UCLA

In this thesis, I suggest that through learning wheelchair basketball, players undergo bodily “enskillment” characterized in terms of both the degree of body-chair unification and processes of corporeally mediated intersubjective attunement. Exploring the case of one player recovering from spinal cord injury whom I call Richard, I describe how bodily enskillment can work in accordance with physical therapy to influence individual existential self-transformations. I suggest that Richard’s experience of recovering from spinal cord injury is constituted by the relationship between the regeneration of bodily capacities and existential transformations in self-experience discerned through somatic modes of attention to the body over time. Through this case study, I argue that social practices of bodily enskillment on the court generate the conditions for both bodily transformation and changes in the contours of self-perception and self-understanding.