The experience of being famous was investigated through interviews with 15 well-known American celebrities. The interviews detail the existential parameters of being famous in contemporary culture. Research participants were celebrities in various societal categories: government, law, business, publishing, sports, music, film, television news and entertainment. Phenomenological analysis was used to examine textural and structural relationship-to-world themes of fame and celebrity. The study found that in relation to self, being famous leads to loss of privacy, entitization, demanding expectations, gratification of ego (...) needs, and symbolic immortality. In relation to other, or world, being famous leads to wealth, access, temptations, and concerns about family impact. Areas of psychological concern for celebrity mental health include character-splitting, mistrust, isolation, and an unwillingness to give up fame. Being-in-the-world of celebrity is a process involving four temporal phases: love/hate, addiction, acceptance, and adaptation. Findings are presented in the form of a Composite Textural Description and two Individual Structural Descriptions. (shrink)

The teacher-student relationship has long been of primary concern to educators and the focus of much educational research. While various theoretical understandings of this relationship exist, ontological understandings of the lived experiences of this relationship are not so prevalent, and there is thus a call for phenomenological studies aimed at uncovering the essential and ontological meanings of this taken for granted phenomenon. This paper reports on such a project and, in particular, some of the challenges encountered in the process of (...) phenomenologically researching the relationship which arises in the context of teacher education between the lecturer and the student teacher. The challenges of phenomenological research are both numerous and complex. These challenges relate to the intensity of the lived experience of the research itself, the meditative attunement of the researcher to the focal phenomenon, and the process of walking in a research process that is mindful of one's own historicity (Gadamer, 1960/1995). While the primary focus of this paper is on the challenges of researching the lecturer-student teacher relationship in a phenomenological way, it nevertheless reflects the unique capacity of a phenomenological approach to respect the centrality and humanity of relationship and to open understanding that affirms this. (shrink)

This article examines the retrospective accounts of drunken behaviour by groups of students who drink together regularly. The literature on `collective remembering' has demonstrated how shared memories are constructed discursively, and this is likely to be even more true of memories for events when participants were drunk. Close reading of the extracts from one particular interview reveals the way participants construct `drunken identities' for one another, and suggests how they may embroider narrative recollections through subsequent information becoming available to supplement (...) their sketchy individual recall. The implications of these processes are discussed with reference to legal contexts and theories of self and identity. (shrink)