Banca de DEFESA: BRUNO ERICK DE MELO FERNANDES

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : BRUNO ERICK DE MELO FERNANDES
DATE: 17/12/2025
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Departamento de Educação Física - Sala 06
TITLE:

The phenomenology of the body in Brazilian Physical Education

KEY WORDS:

Phenomenology; Body; Physical Education; Epistemology.

PAGES: 93
BIG AREA: Ciências da Saúde
AREA: Educação Física
SUMMARY:

This dissertation examines the production of knowledge concerning the body through a
phenomenological lens, analyzing works presented in the Thematic Working Group on
Body and Culture (GTTCC) of the Brazilian Congress of Sport Sciences (Conbrace)
between 2015 and 2023. It operates on the premise that the body transcends biological
and instrumental dimensions, constituting itself as an experiential, culturally and
symbolically situated reality. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology provides a fundamental
theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the body as a subject of
experience. The research, anchored in the phenomenological method, mapped and
analyzed the selected works through description, reduction, interpretation, and
comprehension, delineating three units of meaning body, expression, and culture
aesthetically articulated through Newton Navarro's artwork Vento Nordeste, which
functioned as a phenomenological device. The first chapter establishes the
epistemological foundation of the investigation, engaging in dialogue with Bachelard,
Popper, Merleau-Ponty, and Morin. It critiques Cartesian rationalism and scientific
determinism, proposing a non-Cartesian epistemology that values imagination,
subjectivity, and sensory experience as constitutive dimensions of knowledge.
Bachelard provides the basis for a science open to the sensible and the poetic, while
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the lived body as a medium for accessing the world, thereby
substantiating the advocacy for a "new educational spirit" in Physical Education that
integrates reason and sensibility. The second chapter presents a phenomenological
cartography of the examined production. The unit on the body addresses experiences
such as pilgrimages, yoga, and artistic expressions, revealing the body as a field of
meaning, memory, and subjectivity. The unit on expression focuses on manifestations
such as dance, circus, and capoeira, understanding gesture as language and the
production of pre-verbal meaning. The unit on culture examines corporeality in contexts
such as quilombo traditions and martial practices, highlighting it as a locus of memory,
identity, and belonging. The analysis identifies a predominance of researchers from the
Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), a national distribution of the
production, and a recurrent vocabulary centered on terms such as lived body,
intercorporeality, and being-in-the-world, alongside a methodological combination of
phenomenology with ethnography, art, and discourse analysis. The concluding
considerations reaffirm the potency of phenomenology to reimagine Physical Education
as a sensitive, ethical, and political field. By valuing lived experience and the diversity
of knowledge, this approach overcomes reductionist perspectives, repositioning the
body as the origin of meaning and relation to the world. The proposed reinvention
entails re-signifying traditional practices through a logic that integrates rigor and
imagination, technique and poetics, concluding with the urgency of a Physical
Education committed to listening to differences and to epistemic justice, in which the
lived body remains an inexhaustible source of knowledge and transformation.

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1672476 - ROSIE MARIE NASCIMENTO DE MEDEIROS
Interna - 1551552 - MARIA ISABEL BRANDAO DE SOUZA MENDES
Externa ao Programa - 1049922 - TEREZINHA PETRUCIA DA NOBREGA - UFRNExterno à Instituição - RAIMUNDO NONATO ASSUNCAO VIANA - UFMA
Externa à Instituição - SORAIA CHUNG SAURA - USP