Bodily Engagement Research Articles

Cleaning: Practicing Everyday Aesthetics and Care

Performing various tasks to manage our daily lives does not fit comfortably with the predominant model of aesthetics, which consists of a disinterested spectator making a judgment on the aesthetic value of an object. Taking ‘cleaning’ as an example, this paper illuminates its rich aesthetic potential, which includes sensory and bodily engagement, development of aesthetic sensibility, activation of imagination, and cultivation of a care relationship with other people and the world.

Doing Mathematics Outdoor

Abstract This article delves into the significance of bodily experiences in the context of outdoor STEAM activities. It features a case study involving three tenth-grade students who engage in outdoor tasks – which are part of an outdoor STEAM trail – using the MathCityMap app. The research focuses on the students’ emerging strategies when dealing with two modelling tasks by integrating the modelling cycle phases with a perspective on embodiment that encompasses learning as navigating mathematical places. By intertwining these theoretical stances, the analysis uncovers the students’ strategies and seeks to describe their orientations during the experience. Despite the students not reaching the expected solutions, they bodily engage with the modelling tasks in meaningful ways, employing an array of various strategies. Trying to overcome the separation between domains, classically emphasised in the modelling context, the authors show how bodily engagement operates at their intersection and discuss the relevance of their approach for STEAM activities.

“That Was My Power”: The Value of Physical Exercise for Migrant Women Managing Marital Breakdown

Divorce is, for many, unsettling and, for some, it can even be traumatic. In rupturing a significant intimate relationship, divorce raises difficult questions regarding one’s sense of self and life path. For migrant wives, separation takes on additional dimensions, disrupting plans for their personal lives along with their migration journeys. Divorced migrant women draw on various resources during separation and yet research has paid scant attention to the role of leisure within this. This article responds to this gap by highlighting how, for thirteen heterosexual and cisgender women who originally migrated for marriage (seven in Hong Kong and six in Melbourne, Australia), physical exercise became key to managing their marital breakdowns. Despite social differences between the women, physical exercise connected them as a group in how it offered time for contemplation; positive bodily engagement; and self-empowerment opportunities, thus revealing it to be a powerful resource for migrants faced with divorce. (150w)

The Aesthetic Dimension of Reading: An Embodied-Ecological Approach

This paper aims at integrating insights from ecological psychology, pragmatism, and embodied cognitive science to shed light on the aesthetic dimension underlying daily activities. For this purpose, we discuss conceptions of the aesthetic developed by authors from diverse traditions, including Dewey’s pragmatism, Carroll’s cognitivism, and Saito’s everyday aesthetics. We focus on the activity of reading, which has traditionally been conceived as involving the establishment of letter-sound correspondences and the rule-based deduction of information. However, an embodied framework opens up a more ecological understanding of this activity encompassing dynamic, multimodal perceptual engagement which is dependent on: (i) who the reader is (ii) the task or purpose, and (iii) what the person-environment-system affords. This form of engagement, even in mundane everyday-reading, we argue, brings forth an aesthetic dimension to it. Specifically, we explore how bodily engagement such as olfactory, tactile, and prosodic processes, saturate even logical judgements and reasoning. This integration of embodied and aesthetic processes in a particular context, we claim, can effectively emphasise and cultivate an aesthetic attitude. This, in turn, will provide insight into how the aesthetic dimension of reading can be cultivated intelligently, enriching the overall experience and will also illuminate why we read at all.

Werktreue Ideology in Clara Schumann’s and Franz Liszt’s Piano Transcriptions

The piano transcriptions of Clara Schumann (hereafter ‘Schumann’) and Franz Liszt capture the tensions surrounding the concepts of interiority and virtuosity in nineteenth-century Germany. The two composers’ transcriptions of Robert Schumann’s ‘Widmung’ could not be more different: one draws upon the faculty of the mind with its ‘spirit and depth’, the other prizes ‘spirit over the letter’ with its bodily engagement. Nonetheless, there is an important meeting point to be found between these two differing approaches in Liszt’s transcription of three Lieder by Schumann. In this article, I juxtapose Schumann and Liszt to demonstrate how their ideological differences concerning Werktreue, or ‘fidelity to the score’, problematize received notions of virtuosity and interiority. Alexander Stefaniak’s notion of elevated virtuosity, in which virtuosity can be legitimized with interiority for its attendant spirit and depth, offers a productive starting point to understanding Schumann’s and Liszt’s individual manner of transcription. Yet, it does not fully address how ideas of interiority and virtuosity depend upon ideological conceptions of the Work. To probe the interiority-virtuosity divide as it relates to the Work, I refer to the history of improvisation to nuance nineteenth-century attitudes towards virtuosity and to provide a critical discourse around mental and physical engagement with music. The categories of Work and improvisation prove to be much more separated for Schumann than for Liszt– a separation that is bound up with Schumann’s ideal of faithfulness to the Work.

Radical Ecopoetics: The Apocalyptic Vision of Jorie Graham’s Sea Change

Jorie Graham’s Sea Change (2008) addresses the environmental crisis engendered by climate change, sending us a dire warning of the end of humanity by featuring an apocalyptic world. Sea Change gives a poetic voice to the dynamics of climate change by embodying the catastrophe in linguistic forms and thus enabling us to experience the ecological crisis. For Graham, poetic imagination is an act of physical or bodily engagement as it brings together linguistic and emotional factors into an embodied performance. This paper explores the affective dimension of Graham’s experimental poetry to demonstrate how her radical ecopoetics allows us to (re)engage with the material world, and how it changes our perceptual and sensorial registers to awaken our sense of interconnectedness with nonhuman others.

Creativity, Auto-Ethnography, and the Reinvention of Sacred Space in New Age Spirituality and Healing during the COVID-19 Pandemic

New Age practices and their ritualized actions have been primarily based on the creation of sacred spaces through immediate interaction, proximity, affect, healing, bodily engagement, and emotional exchange. In the COVID 19 pandemic context, however, such spiritual intimacy has been challenged if not compromised. New Age practitioners have faced the necessity to become ritually and spiritually innovative and establish new forms of sacred spaces to accommodate their performances. Drawing on long-term fieldwork on the theme of New Age spirituality and healing in Lisbon, Portugal, and Athens, Greece, this article offers an account of how New Age spiritual creativity was performed in the context of the pandemic, while exploring how different yet intertwined sacred spaces are created, and the role that (auto)ethnographic embodiment and research knowledge plays in this process.

Moving between worlds: Performance, the scene of empathy and flexible identity in Infernal Affairs

This article explores the bodily and psychological dimensions of Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s performance in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s urban noir thriller, Infernal Affairs (2002), as a way of trying to comprehend the actor’s flexible, transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of a pivotal scene from the film, the article argues that Leung’s facial acting facilitates an embodied and empathetic connection between the actor and the spectator, effectuated through cinematic techniques such as close-ups, editing and music. An embodied understanding of Leung’s facial work in the close-up thus challenges the existing scholarship that limits Leung’s transnational appeal to a restrained or minimalist acting style. A greater appreciation of Leung’s modulating, flexible and multi-layered performance is also illustrated through the scene’s juxtaposition of narrative and spectacle. The rupturing of the spectator’s empathetic and bodily engagement with Leung’s character during the spectacle sequence encourages the actor to shift his emotional response and bodily expressivity towards a performance delivery dictated by a flexible identity, thus bringing into relief the film’s preoccupation with a postcolonial identity crisis.

Utilizing augmented reality for embodied mental rotation training: A learning analytics study

AbstractMental rotation is the ability to mentally rotate two‐dimensional and three‐dimensional objects in one's mind. Previous studies have examined the relationship between mental rotation abilities and embodied cognition. However, conflicting findings underscore the necessity for further investigation. This study aims to investigate how different levels of embodiment in mental rotation training affect mental rotation training. Three versions of mental rotation training with different levels of embodiment (keyboard, touchpad and augmented reality) were developed for this study. A quasi‐experimental study was conducted with a total of 125 university students to explore how different training versions affect participants' training performances, perception of the usability of the training and mental rotation ability. The results suggest those who used the versions with higher levels of bodily engagement performed better than those who used the versions with lower levels of bodily engagement (p < 0.001). Participants' mental rotation ability also improved significantly after training with the augmented reality (AR1) version compared to those in the keyboard group (p = 0.01). The learning analytics results provide additional clarity by indicating that the participants' mental rotation ability can be predicted by their training performance in the AR condition (p < 0.001). This study has significant implications for the potential of using embodied AR training to improve mental rotation ability. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Mental rotation ability is a malleable trait that can be improved through repeated and long‐term game‐based training. Short‐term training using digital games has limited impacts on mental rotation ability. Mental rotation abilities are linked to our bodily interactions with the physical world. What this paper adds Investigates how different levels of bodily engagement in a digital game affect short‐term mental rotation training. Investigates how different levels of bodily engagement in a mental rotation training game affect players' game performance and perception of the usability of the game. Investigates if players' performance in a mental rotation training game can predict their mental rotation ability and self‐diagnosed sense of direction. Leverages learning analytics to explain findings generated by traditional research methods. Implications for practice and/or policy Leveraging augmented reality technology in more embodied mental rotation training games can facilitate short‐term gains in mental rotation. Game‐based learning researchers should consider leveraging learning analytics techniques to provide richer and more nuanced explanations for findings generated by traditional research methods. Game performance in effective mental rotation training games can predict mental rotation abilities, thus potentially assessing such abilities.

The cultural logics of mothering practices: agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong

PurposeThis study aims to reveal and compare the cultural logics of university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong in their mothering practices to improvise their femininities in constituting their work–family interactions.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative research, with the ethnographic elements, has included 32 Chinese mothers to share about their mothering experiences through semi-structured interviews. This methodological design with feminist lens embraces women’s own narratives as sources of knowledge and learns their voices to reinvent their role and bodily engagement in shaping their family dynamics.FindingsThis discussion basically reaffirms the argument where the mother’s involvement in their children’s schoolwork becomes one of the core elements in their actual everyday mothering practices. It has further reflected the dynamics of family quality time in the light of mothers’ cultural logics as much as their attentive agency capacity to present their respectable femininity in the form of mothering.Research limitations/implicationsThis research process has revealed the actual experiences of the participants from their own narratives. For future research development, data collection can be extended to include the husbands’ profiles and their narratives in understanding their wives’ mothering experiences.Originality/valueThis discussion enriches the work-family literature by extending it to the Asian Chinese context. While the concepts of cultural capital and habitus have been addressed in previous studies, this discussion highlights the agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in their cultural logics to deliver their respective mothering practices. This filtering process to transmit cultural capital to their children is as much as they involve in reproducing status boundaries for the family.

Performativity and the domestic space Practices of embodied dwelling through enactivism, participation, and auto-construction


 
 
 This paper examines the transformative potential of performativity in reimagining the concept of dwelling and of domestic spaces. Drawing from enactivist and embodied cognition perspectives, we delve into the dynamic relationship between individuals, their bodies, and the architectural environment. Emphasising the role of bodily engagement, sensorimotor experiences, and interoceptive awareness, we explore how individuals actively participate in and shape their architectural surroundings. Moving beyond individual interactions, we also highlight the social and collective dynamics influenced by the built environment, underscoring the impact of cultural conventions and societal norms.
 This paper investigates some contributions that advocate for a reappropriation of institutionalised domestic spaces through imaginative interventions that challenge conventional norms and envision future-oriented dwelling practices. Within the context of institutionalised domestic spaces, we investigate the role of the fantastical and the monstrous as disordered qualities that challenge traditional boundaries and offer opportunities for transformation. Through case studies, we examine projects that blur the lines between public and private realms, enabling participatory practices and urban influences to reshape functional space utilisation.
 In conclusion, this paper underscores the importance of a dialogue between embodied performativity and the concept of dwelling. It proposes a re-evaluation of our relationship with space that is not just functional but enactive, and it champions the transformative potential of the arts in conceiving our future homes. With a renewed focus on sustainability, participation, and the interplay between the human body and space, we can begin to imagine a future of dwelling that is as dynamic, inclusive, and vibrant as the lives we wish to live within these spaces.
 
 

Reflection on traditional sporting games: the impact of bodily involvement on empathic dimensions.

The aim of this study was to investigate bodily engagement and involvement in traditional sporting games (TSGs), with a focus on the development of empathy. Even though the current research on empathy has been focused on its emotional component, the name "empathy" alludes to a considerably more profound dimension than emotional engagement. Empathy refers to the ability to perceive another person's private life through the exchange of contextual factors provided through interactive sports activities. In this study, based on real-world experiences, it has been demonstrated that traditional sporting games stimulate, preserve, or reveal empathic capacities in several ways. Games can show and sustain the full potential of empathic dispositions if they are present at a young age. Moreover, by examining empathy through the prism of a TSG, we recognized them as a source of relational empathy and feelings developed to various degrees by direct involvement. As a result, we may define empathy as an integrated pedagogy that can be more successfully conducted through TSGs which are multifaceted because of their internal and external logic systems. Essentially, the hypotheses discussed in this study allow us to postulate that the physical gaming involvement of players, such as role changes, influences the individual's empathic dimensions. Furthermore, the characteristics of traditional sporting game interaction networks may serve as a source of encouragement or inspiration for a wide range of games (theatrical, social, etc.).

Encountering drawing

This project report outlines the research-led exhibition, Drawing Room – part of an ongoing collaborative design research project focusing on drawing – exhibited at Toi Moroki Centre of Contemporary Art Christchurch (CoCA), New Zealand. The research interrogates drawings that move – made by light, shadow and animation – and our encounters with drawings through the manipulations of scale and virtual reality (VR). The research investigates the relationship between scale, moveable drawings and bodily engagement in architectural drawing and the speculative nature of VR in architectural drawing. The research places architectural drawing within an expanded practice – shifting its generation from the architectural office – by way of critiquing the normative ways of representing the discipline of architecture. This project demonstrates that the making of architectural drawings and their encounter engages the entire body; in encountering these, we occupy and inhabit the spaces of these drawings. The project investigates the influence of speculative drawing practices on the conceiving and developing of developing architectural built work through the use of exhibition.

What Is the Role of the Body in Science Education? A Conversation Between Traditions

Bodily engagement with the material and sociocultural world is ubiquitous in doing and learning science. However, science education researchers have often tended to emphasize the disembodied and nonmaterial aspects of science learning, thereby overlooking the crucial role of the body in meaning-making processes. While in recent years we have seen a turn towards embracing embodied perspectives, there persist considerable theoretical and methodological differences within research on embodiment in science education that hamper productive discourse. What is needed is a careful examination of how different traditions and disciplines, among them philosophy, social semiotics, and cognitive science, bear on embodiment in science education research. This paper aims to explore and articulate the differences and convergences of embodied perspectives in science education research in the form of a dialogue between three fictitious personas that stand for the cognitive, social-interactionist, and phenomenological research traditions. By bringing these traditions into dialogue, we aim to better position the role of the body in the science education research landscape. In doing so, we take essential steps towards unifying terminology across different research traditions and further exploring the implications of embodiment for science education research.

The role of movement in young children’s spatial experiences: a review of early childhood mathematics education research

Young children’s spatial reasoning is critical to mathematics learning from an early age. Recent reviews have drawn attention to the importance of mathematical experiences in the early years; however, an explicit focus on research in spatial reasoning can contribute to a more coherent account of the field. This paper reports a scoping review of qualitative studies (n = 37) during the years 2009–2021. The studies analysed in this review provide insight into children’s embodied spatial concepts and non-verbal expressions such as gesture and the relationship between spatial reasoning and mathematics learning in early childhood (birth to 8 years). Four main themes were found: (i) children’s manipulation and transformation of objects, (ii) children’s bodily engagement with and within spaces, (iii) children’s representation and interpretation of spatial experiences, and (iv) contexts for spatial learning. While the review illuminates a deeper awareness and a more holistic and embodied view of children’s spatial competencies, there remains few studies focussed on children under three years of age. Future directions for ongoing research are identified.

How Do We Move in Front of Art? How Does This Relate to Art Experience? Linking Movement, Eye Tracking, Emotion, and Evaluations in a Gallery-Like Setting

Embodied cognition claims that how we move our body is central for experience. Exploring dimensions of bodily engagement should, therefore, also be central for engaging art. However, little attention has been paid to the actual ways viewers move in front of art and how this impacts experiences. We aim to close this gap, using a new paradigm in a gallery-like setting in which we tracked movements of participants that engaged an abstract artwork. Guided by a literature review, we relate objective movement factors and subjective body awareness to mobile viewing behavior, art experience, and expertise. We also—for the first time—define shared movement patterns employing principal component/cluster analysis and relate these to experience outcomes, noting, for example, that moving more/more dynamically related to more reported insight. As a proof-of-concept paper, we hope to support a more embodied, enactive understanding of art engagements, and provide practical guidelines for future research.

Bodily engagement in the learning and teaching of grammar

Abstract Cognitive Linguistics claims that language is not purely abstract and arbitrary, but meaningful and grounded in concepts arising from our embodied experiences (Oakley, 2007). The potential of using imagery and bodily representations to explain the conceptual motivation of grammar has been widely recognized in the context of language acquisition and teaching. This study investigates whether an increase of learners’ bodily engagement through the performance of bodily movements and locomotion produces even greater learning outcomes. To this end, we refer to Talmy’s (2000) Force Dynamic System to conduct a pretest-posttest interventional study with two groups of learners dealing with the German modal verb system. Whereas the first group watched multimedia animations (low bodily engagement), the second group was asked to perform bodily movements in line with the force-dynamic notions underlying the different modal verbs (high bodily engagement). The results show that both groups produced similar learning gains and that an increased bodily engagement could not be associated directly with a significantly better performance.

The garden visitor experience

ABSTRACT Based on a systematic data base search this paper provides a comprehensive survey of empirical research on garden visitor experiences, arguing that prevalent studies in garden tourism, psychology and education shed little light on the esthetic experience of gardens as cultural artifacts. Gibson’s transdisciplinary concept of ‘affordance’ is therefore used to reinterpret findings from the social sciences in light of landscape design and cultural analysis. The paper addresses how horticultural designs afford visitors to move through landscapes, to perceive and sense plant displays and to create meaning through bodily engagement. It furthermore shows, how media technologies such as mobile guides afford visitors to engage the garden through their specific material and operational design. As a result, the paper introduces a transdisciplinary model of the garden visitor experience that integrates bodily perception and conceptual understanding. Accordingly, the deliberate design of interpretative media is identified as a key agenda for visitor engagement.

Prayer and Buddhism? The Supreme Offering

AbstractHow can comparative categories be used with vigorous attention to historical context and cultural variation? My example is the concept of prayer applied to various forms of premodern Buddhism. After analyzing past attempts to square theocentric notions with Buddhism, I propose a more circumspect mode of comparison. Adopting a performative approach to the study of religious language, I stipulate prayer as “speech acts directed toward seen and unseen sentient beings.” This strategy broadens the addressees in prayer discourse to include Buddhas, bodhisattvas, minor gods, ghosts, spirits, and other beings. It also covers a wide range of Buddhist practice and focuses on exchange, morality, and bodily engagement. The article then analyzes a specific ritual, the supreme offering, found in many articulations across Buddhist cultures. The conclusion argues that this approach offers several insights. Engaging a wide range of beings in the cosmos, the supreme offering envisages a hierarchical moral community. The different steps in prayer highlight the importance of karma in Buddhist ritual. As a regimen of practice, the supreme offering aims at forming ethical dispositions and cultivating character.

Virtual reality for geospatial education: immersive technologies enhance sense of embodiment

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role of embodiment in learning spatial phenomena in virtual reality in the context of geospatial education. We conducted an empirical study on the geovisualization of global earthquake locations in immersive VR and desktop VR. We asked students to visualize cross-sections of the geometry of earthquake locations in subduction zones and answer pre- and post-experience questions. The degree of the sense of embodiment in immersive VR versus desktop VR was researched. We defined the sense of embodiment based on two embodied affordances: (1) embodied relative reference frame and (2) bodily engagement. We found that immersive VR has a significantly higher sense of embodiment than desktop VR. Additionally, students showed a significantly higher level of reflective thinking in immersive VR. In terms of learning performance, students significantly gained knowledge in both conditions when comparing their pre- and post-knowledge. However, we could not find any significant difference between immersive and desktop VR. The lower level of embodiment in desktop VR seemed sufficient to improve students’ grades. These results encourage more research studies on the effect of the sense of embodiment on learning in the geospatial and earth sciences.