of life’s continuity.
However, when I experienced my moving body in the presence of another person who simply
witnessed my moving self, without judging, classifying, analysing, or interpreting, I felt being truly
seen and accepted, and that was healing and transformational for me. It was similar to my experience
of a dancing child being fully seen by her family. I experienced a loving gaze.
Hence, my healing process included three aspects. One of them was learning to experience my
body as a soma: a living subject and as an object of positive conscious awareness, through the
processes of bodily self-reflection. This was connected to practices of mindful body listening, sensing
deeply into the body, and responding to changes evoked by this somatic self-awareness, through
conscious movement and rest, learning to self-care. The second aspect was re-gaining moments of
wholeness, associated with health, as well as experiencing spontaneous and expressive nature of
pre-reflective self-movement, which allowed me to feel more at home in my own body, trust it again
and with it – trust the flow of life, experiencing a potential of an accepting loving gaze of others.
The third aspect of finding healing was also writing this autoethnography and so I am sharing my
story, in this moment in time, in a form that is real for me today, releasing it for the readers – those
touched by scoliosis, their relatives, therapists, researchers, policy makers, and others interested – to
find something in it that will resonate and respond within them.
I am thirty-three years old now. I came full circle, although as a different person. I am a dancer.
I realised I never had to become a dancer. I always was a dancer, dancing the songs of my embodied
self every time I decided to move. The conscious dance and somatic practices allow me to connect to
 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 15

my inner bodily experience, giving me a way to rest and receive, reminding me that I not only have
a body that looks a certain way but more importantly, I am a body also, full of feelings and
sensations, full of life. And that, again and again, helps me to feel well, whole, alive and connected
to others and to the world, similar to when I was a dancing child.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my both co-authors for their support, knowledge, and encouragement. Professor Ejgil Jespersen gave his
expertise in the fields of methodology, philosophical perspectives of the body, and the formation of the research question.
Professor Maciej Płaszewski contributed with his evidence-based and person-centred understanding knowledge about the
condition of AIS. Furthermore, both co-authors participated in revisions of the article. As a first author of this article,
I composed the manuscript text, contributing with my personal story, including experiences connected to scoliosis and to
movement practices, as well as their analysis. I also conducted a literature review. Finally, I wish to thank my UCLAN lecturer,
Tim Lamford, who always believed in me and to my husband, Rob Grantham, for all his love and support.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Weronika Grantham (MA) is a lecturer and researcher, working at the Department of Sport for All in Biała Podlaska, Józef
Piłsudski University of Physical Education, Warsaw, Poland. She is also a Somatic Movement Educator, registered with
the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), after completing an MA course in
Dance and Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the Living body, at the University of Central Lancashire, England.
Additionally, she is a yoga teacher and a creative movement artist, working with people of all ages and abilities,
using conscious movement practices to assist them in re-discovering the awareness of the living moving body. Her
practice guides her research interests in the living body and phenomenology.
Ejgil Jespersen is an educated psychologist (cand. psych.) from the University of Aarhus, Denmark and is currently
a professor at the Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education in Warsaw, working at the Department of
Rehabilitation in Biała Podlaska. He is also: a former docent at the University College Absalon, Denmark; former
professor (associate) and head of the Centre for Adapted Physical Activity Participation Studies, University of
Southern Denmark; former professor (associate) and head of the Department of Physical Education, Norwegian
School of Sport Sciences; former lecturer in sport studies at the University of Copenhagen and at the University of
Aarhus; former lecturer at the Jutland College of Education, Aarhus; former head of research at the Gerlev Sport
Academy.
Maciej Płaszewski, MEd, PT, PhD is a university professor at the Department of Rehabilitation in Biała Podlaska, Józef
Piłsudski University of Physical Education, Warsaw, Poland. He has a background is physiotherapy and physical
education, and he also completed an international course of occupational therapy. Apart from academic activity, he
is also engaged in management in the health care sector. His research interests are primarily focused on Evidence-Based
Practice, secondary research and research synthesis methods. He has been engaged in research synthesis studies
addressing management and recommendations for school screening and treatment interventions for people with
idiopathic scoliosis, as well as other, especially physiotherapeutic, interventions within his interests, including physical
modalities and pulmonary physiotherapy.

ORCID
Weronika Grantham http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7018-3023
Ejgil Jespersen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4512-4886
Maciej Płaszewski http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9874-5964

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