About David B. Glover, PhD
I am a scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of movement-based learning, ecological approaches to perception, cross-cultural transmission, and qualitative research. Across both academic study and long-term embodied training, I have pursued a continuous question: how do humans move, learn, adapt, and intentionally transform through sustained engagement within dynamic environments?
Trajectory
My research draws on a trajectory that integrates technical, analytical, and embodied ways of knowing. I trained as a computer scientist at the U.S. Naval Academy, served as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy, completed graduate study in exercise physiology and engineering management, and spent more than a decade in systems integration, competitive intelligence, and financial analysis before transitioning to endurance sports coaching and, most recently, graduate-level teaching. Alongside that work, I trained and competed as an IRONMAN® triathlete and marathon runner, became a cancer survivor at age 23, and began a sustained practice in Japanese martial arts that continues today.
Over time, my focus shifted from performance outcomes to the deeper processes by which sustained practice shapes perception, attention, judgment, and self-regulation — particularly when practices move across cultural contexts and must be interpreted, translated, and integrated through the body.
Doctoral Research
My doctoral research in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies examined ninpo taijutsu — the body movements and techniques of the Japanese martial arts systems of ninjutsu — as a technology of the self. The dissertation investigated becoming-imperceptible, an advanced practitioner skill of blending into one’s environment both physically and relationally, as a site for theorizing perceptual refinement, adaptive expertise, and intentional self-transformation. My work work integrated Asian philosophy, ecological approaches to learning, phenomenology, poststructural cultural theory, somatics, and practice-as-research.
Dissertation: Becoming Imperceptible: A Phenomenological Autoethnographic Exploration of Ninpo Taijutsu as a Technology of the Self (2025).
Committee: Debashish Banerji (Chair, CIIS), Jun Wang (CIIS), Paul Bowman (Cardiff University).
Defense recording: link.
Current Practitioner Work
I am a long-term student and collaborative research partner at Shinobi Martial Arts, where continued ninpo taijutsu practice with senior instructors Dennis Mahoney and Theresa Murphy serves as a living site of inquiry into movement-based learning, ecological attunement, and the cross-cultural transmission of practice. This engagement informs both my conceptual work and my qualitative research, grounding theoretical claims in lived practice.
Positionality
I am a white, non-Japanese American practicing a Japanese martial tradition that is itself a minority practice in contemporary Japan. The questions this raises — about cultural transmission, etic and emic positioning, and the politics of cross-cultural embodied practice — are not peripheral to my scholarship; they are part of its content. My published work addresses these tensions explicitly, drawing on Paul Bowman’s (2017, 2021) historiography of martial arts, Ben Spatz’s (2017) account of practice as research and technique as knowledge, and the cross-cultural transmission literature in performance and somatic studies.
Credentials
- PhD, East-West Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies, 2025
- MS, Exercise Physiology, Eastern Michigan University, 2011
- MSE, Engineering Management, Catholic University of America, 1998
- BS (with distinction), Computer Science, United States Naval Academy, 1993
Scholarly Profile
