Embodied Communication Research Articles

The embodiment of language

AbstractIn this paper an understanding of psychotherapeutic conversation is outlined emphasising whole-body functioning. The underpinning of conversation by both Central and Autonomic Nervous Systems (CNS & ANS) and evolutionary developments that support social engagement and language are considered. An idea will be taken up that for psychotherapy, language needs to be understood within each patient as more than meets the eye, rather than less, providing a potential for exchanges in the therapeutic conversation that enhance the growth of self for each individual. The notion ofculminativepatterns of communicative interaction speaks to this growth and the enhancement of a sense of meaning in personal contexts. This goes beyond an analytic approach, implying synthesis, integration and growing coherence over time. Human development is towards social engagement, building upon a capacity for relations that are rewarding to the parties involved (Meares 2016). The problem of responding to embodied communication in psychotherapy is considered in relation to moments of meeting, seen as mutative in therapy. Each person is anembodied textwith potential for elaboration, re-shaping and discovery. Clinical illustrations are provided, demonstrating a linguistic model of therapeutic growth and an experimental method that provides a window onto the exchange characteristics of language. To close, the problem of systematising embodiment and its relation to the conversation is considered, along with the implications for therapy and future research, integrating linguistics and interactive functional measures of the body.

Zoocialization: Learning Together, Becoming Together in a Multispecies Triad

Abstract Herding cattle across the landscape requires three species – horse, cattle, and human – to move together in a goal-orientated, albeit human-centered, activity. In this multispecies activity, they must synchronize through embodied communication and develop a shared understanding of moving conjointly. Together, all three species are socialized, or “zoocialized,” to learn to engage in a shared community of communication where they develop a sense of “timing” and “feel” of the others to enable their directed movement together. While not denying or downplaying the power and pain integral to cattle ranching, we explore and interpret the interspecies, multispecies communication, collaboration, and choreography. Based on a multispecies ethnographic methodology, we draw on experiences from cattle herding in the USA, Canada, and Sweden. What emerges are intricate relations of agency, shaped by meanings of species, where human and nonhuman social actors learn to meet and construct a vibrant multispecies community of communication.

Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

In most narratives of contact between Native Americans and European newcomers, communication begins with gestures, pantomime, and rudimentary sign language before increased familiarity enabled speech. Céline Carayon's Eloquence Embodied shows how this familiar sequence of events oversimplifies—and often ignores—the rich variety of nonverbal communication that occurred in the early modern Americas, including signs, ceremonies, gestures, and performances. Instead, this study of the first two centuries of French colonization in the Americas from 1500 to 1700 argues that, rather than evolving from “basic” nonverbal to more “sophisticated” verbal communication, “colonial America was the site of rich intersections between effective traditions of embodied expressiveness” (6–7). Furthermore, far from fumbling from one misunderstanding to the next, French colonizers and the Native Americans they met generally managed to understand each other quite well.Carayon's chronological framing means that French encounters with Indigenous people in Florida, Brazil, Guiana, and the Caribbean receive significant attention alongside the more frequently studied St. Lawrence Valley and Illinois Country. As a result, Carayon's account of Indigenous experiences with French colonizers includes Beothuc, Guale, Yao, and Tupi-Guarani speakers as well as Iroquoians and Algonquians, a choice that greatly strengthens the book.Each chapter in Eloquence explores a different theme while also proceeding in chronological order. The first surveys the use of sign language in the Native America, using a vast array of imperfect French sources to detail “complex” nonverbal communications systems across the hemisphere, including “what might have been a full-fledged sign language system in the circum-Caribbean region” (104). The next chapter examines traditions of nonverbal communication in early modern France against the backdrop of elites’ interest in “civility” to achieve refinement and unity of a linguistically and culturally diverse kingdom and is followed with an exploration of how Indigenous people chose to greet and communicate with French newcomers, mediated through the Europeans’ depictions of these encounters. Chapter four shifts attention from expressions of friendship to cross-cultural expressions (and interpretations) of trustworthiness and deception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and five probes French and Indigenous attitudes towards language learning and multilingualism, with knowledge of unspoken cultural values and taboos as valuable as spoken tongues. Chapter six argues for the ongoing importance of nonverbal communication as an accompaniment to diplomatic oratory in the late seventeenth century. Carayon's conclusion briefly compares seventeenth-century English nonverbal exchanges with Native Americans before suggesting avenues where other scholars might fruitfully use “nonverbal features of Early American encounters to shed light” on various aspects of colonization (433). While making clear that she views the French as more adept than their European rivals—especially the English—in nonverbal communications with Indigenous people, she rejects the idea that such skill “produced a uniquely benevolent style of colonialism” (433).Carayon draws on a broad tranche of evidence, and her choice to include French colonization efforts in Florida, the Caribbean, and South America in her analysis gives added weight to the book's contributions. Overall, Carayon's argument—that French colonizers and Native Americans drew upon deep traditions of nonverbal communications to bridge their linguistic divide with less trouble than previously thought—is persuasive. Eloquence Embodied makes clear that scholars should jettison the idea that spoken language obviated the importance of ritual, sensory, and other embodied communication in later colonial counters. For all these reasons it will be a standard work in the field for some time.

Differential Experiences of Social Distancing: Considering Alienated Embodied Communication and Racism

In this musing we consider how social distancing, the primary public health measure introduced to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, is creating social encounters characterized by a self-and-other-consciousness and an atmosphere of suspicion, leading to what we call “alienated embodied communication.” Whilst interaction rituals dominated by avoidance, fear and distrust are novel for many individuals who occupy positions of social privilege, Black and ethnic minority writers have demonstrated that the alienated bodily communication of COVID-19 social distancing is “nothing new” for people who routinely experience marginalization as a result of racism. Our aim in this musing, then, is to reflect on how on-going experiences of stigma, shame, and marginalization can shape how social distancing is registered on an embodied and existential level, and therefore how social distancing may differentially impact individuals with lived experiences of racism.

스턴트 치어리딩 퍼포먼스에 있어 비언어적 의사소통에 관한 연구

This study aims to explore the mutual communication style and behavioral structure among cheerleaders in performing stunt cheerleading. To this end, it used the constitutive ethnography, a qualitative research method. From the findings, four main themes and 10 implications were drawn. First, an analysis on the meaning of physical communication could be conducted based on gaze and mutual gaze, and communication through certain gestures and through senses. Second, the communication in the embodied communication space, including roles, positions and immersion in space was examined for spatial communication. Third, communication through time has been conducted by technical timing and duration of technology. Fourth, communication through vocal behavior has been conducted by the tones of voices and rapidity symbols. The non-verbal communication structure of stunt cheerleading was based on responsibility for each position and trust with partners and affinity. From the findings above, it could be found that non-verbal communication is based on sports communication as indirect/subjective experience.

The Micro-genesis of Improvisational Co-creation

ABSTRACT Recent voices in creativity research emphasize the vital role that processes of active engagement and interaction play. These distributed, interactivity-based, and ecological accounts critique the reduction of creativity to mental mechanisms and eschew the methodological individualism that underlies this view. Instead, they elevate socio-material couplings to a genuine causal mechanism, hereby explaining why others “are good to be creative with” beyond mutual inspiration or mere constraints on creativity. With improvised dance duets as our example, we introduce a micro-analysis that unpacks these mechanisms from a first-person viewpoint: We describe how the embodied communication at the sub-second scale, a continuous “give and take” between dancers, mediates the co-creation process and how reciprocal micro-actions cumulate into more complex creative effects. Secondly, we distinguish convergent and divergent co-creation dynamics, degrees of playful exploration vs. adaptive pressures, and degrees of individual creative autonomy. Thirdly, we argue that the mix of external constraints, joint exploration, and individual ideation provides a fertile mechanism for co-creation. Finally, we discuss forms of individual creative vision that respect and exploit the dynamic ecology, which can manifest in immediate micro-inspirations, but also in subtle modulations of ongoing process, and in “cultivating” the wider system in ways that benefit novelty.

Showing as sense-making in oral presentations: The speech-gesture-slide interplay in TED talks by Professor Brian Cox

Building on research into the visual semiotics of slides and the multimodality of oral presentations, this paper analyses the speech-gesture-slide interplay in TED talks and considers implications for teaching about gesture in the academic presentation genre. Using two examples from presentations by award-winning science communicator Professor Brian Cox, an enactive-ecological approach to embodied communication yields fine-grained descriptions of relations between spoken language, visuals on the slide, and gesture including depictions, eye-gaze shifts, posture, and footwork. These demonstrate how the speaker's activity of showing slides is a person-environment dynamic of sense-making with the audience, and more specifically, how the speaker's speech-gesture-slide interplay animates, discloses, and decomposes aspects of the visuals on his slides while keeping his audience's attention intact. Whereas researchers of English for Academic Purposes have recommended raising students' awareness of multimodality or body language, this paper's findings suggest ways to sensitivise and engage students more directly and implicitly with the ecology of oral presentations.

How Do Children Experience the Embodied Communication and Leadership of Teachers? Expressing the Voices of Children Through Artistic, Sensual, and Multimodal Methods in Educational Research

This article focuses on children’s lived experiences with teachers in school, and shows how a multimodal methodological perspective can strengthen the voices of children in educational research. The authors illustrate how a strong children’s perspective can be established with a methodical starting point inspired by phenomenology, critical utopian action research, and arts-based research. The inquiry is especially focused on how the embodied communication of the teacher’s professional practice is experienced by children and transformed from an often silent bodily knowledge to esthetic, artistic, and verbal formats. In order to understand the children’s lived experiences of life in school, they were invited into an open and playful future workshop. The workshop creates a dialogical space where the verbal, sensuous, emotional, and bodily expressions of both criticism and dreams can be articulated. It’s a space that can be seen as potentially activist material, because it allows for the dominance of the already existing structures to possibly be exceeded. Therefore, the article also includes children’s concrete artistic interpretations of the embodied leadership of their teachers. The empirical material shows how the artistic, visual, and aesthetic practices can transform the child’s lived experiences and contribute to creating an open space, where images, imagery, and metaphorical explorations are possible. The children’s voices show how they experience being seen, being invisible, or being touched by their teachers. They also show how they experience being afraid and exposed in the classroom. It is perhaps just here that the forms of expression in art offer a dialogic, collaborative foundation, where embodied experiences can be transformed into forms of knowledge that are more accessible to reflection and exploration. This could be a first step toward change.

Realising the ‘right to play’ in the special school playground

ABSTRACT In this paper I mobilise a multimodal ethnographic data fragment depicting a moment of play in a UK ‘special school' playground to unpack the challenges of realising the ‘right to play' (Article 31, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) in a non-inclusive play space. I show that play (im)possibilities were delineated by the physical boundaries of the playground, the absence of non-disabled peers and a lack of symbol-based resources to support playful meaning-making. Nevertheless, the children execute a short play event through multimodal embodied communication encompassing pleasure, frustration, invitations, rejections, acceptances, and negotiations over resources. I argue that this brief play event instantiates broader debates around the ‘right to play': specifically, to what extent this right can be realised in a non-inclusive playground, whether autistic children require play ‘training’, and how diverse forms of play can be scaffolded by staff in the absence of non-disabled children.

Through the Magical Pink Walkway: A Behavior Setting's Invitation to Embodied Sense-Makers.

This paper examines an intersection between ecological psychology and the enactive approach brought about by studying sense-making in relation to a behavior setting in Hong Kong and adopting a focus on embodied action and gesture. A cosmetics pop-up store embedded in a downtown shopping mall provides the basis for a case study involving a two-pronged analysis. I first use Barker’s behavior setting theory to describe the publicly accessible structure and dynamics of the store, which reveals a bounded spatiotemporal entity with several interdependent behavior–milieu parts. I then analyze video recordings of my research participant encountering, entering, and exploring this environment. Following an enactive-informed micro-ethnographic approach to embodied communication, I examine her movements, postures, gestures, and language use as she joins the behavior setting. These fine-grained descriptions of her embodied actions provide an empirical basis to analyze enactive sense-making. On the one hand, they disclose the affective and emotional experience of perceiving relevant affordances in the environment, and on the other hand, they show the specificity of sensorimotor abilities required to join the setting’s standing pattern of behavior.

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

That and There: Judging the Intent of Pointing Actions with Robotic Arms

Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by extending existing models from the related literature. These principles are evaluated through studies where English-speaking human subjects view animations of simulated robots instructing pick-and-place tasks. The evaluation distinguishes two classes of pointing actions that arise in pick-and-place tasks: referential pointing (identifying objects) and locating pointing (identifying locations). The study indicates that human subjects show greater flexibility in interpreting the intent of referential pointing compared to locating pointing, which needs to be more deliberate. The results also demonstrate the effects of variation in the environment and task context on the interpretation of pointing. Our corpus, experiments and design principles advance models of context, common sense reasoning and communication in embodied communication.

Fiber, Fingers, and Code: Manufacturing Software and Seamlessness in the Garment Industry

This article describes how software is imagined and used to disrupt garment industry practices. Drawing from interviews, fieldwork, and discourse analysis of marketing from two companies, Stoll and Resonance, we argue that software is integral to the creation of a new kind of designer, a “digital craftsman,” that directly interfaces with a new kind of supply chain. This interaction is defined by its “seamlessness”—what we describe as both an emergent technical design element and an imaginary of software-enabled manufacturing free from friction between sites of concept development and its material execution. Counter to this imaginary, we mobilize the “tactile grammar” of seams to foreground the role of embodied communication and labor practices in shaping software-defined industrial futures. Studying the connections between fiber, fingers, and code, this article opens up new lines of inquiry into industrial software and into the links between media production and larger spheres of commodity production.

Lynne Tillman's Literary Ecologies: Affect, Cognition, and Signification inAmerican Genius, A Comedy

Attuned to the need for ecologically informed criticism addressing the ‘affective turn’ in contemporary fiction, and following upon psychoanalytic critiques of the fantasies underlying neoliberal ideology, this article engages critically with questions concerning affect and meaning through a deliberate reading of Lynne Tillman's American Genius, A Comedy (2006). Tillman's encyclopaedic novel – narrated by an erudite, obsessive woman, Helen, afflicted with an irritating skin condition – is read as a cognitive-affective fiction that provides an oblique psychoanalysis of post-9/11 America: a neoliberal culture of would-be victims where the ascendant sensibility is hyper-sensitivity. While some literary theorists have recently advocated for phenomenological approaches less focused on interpretation and critique and more receptive to corporeal experiences, Helen's digressive, repetitive, skin-fixated narration reminds readers just how irritating, and funny, tangibility and ‘presence effects’ can be – precisely because of the curious way affects inevitably generate meaningful thinking. Tillman's artful syntax registers a heightened sensitivity to how affective forces in the environment, including language, stimulate our embodied minds and shape our thinking, feeling, and interactions. Much affect-studies scholarship claims affect circumvents semantics and resists being captured in language. But Tillman's writing, this article argues, contests notions of ineffable affect. Tillman's investment in transcribing affective phenomena, it is claimed, belies neither an individualistic or a solipsistic concern with subjective response, nor a radical materialist commitment to pushing the materialities of communication to the brink of meaninglessness. Affect, American Genius ingeniously demonstrates, is integral to eco-critical thinking. This account of affective circulations in American Genius demonstrates how Tillman successfully takes up the challenge of conveying, in prose, the complex, infra-linguistic affective processes underlying embodied communication and cognition. After introducing the novel, Section Two, ‘Ambivalent Belief’ explains how its opening prepares readers to confront what Slavoj Žižek calls the contemporary crisis of belief. Section Three tests and ultimately rejects the hypothesis that American Genius expresses a meaningless posthistoricist aesthetic; rather, Tillman's ecological aesthetic entails a meticulous staging of how imbricated cognitive processes are within the biological human body and political social body. Through her recursive prose, Tillman creates a mediating space for staging affectively inflected meta-cognitions. Section Four analyses passages where these meta-cognitions involve ecological perceptions. The critical focus throughout is on form. Deliberate readings reveal how, sentence by sentence, Tillman's ‘skintax’ evokes multidimensional corporeal processes that constitute the affective dimension of thinking. ‘Sensitivity and Making Sense’, the Fifth Section, identifies the ethical core of Tillman's eco-aesthetic and unpacks passages that expand the concept of sensitivity in ways that attune readers to affective modulations of the social that are potentially transformative.

The materialization of language in tourism networks

Abstract This article traces how new linguistic practices emerge alongside the development of tourism in Hawai‘i and Japan. We trace and describe two networks of tourism to illustrate how signs, speech, and embodied communication materialize in actor networks. We frame these new spatial repertoires as examples of language learning and language change that occurs as an effect of human mobility intersecting with material affordances in new environments. We compare the relatively new emergence of such spatial repertoires in Izumisano, a residential neighborhood in Oʻsaka, to the more established repertoires that have formed in Kailua, a residential beach town on O‘ahu in Hawai‘i. In Izumisano, we focus on the emergence of Chinese alongside English, and in Kailua, we examine the recent emergence of the Japanese language. In both contexts, we identify how language first emerges in written form on signs in relation to other actants such as pancakes, airports, and train stations. This signage later becomes part of the embodied actions by service providers who acquire multimodal verbal repertoires through their interactions with tourists.

Language, trust and transformation: exploring theatre as a research method with migrant youth

ABSTRACTThis article explores the challenges and benefits of using theatre as a research method. It questions certain claims and assumptions underlying Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and more recent literature on theatre-based research. In particular, it investigates the notion that theatre enables participants to address issues of oppression and create socio-political change. Based on a case study with migrant youth in South Africa, the article firstly argues that certain challenges specific to working with migrants such as differing language skills and a lack of trust may impede genuine dialogic exchange as envisioned by Boal. Secondly, it shows how these challenges can be overcome by incorporating writing exercises, video recordings and embodied communication. Finally, the article argues that theatre-based research can indeed create individual transformations in the form of increased displays of ownership, confidence and hope. These insights contribute to the growing literature on theatre-based research and will be useful for others using similar arts-based approaches.

Microbiomes as companion species: an exploration of dis- and re-entanglements with the microbial self

ABSTRACT Research within the natural sciences is increasingly revealing the importance that microbial life has for human functioning. Referred to as the microbiome, the unique selection of microbial life that harbours inside the body affects human behaviours. This paper contrasts the more simplistic practices and imaginations associated with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ microbes with the more nuanced perspective offered by research with FMT users and explores what these sources say of a human microbe relationship. Through an engagement with Haraway’s concept of companion species this paper first explores how a good/bad binary of microbial life is reproduced through cleaning, probiotic advertising and the technologies of antibiotics. It points to the consequent warping of the complexities of microbial life through such representations. It then engages with FMT users’ experiences of FMT to develop Haraway’s concept of embodied communication to corporeal communication, which describes a mode of relating between FMT users and their microbiomes. The paper then offers corporeal communication as an alternative conceptual tool that can be used by those that have not undergone FMT to better understand and appreciate the microbial self.

An embodied communication system with avatar-shadow’s color expressions based on an interaction-activated communication model in voice communication

An embodied communication system with avatar-shadow’s color expressions based on an interaction-activated communication model in voice communication

Emotional Communication in the Case of Antonio

ABSTRACTIn describing her work with her traumatized patient Antonio, Dr. Jane Lewis focuses on Barthes’s (1981) notion of a photograph as having the symbolic linking function of an umbilical cord, and emphasizes the notion of the punctum, the specific personal wounding detail in an image that connects to the viewer’s experience. This article discusses these ideas, which appear mystical to Lewis, in the contexts of the theory of multiple coding and the referential process, as well as recent advances in the fields of social neuroscience and embodied communication. In the early Arousal phase of the referential process, emotion schemas associated with painful events of the past are activated for both participants, in subsymbolic, embodied form. Antonio is largely mute and frozen; Lewis also feels herself freezing and disappearing. In the Symbolizing phase, Antonio begins to connect to dreaded experience of his past, and to tell memories, fantasies and dreams. Memories and images of her past, related emotionally to Antonio’s experience, are awakened for Lewis as well. Through their embodied communication and shared imagery, the therapist’s ability to find emotional meaning for her own painful experience appears to support the patient’s beginning to provide some meaning for his pain and dread. Related observations by Bollas and Arlow, and parallels to a case reported by Ogden are discussed.

Role Differences in Healthcare: Overcoming Borders through Semiotic Skin is the Basis for Communication

Role differences in healthcare systems are the very foundation of communication in this specific field of environment. It has to be understood as a collective corporation between collective individuals and thus connect through intertwined border zones. These border zones between collective communicators holds the notions of individuality, which is represented in the ability to decipher and negotiate the multiple layers in the communicative border zone. These processes in border zones of persons - in relation with others - are dealt with by the Semiotic Skin Theory. In addition, the biological skin is central for human lives and the Semiotic Skin is conceptualized as a socio-somatic-semiotic, layered and dynamic membrane that operates as a semi-permeable, communicative boundary. A constant interpretation between a self-reflecting system and an unending spiral of semiosis is the emergent of the semiotic skin. It creates a semi-permeable barrier that holds the very notions of the multi-layered skin-on-the-skin that is reflected in an embodied communication between humans and environment. In this theoretical understanding of an embodied aspect of not only meaning-making but also the regulative aspect of embodied interaction with others, the very idea of borders of individuality becomes the notion of interpretation. Any communication in a medical setting involves actions on the border of mutual understanding - e.g. communication between a pediatrician and a child. The concepts of a collective patient and a collective doctor are introduced as to understand the aspects of the multiple dynamics of the semiotic skin as the holder of an individual's personal ideas/interpretations in the interaction with one other person, holding multiple aspects from others as well. Examples of the interaction between patients and the healthcare system in Denmark illustrate how a new theoretical and practical performance of mastering the communicative partnership in the cross field between the healthcare system and psychology is born.