Amiri-Savitzky, Tamar
Meaningfulness in the making: A phenomenological and sensory study of embodied and gendered meanings experienced during creative leisure occupations, in midlife
Midlife is a dynamic period, prone to challenging life transitions that impact roles, identity, and wellbeing, and often accompanied by a lack of meaningfulness. Everyday creative occupations of arts and crafts are undervalued as pathways for meaning yet offer unique opportunities to explore everyday gendered and embodied roles, routines, and interactions. This paper presents a phenomenological study of lived experiences of meaningfulness during arts and crafts, asking: how do creative leisure occupations provide space for meaningfulness to emerge, in midlife?
Combining a sensory ethnography approach, visual methods, and interpretative phenomenological analysis, this study employs a creative, reflexive and embodied stance to investigate arts and crafts activities of midlife women. Meaningful creative occupations such as knitting, upholstery, painting and sculpture are studied through prisms of sensory-rich embodied cognitions, person-environment-occupation transactions, and midlife role transitions. The triangulation of data through multiple qualitative methods enables intriguing intersections of pre-reflexive, visual, and verbal expressions of meaningfulness. This enables fresh exploration of interconnections that lie between the sensory and material aspects of occupation, emotions of meaningfulness, and the way that women in midlife negotiate life transitions on both personal and relational planes.
First empirical findings are presented through interview extracts, photo-elicitation vignettes, and sensory ethnography diaries. Shining light on both process and product, meaningfulness in the lives of women in midlife is shown to emerge through slow making of tangible artefacts, self-taught skilled interactions with materials and tools, and emplacement of occupation in domestic and community spaces.
Tamar Amiri is a PhD candidate at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands. An occupational therapist with a background in industrial design, her research centers on the intersections of meaningfulness, creative leisure occupations, and aging.
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