Bodily Connection Research Articles

Haptic poetics and community (re)building in Swinburne’s The Flogging Block

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Swinburne’s unpublished manuscript The Flogging Block and its 2011 transcription produced by Mark McDougal. Caricaturing the corporeal punishment at Eton, Swinburne’s poem integrates touch, sound, and sight in the text. However, the transcription seems to compromise this multimodality in a print medium. McDougal hopes that his inadequate rendering of Swinburne’s hands could be completed by future interested readers with higher technologies. My article is an interested response to this hope and reads McDougal’s adaptation as a haptic mediation of Swinburne’s multimodal poetics. Through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s disorientation theory, I argue that Swinburne’s poem disorients readers’ sensory experience of language, critiques his contemporary ideological repression of body, and rebuilds a community based on bodily connections. The first part of the article conducts a reversed reading that first examines McDougal’s haptic mediation of Swinburne’s manuscript and then explores Swinburne’s techniques of sensory disorientation. The second part relates this sensory disorientation to Swinburne’s republican project of building a community through appropriating pornographic techniques and through stressing the role of rhyme. Both McDougal’s adaptation and Swinburne’s manuscript endeavour to recover our lost intimacy with language, with one another, and with the world.

An interpretative phenomenological analysis of daily meditation and its impact on one’s sense of self

The present study investigated the impact of daily meditation on sense of self. There is extensive research regarding the physical and mental health benefits that meditation can bring about, yet literature is still limited on the influence this has on an individual’s sense of self. The aims of the current study were to contribute to the existing body of research on meditation and the self and to gain a better understanding of the link between meditation and the self. Furthermore, to look at the potential social health benefits that meditation induces. This was achieved using a qualitative methodological approach applying Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), with an epistemological stance of interpretivism and an ontological position of social constructionism. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted in collecting qualitative data. Three super-ordinate themes emerged which were: 1. Inside Out Positivity, 2. “Quieting the Mind to Hear the Heart”, 3. The Holistic Experience, with eight corresponding sub-ordinate themes. The key findings were that meditation increased feelings of kindness and compassion and improved the quality of relationships for the participants. Participants felt more positive and calmer in their daily living and reported higher levels of awareness. Another key finding was that participants had a better perception of themselves and felt like meditation gave them more perspective of mind. Additionally, participants noted physical changes with greater bodily connection to breathing and had more mental clarity. Finally, participants reported enhanced feelings of spirituality and spoke of power and consciousness beyond themselves. The implications of these findings are that meditation can be a useful intervention for social health issues such as poor relationship quality or feelings of social exclusion by increasing compassion and awareness. Meditation is a useful tool for reducing stress and feeling present. Meditation would also be a beneficial method for positive self-perception and identity.

A mineral listening: digital soundscapes of geological time

Composed between 2020 and 2022 by Guillaume Malaret, Érodé is a musical piece created from field recordings at Eagles Nest, a tidal island in Australia’s Bunurong National Marine Park. Based on an interview with Guillaume Malaret, this article addresses several issues concerning digital representations, renderings, and ecologies of geological, hydrological, and sonic spaces, as well as the cultural geographies of landscape, embodiment, and affect. We explore the potentials of sonic composition and geophonic recordings for mediating bodily connections with difficult-to-imagine processes, such as environmental change over deep time. Our dialogue throughout this article contributes to emerging themes in digital ecological research by focusing on the materialities of digitization, digitally mediated creative practices in sonic geography, and the importance of different affective registers for comprehending environmental transformation.

Social aesthetics and an unreliable narrator: engaging with homelessness in Cities of Sleep

ABSTRACT How can documentary film overcome ‘engagement at a distance' to perceptively express urban experience? In this article, I examine modes of sensory mode of spectatorial engagement in Cities of Sleep (Dir: Shaunak Sen, 2015) to foreground the place of the body and lived experience in portraying homelessness in Delhi. Drawing upon the concept of social aesthetics that recognises the perception of culturally patterned responses produced in socio-cultural environments as a form of knowledge about the world, I make two arguments. A corporeal focus on the sensuous body conveys urbanisms translated into effect, sensation, and behaviour that invite bodily connections with the documentary's traditional outsiders and victims. Next, by revealing individual negotiations with subjectivity, the film dismantles the notion of unified on-screen subjectivities to challenge audience expectations of a stable self in documentary representation. Instead, subjectivities are shown to respond to social experience, and everyday encounters, revealing a terrain of power relations experienced corporeally and emotionally. Political meaning, therefore, I contend derives not so much from the verifiable value of evidence or documentary transparency but from the act of feeling, sensing and perceiving which attempts to collapse our distance from a represented subject and world ‘out there’.

Shortsighted sales or long-lasting loyalty? The impact of salesperson-customer proximity on consumer responses and the beauty of bodily boundaries

PurposePrevious research on salesperson-customer proximity has yielded mixed results, with some studies documenting positive proximity effects on shopping responses and others demonstrating the reverse. To reconcile such mixed findings, this paper aims to test whether and how salesperson proximity influences a series of key customer outcomes in actual retail settings using sample sizes that are considerably larger than most former investigations.Design/methodology/approachWe conducted two high-powered field studies (N = 1,312) to test whether salesperson‐customer proximity influences consumers’ purchase behavior and store loyalty. Moreover, we investigated whether the short-term effects on purchase behavior were moderated by the extent to which the consumption context had a clear connection to consumers’ own bodies.FindingsSalesperson proximity increased purchase incidence and spending in consumption contexts with a bodily basis (e.g. clothes, beauty, health), suggesting that consumers “buy their way out” in these contexts when a salesperson is violating their personal space. If anything, such proximity had a negative impact on consumers’ purchase behavior in contexts that lacked a clear bodily connection (e.g. building materials, furniture, books). Moreover, the link between proximity and consumer responses was mediated by discomfort, such that a salesperson standing close-by (vs farther away) increased discomfort, with negative downstream effects on shopping responses. Importantly, the authors found opposite proximity effects on short-term metrics (purchase incidence and spending) and long-term outcomes (store loyalty).Research limitations/implicationsDrawing on the nonverbal communication literature and theories on processing fluency, the current work introduces a theoretically relevant boundary condition for the effects of salesperson-customer proximity on consumers’ purchase behavior. Specifically, the bodily basis of the consumption context is discussed as a novel moderator, which may help to explain the mixed findings in this stream of research.Practical implicationsSalesperson-customer proximity may serve as a strategic sales tactic to improve short-term revenue in settings that are closely tied to consumers’ own bodies and characterized by one-time purchases. However, as salesperson proximity was found to be associated with lower store loyalty, irrespective of whether the shopping setting had a bodily basis, the risk of violating consumers’ personal space may have costly consequences from a long-term perspective.Originality/valueThe present field studies make three central contributions. First, we introduce a novel moderator for proximity effects in various sales and service settings. Second, we test the focal hypotheses with much higher statistical power than most existing proximity studies. Finally, we document that salesperson-customer proximity ironically yields opposite results on short-term metrics and long-term outcomes, thus underscoring the importance of not solely focusing on sales effectiveness when training frontline employees.

The Buddha’s Busted Finger: Craft, Touch, and Cosmology in Theravada Buddhism

AbstractThis article is about the bodily connection between Theravada Buddhist craftspeople, monks, and laypeople to the objects they create and touch. Textual and contemporary accounts of Buddhist material production emphasize the importance of physical touch in the formal aspects, embodied efficacy, and social salience of Buddhist objects, including Buddha images, brick stupas, and shrines. Here, I explore how the hands of skilled and unskilled Buddhist craftspeople manipulate, form, and connect divine, material, and social expressions of Theravada Buddhism. The handiwork of Buddhists gestures towards the ethical possibilities and cosmological significance of religious crafting, installation, and construction. Drawing on a variety of Theravada Buddhist sources, this article introduces “religious building” as a usable analytic category that can reveal why religion itself is often organized around, and generated through, acts of material and spatial production.

Family caring for the elderly during the pandemic in Hong Kong: perspective from Confucian familism

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to argue for the values of familial caring and relationships in addition to the provision of social media technology during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong.Design/methodology/approachThe discussion of this paper has adopted an inter-disciplinary approach by integrating health care system and psychological analysis, based on cultural philosophical argument through the hermeneutic approach of classical texts and critical analysis.FindingsThe COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the dilemma between the public health measures for COVID-19 and sustaining elderly social psychological health through familial connection. From a Confucian perspective, the practice of filial piety (xiao, 孝), which demands taking care of parents, is essential for one’s moral formation, and for one’s becoming a virtuous (ren, 仁) person. The necessity of taking care of elderly parents by adult children is not something that can be explained in terms of consequentialism. Indeed, the rising trend of instrumental rationality seems to weaken rather than strengthen the sense of filial obligation. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic which tends to separate connections between family members, the author argues that we should emphasize the values of familial caring and relationship because it enhances the elderly’s characteristic of resilience.Originality/valueThis paper shows that while social media technology has mitigated the negative effect of social distancing, such online relationships should never replace the bodily connections between the elderly and their family members from a Confucian perspective.

Interspecies intercorporeality and mediated haptic sociality: distributing perception with a guide dog

Some visually impaired people/persons (VIP) use guide dogs to help them navigate when walking outdoors, e.g. when shopping, visiting friends or going to work. In this article, I show how a VIP and his dog function as an interspecies assemblage, in which they co-operate to accomplish navigating and avoiding obstacles. Based on ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis and video ethnographic methodology, the article introduces the concepts of interspecies intercorporeality, which relates to bodily connection, and mediated haptic sociality to describe the transferral of sensory feedback through the dog harness, and thereby shows how the VIP and the dog co-operate in situ. The article contributes to visual studies by highlighting how senses other than the visual are made relevant for accomplishing simple navigational tasks, and how perception of the world is achieved through a distribution of perception-related actions.

RETRACTED: Identifying non-contact defects in fault bearing

Early diagnosis of bearing failures can save time, effort, and money on rotating machine maintenance. On this test, a non-touch type vibration pickup was designed and refined to capture vibration data for bearing fitness tracking under tight load and pace variations, avoiding the bodily connection of vibration pickup to the system tool. The signal was denoised and fault analysis was performed using a Hilbert rework. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the dimensionality of the extracted capabilities, and then the chosen capabilities for lowering the amount of enter capabilities and discovering the maximum premier function set, the Sequential Floating Forward Selection (SFFS) method was used to rank them in order of significance. Finally, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were used to determine and classify the numerous faults in bearings. A comparison of SVM and ANN efficacy was carried out. The results reveal that vibration signatures from advanced non-touch sensors (NCS) correspond well with accelerometer data collected under the same conditions. The classification accuracy obtained by combining the advanced NCS with various sensors mentioned in the literature is comparable to that obtained by using the advanced NCS alone. The proposed method could be utilised to detect automated popularity system faults and issue early warnings, preventing unwelcome and unplanned device shutdowns due to bearing failure.

Bodily Connections Between Yielding and Knowing in Anthropological Filmmaking and Internal Martial Arts

Yielding and knowing may be familiar terms. But how do they connect to anthropological filmmaking and Chinese martial arts? This is a new way of looking at knowledge in the making. The author defines the relationship between the two arts and their experiential and physical ways of learning and understanding the world. Each art has its own aesthetic and ethical qualities. They are creative processes and embody an attitude towards life.

Rock Beats the Wall? On Commemorative Practices in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract This paper focuses on the case analysis of the memorial to the victims of state terror – the Wall of Grief (Stena skorbi) – which was unveiled on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the November 7, 1917, coup d’état. Using this example, we have attempted to elaborate a structure for a more complex analysis of the memory of past regimes’ manifestation and to create a methodological base for their comparison. We have based our research on the discourse theory by the so-called Essex School, the social semiotics by Kress, and the procedures of the critical discourse analysis. The procedure that we have considered relevant consists of the following: (a) description of the social context in which the memorial was manifested as a piece of evidence; (b) semiotic analysis of the memorial artifact; (c) analysis of verbal practices, as well as written and spoken texts that “explained” the memorial; and (d) analysis of nonverbal practices, namely, rituals. On the basis of our case study, we have come to the conclusion that when carrying out a semiotic analysis and the analysis of verbal and nonverbal practices in the case of the Russian public discourse, it is especially relevant to pay attention not only to widening vs. narrowing of the chronological framework, generalization vs. concretization, and specification of the traumatic experience but also to the question of framing of the memorial. In regard to the semiotic analysis, the extent of indexicality is considered to be very important in the sense of the bodily connection with an element of the commemorated event that bestows “truthfulness” and authenticity on the memorial. We assume that particularly present-day Russia, where explicit attempts to reinterpret the history of the authoritarian communist state and attempts to instrumentalize the totalitarian period according to the vector of the current political direction may be seen, is a relevant object of this kind of research.

Continuing Trends in Popular Holocaust Fiction: Heather Morris and the Corporealization of Women’s Suffering

This article explores the problematic representation of female sufferers in works of fiction relating to the Holocaust. Specifically, I contend that modern fiction fails to engage with the moral and emotional complexity of wartime sexual compromise and instead replaces a cognitive understanding of history with a bodily connection to women’s wartime pain. I do so by focusing on Heather Morris’s two Holocaust-themed texts: The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) and Cilka’s Journey (2019). Morris, the article contends, cannot connect to the psychological or moral reality of Cilka’s wartime abuse and so instead focuses on the corporealization of her suffering. Having established the existence of the trend in Morris’s fiction, the article then also addresses Morris’s associated need to morally contextualise Cilka’s actions. In order to maintain her connection with Cilka’s body, I assert, Morris must frame Cilka’s actions using the incompatible morality of the post-war present day. To provide the character with depth would block Morris’s engagement with Cilka’s body as a post-memorial nonwitness. This is profoundly problematic as, rather than informing our understanding of the Holocaust past, Morris merely perpetuates a view of the event that is objectifying, de-humanising and frequently misogynistic.

Belonging in Movement: Capoeira for Children and Youth at the Za’atari Refugee Camp

Abstract This paper examines the practice of using capoeira for psychosocial support at the Za’atari Refugee camp through the work of the Jordanian non-profit organisation Capoeira al-Shababi. It explores the role of body practices involving humour, performance and synchrony on the development of feelings of belonging among Syrian children and youth. The work suggests that the capoeira class succeeded in holding the necessary space for vulnerability, which is the key reason why the participants described a bodily connection with each other and the feeling that the group was a family.

Digital costume sketching through embodied awareness

This article presents a method for costume design, where empathy and embodiment are used as methodological choices by the designer in the character-creation process. In creating references for the sketching process, costume designers combine photos in which they portray themselves as the character that they imagine. These role-selfies, taken with a handheld tablet, work as starting points for the sketching procedure. The material for the present study is collected from MA costume design students who participated in digital character-creation courses at Aalto University, in Helsinki, Finland, and is a part of doctoral research by the author. The data are collected through a mixed-method approach and is organized as a case study investigating the experiences of using the body as a source for costume design. The research question in this study is as follows: does an awareness of one’s own body facilitate the sketching process? The initial results show that the research participants consider the method useful because it enables them to experience a stronger bodily connection with the digital medium, the imagined design and the emerging character in the costume sketching process. Hence, the findings of this study can be used to develop design and teaching practices not only in the field of costume design but also in other design processes involving character creation.

The onto-politics of entrepreneurial experimentation: re-reading Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s understanding of ‘experimental systems’

ABSTRACT In this article, we argue that there is a need to theorize the relationship between entrepreneurship and the political beyond the currently dominant neo-liberal and emancipatory narrative by turning to an onto-political conception of entrepreneurship based on the processes of entrepreneurial experimentation. In entrepreneurship studies, the relevance and the potential of experimentation for shaping new organizational realities has only been explored marginally. Through re-reading the thinking on ‘experimental systems’ by the science historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and connecting it to Annemarie Mol’s notion of ‘ontological politics’, we develop a conceptual framework for entrepreneurial experimentation which we document with the illustration of an art enterprise. The framework that we propose focuses on the interwoven embodied, material and processual dynamics of entrepreneurial experimentation and reframes entrepreneurial world-making as a speculative process driven by material reconfigurations and bodily connections. As a consequence, we argue that this model is able to emphasize the intricate political dimension inscribed in processes of entrepreneurial experimentation through their onto-political force of reconfiguring systems of ‘self-others-things’. Furthermore, the model highlights that this capacity of ‘world-making’ cannot be realized without articulating the tensions and resistances that entrepreneurial endeavours often need to navigate and negotiate while reconfiguring and challenging dominant socio-material orders.

“They Medicated Me Out”

Addiction, a cultural construct long framed in moral, psychological, and social terms, is increasingly understood as biological and treated with medications. In the United States, methadone, buprenorphine, and a variety of psychopharmaceuticals are now commonly used to treat addiction alongside long-standing approaches such as 12-Step mutual aid. These biomedical interventions reshape the very condition they intervene on, influencing the ways treatment clients understand and experience addiction. Clients often experience medication treatment in tension with embodied and social practices of addiction: bodily routines, sensory experiences, temporalities, and social contexts of use. This article examines these tensions through theories of the social flesh and embodied citizenship. This analysis is based on a 20-month ethnography in and around “Sunrise” residential center in Northeast Ohio. Sunrise merges biomedical interventions with 12-Step, psychological and juridical approaches. These data show how biomedical practices alter client bodies and subjectivities, promoting body alienation at stark odds with the intense bodily connection clients established through drug use. This alienation results from rapid weight gain and heavy sedation clients attribute to medication effects, as well as mandated medication and adherence practices that strip clients of a sense of control of medication use. Many clients describe feeling “medicated out” of life: estranged from treatment peers and kin who oppose medications, counselors and other powerful authorities who demand their undivided attention, and friends with whom they are unable to relate when heavily medicated. Clients, however, do not passively accept this estrangement. They alter their bodily experiences by leveraging embodied practices developed during drug use. Through practices such as selectively taking medications based on historical bodily experience and illegal drug “testing” in the underground economy, clients reassert bodily connection and control, deriving a modicum of power—albeit constrained and risky—in a treatment system that strictly limits it.

Dance movement strategies training to help rebuild social capital in Colombia

Building social capital within a post-conflict scenario is key to achieving sustainable peace. The authors implemented an intervention consisting of a 120-h training programme in dance movement strategies in five violence-affected municipalities in Colombia (n = 150). The aim of the intervention was to assess any possible changes in the participants’ states of mindfulness, bodily connection, emotional intelligence, somatic complaints, aggressive reaction, empathy, agency, and subjective emotional experience. We selected the tested variables as conditions necessary to rebuild social capital within a community affected by violence. Post-test measures revealed statistically significant changes in mindfulness, bodily connection, emotional intelligence and regulation, somatic complaints, aggressive reaction, agency, perspective taking, sleep and appetite. Key implications for practice Dance movement strategies help to create the necessary individual conditions for rebuilding social capital in regions heavily affected by an armed conflict Training the community leaders in dance movement strategies positively impacts some aspects that are associated with better trust and reciprocity within communities Community leaders trained in dance movement strategies should be encouraged to replicate these strategies within their own communities.

Drugs: Bodies Becoming “Normal”

"People say, “don’t you ever want to come off?” I don’t know. The thought of me getting up without taking something is totally... to me that’s normal. If I haven’t taken anything then I’m not normal. And for me to even, I can’t contemplate not taking something, you know. I’m not a lost cause. I know what my problem is. It’s other people that want me to stop. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to. Does that make sense to you?" (Mya) This extract is taken from an interview that formed part of my doctoral research looking at people’s experiences of injecting drug use and treatment services in London, UK. Here I consider one of the ways participants described their use of drugs through a concept of becoming “normal.” I pay particular attention to Mya’s account and explore the very sense-making that her question (above) demands. Mya uses the concept of normality not only to reflect how drugs have become part of her everyday routines, or part of feeling normal, but actually in materially becoming herself—in embodying a “normal body.” As she puts it, “if I haven’t taken anything then I am not normal.” In this sense, Mya’s problem is not the drugs, but the people who want her to stop taking them. This understanding is important for challenging recent policy shifts towards reducing opiate replacement/substitution services in the UK (HM Government; Home Office).

The argument from souls to God

AbstractHumans are pure mental substances, that is essentially souls, who have a rich mental life of sensations, thoughts, intentions, and other pure mental events, largely caused by and sometimes causing events in their brains and so in their bodies. God has reason to create humans because humans have a kind of goodness, the ability to choose between good and evil, which God himself does not have. The existence of these causal connections between mental events and brain events requires an enormous number of separate psychophysical laws. It is most improbable that there would be such laws if God had not made them. Each soul has a thisness; it is the particular soul it is quite independently of its mental properties and bodily connections. So no scientific law, concerned only with relations between substances in virtue of their universal properties, could explain why God created this soul rather than that possible soul, and connected it to this body. Yet a rational person often has to choose between equally good alternatives on non-rational grounds; and so there is nothing puzzling about God choosing to create this soul rather than that possible soul. Hence the existence of souls provides a good argument for the existence of God.

The Limitations of Dignity: The Novel and Human Rights

The Limitations of Dignity: The Novel and Human Rights