Experiential Dynamics Research Articles

Play and Freedom: Patterns of Life in the Spirit

AbstractThis article explores the pneumatological theme of the freedom of the Spirit from the perspective of experience. It deploys a recently developed methodology of attending to affective and experiential dynamics in pneumatology to identify two significant patterns or modalities of Christian life in the Spirit that are indexed to the Spirit's freedom: a pattern of divine resistance to human attempts to control God, characterized on the human side by experiences of disruption as well as dynamic creativity; and a pattern of life free from the tyranny of the law, characterized by a modality of play or playfulness, as explored in the work of Nimi Wariboko. In identifying and illuminating these patterns, this article extends a project of seeking to make explicit the connections between Christian doctrinal concepts and Christian experience into a new domain, and responds to a long‐standing concern that theologies of sanctification emphasizing freedom have little to say about the positive shape of Christian life in the Spirit.

Healing online? Social anxiety and emotion regulation in pandemic experience

During the pandemic of Covid-19, internet-based communication became for many the primary, or only, means of interaction with others, and it has been argued that this had a host of negative effects on emotional and mental health. However, some people with a lived experience of mental ill-health also perceived improvements to their wellbeing during the period in which social activities were moved online.In this paper, I explore the possibility that some of these improvements are due to the partial “disembodiment” of emotions facilitated by internet-mediated interaction. In particular, I consider the phenomenology of social anxiety and how it may be impacted upon by encountering others primarily through the medium of internet-enabled technology.I will start by reconstructing a phenomenological account of social anxiety to which disruptions of bodily experience are central. I will then move to consider how the experiential dynamics that are particularly prominent in social anxiety can be weakened when communicating with others via video calls, instant messages, and social media more broadly. I will suggest that this is the case due to the diminished visibility of the body online, and the higher degree of control and agency over one’s experience that can be exercised in this context.Finally, I will argue that the weakening of social anxiety through internet-mediated contact exemplifies some of the processes which are key to emotion regulation more widely, thus suggesting that communication and interaction online could have a positive effect on a wider range of affective disturbances.

Editorial

The present issue (vol. 3, no. 2) of the transcript: An e-Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies is a themed one with special focus on Disability Studies. With this aim in view, the issue comprises four articles and one book-review on various aspects of the area chosen for analysis. The subjects explored range from locating female experiences of disability and sexuality, followed by an analysis on the politics of subjugating female bodies to power structures, and then comprising two genre-based studies—one on Graphic novels and the other on cinema—thereby enabling the development of a truly multimedial perspective on Disability Studies. In her article on the twin issues of sexuality and violence, and their joint interface with women with disabilities, Dr. Mukul Chaturvedi analyses select narratives of such women, including a few court cases, and studies how violence inflicted upon them is often examined without due cognisance of the sexuality of the victims concerned. This engagement with the disciplinary rigours of repressive structures continues in the article by Rishiraj Sen & Shweta Jha which deals with a select lesser-explored short stories of Chughtai to show how regimes of surveillance, norms, and punishment are deployed to construct desexualised female bodies amenable to the unjust strictures of patriarchy. Mushrifa Rahim, in her article, examines the efficacy of the Graphic novels with its visual dynamics as a medium of expressing the intricate experiential dynamics of disability and also enabling newer orientations on the subject-matter explored through its medium. Roy Jreijiry & Carla Dreij continue this “medial” engagement with the representation of disability through an analysis of Lebanese cinema comprising characters played by actors with both assumed and real-life disabilities. The authors also shed light on the problematic consequences of normalising disability at the cost of trivialising or making light of the special needs of the persons with disabilities. The book-review by Dr. Krishna Kumar S examines Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight as a work that looks at blindness both as a lived experience and a subject of historical inquiry, and shows how writing as an activity could ultimately prove to be an enabling experience and a faculty for “sightedness” thereby effectively countering the limitations of blindness.

Hiking tourists’ experiential dynamics: a multiple measurement approach

ABSTRACT This study attempts to more exactly trace tourists’ perceptions of hiking experiences by measuring perceptions in the early, middle, and late stages of a 4-hour hiking trip. A total of 339 respondents participated in this survey while hiking in Jeju Olle, South Korea. A survey was conducted three times using the same respondents and the same questionnaire. A total of 301 questionnaire sets, matched for all three stages of the experience, were used for further data analysis. Hikers indicated differences in their psychological states between the three points in time. In terms of benefits sought, environmental experience, and place attachment, they reported a higher level of immersion in experiential dynamics. However, regarding perceived mood, they became less excited and less rushed, while feeling more bored and relaxed. Four clusters generated after conducting cluster analysis demonstrated differences in perception of the psychological variables across the clusters.

Forgiveness of Sin in the Relation to the Community of Believers

"A large number of casualties in our day and our eroded testimony to the world around us, allows for a lot of grieving but also calls for the reassessment of our understanding of sin, forgiveness and the context of restoration: the community of the forgiven. True, there is around us a growing concern for the problem of sin. However, it is more a face-saving concern vis-a-vis the secularized world and the Church. Unfortunately, it is less a concern compared to God and His righteous standards. How do we define sin? How are we to understand the forgiveness of sin? How do we recognize it, how do we administer it? These are some valid questions that need to be addressed. The purpose behind the present research is not to sift the Bible through our experience to accommodate our generation’s understanding of sin but the other way around: to sift experience through the Bible, expose misunderstanding and thus proceed toward restoration through a way of understanding godliness. The intend is not to fill an ontological gap, but rather address the current situation from a biblical and pastoral perspective, into a situation in which theologians and churches together have lost the ability to talk meaningfully about topics such as sin and the internal workings of the human soul and thus have rendered as irrelevant the meaning of Forgiveness that the Gospel brings. The concern in the following pages is to understand the concept of sin and the experiential dynamics of sin and that of Forgiveness and its personal and corporate experience. Even though a better understanding of Forgiveness may not rid our lives of sins nor make us the best forgivers in the world, it will alert us to what is happening around us and offer insight that can become opportunities. "

A socially-critical curriculum for PETE: students’ perspectives on the approaches to social-justice education of one Brazilian programme

ABSTRACT Brazil is the largest and most influential country in South America with a population of about 211 million. The reality is a country with a wide gap between rich and poor. Many of its issues of (in)equity are related to a complex mix of factors, such as its large population, ethnic and cultural diversity, class and income disparity, late slavery abolishment, unstable democracy and political governance. At a national level, the former Brazilian government attempted to address the challenges outlined above by passing new legislation in 2007 that expanded the services and scope of the federal universities, particularly in respect to increasing access to tertiary education and providing increased support and infrastructure for people of middle- and low-income families. In this paper we analyse a PETE programme offered at one university in the Brazilian Northeast in response to changes introduced as a result of the 2007 legislation. Drawing on the perspectives of graduates from this programme, we examine how they see the complexity of social justice and equity issues from their experience in the course. Data were generated through focus group and individual interviews with former students. We supplemented this with document analysis of key policy and curriculum artifacts produced by the programme, and consultation with professors from the course to better understand the former students’ experiential dynamics. Each participant expressed a strong affinity for and orientation towards social justice as an integral aspect of school physical education. The curricular restructuring enables students to engage with a broad range of content underpinned by ethical, political, aesthetic, epistemological, pedagogical and theoretical-methodological principles. We consider that this curricular orientation seeks to meet the regional and local needs so that future physical education teachers, in turn, intervene with a more critical socio-cultural perspective in their teaching.

Beyond the Individual Body

AbstractSince the emergence of embodied cognitive theories, there has been an ever-growing interest in the application of these theories to media studies, generating a large number of analyses focusing on the affective and intellectual features of viewers’ participation. The body of the viewer has become the central object of study for film and media scholars, who examine the conceptual physicality of the viewing experience by associating body states with parallel intellectual and moral constructions. In this article, I contribute to the study of embodied cognition and cinema by drawing upon Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, especially from his process-based notion of the body. I will put this ecological and dynamic concept of the body in connection with recent studies on enactive cognition, and define a radical enactivist approach to be applied in the discussion of the experiential dynamics of Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here.

"Merda d’artista" di Piero Manzoni. Letture psicoanalitiche ed effetti collaterali

This paper focuses on the critical analysis of Merda d’artista (1961) by Piero Manzoni, underlining the problematic nature of psychoanalytic interpretations proposed by Nancy Spector, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Gerard Silk and others related to Freudian theories. Starting from the philosophical interests of the artist and his theoretical declarations, it proposes a reinterpretation of the famous Manzoni’s work in the perspective of that bond to the social and experiential dynamics that will characterize most of the conceptual researches of the late Sixties.

Integrating Focusing and Differentiation: A Therapeutic Path for Couples in Intimate Relationships

Continuing the workshop I've given in the WPC Paris (2017), this article elaborates my discussion of the way I interlace Focusing with Differentiation Based Couples Therapy (Megged, 2017) under the systemic view, in order to facilitate processes of change and healing in working with intimate couples. This article presents the theory and rationale of integrating Differentiation (Bowen, 1978; Schnarch, 2009; Megged, 2017) and Focusing (Gendlin, 1981) approaches, and its therapeutic potential in couple's therapy. It is written from the point of view of a practicing professional in order to illustrate the experiential nature and dynamics of the suggested therapeutic path. Differentiation is a key to mutuality. It offers a solution to the central struggle of any long term intimate relationship: balancing two basic life forces - the drive for individuality and the drive for togetherness (Schnarch, 2009). Focusing is a body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing, in which one learns to pay attention to the body and the ‘Felt Sense’, in order to unfold the implicit, keep it in motion at the precise pace it needs for carrying the next step forward (Gendlin, 1996). Combining Focusing and Differentiation perspectives can cultivate the kind of relationship where a conflict can be constructively and successfully held in the inner world of each partner, while taking into consideration the others' well-being. This creates the possibility for two people to build a mutual emotional field, open to changes, permeable and resilient.

Capturing customer emotions and experiences to enhance value co-creation: the Ichnusa online brand community

Purpose of the paper: This study aims to explore how business-to-consumer interactions within an online brand community leverage and capture consumers’ emotions and experiences to perform value co-creation processes in the realm of customer engagement theory. Methodology: Given the explorative nature of the research, the study adopts a qualitative methodology through a case study method. In particular, it focuses on Birra Ichnusa’s Facebook page in order to investigate how the brand fosters the logic of value co-creation by leveraging consumers’ emotions and experiences within its online community. Findings: The brand largely adopts different types of “emotional messages” and “experiential messages” that are strictly correlated in order to deliver memorable and unique consumer experiences of value co-creation. Research limits: This study represents a preliminary approach to capture the complexity of consumers’ emotions and experiences within the customer engagement theoretical framework in order to explore value co-creation within online brand communities. In turn, such research will require further theoretical contributions and refinements, as well as appropriate empirical tests. Practical implications: This study may represent a useful framework for managers and decision makers to better understand the strategic advantages that could derive from leveraging on consumers’ deeper emotions and experiences within customer engagement practices. Originality of the paper: This study analyses the concept of value co-creation from a little explored perspective: emotional and experiential dynamics with reference to a very original context represented by an online brand community of food and beverage. In doing so, it deals with the validation and enrichment of the theoretical foundations of customer engagement.

Urban Regeneration and “Resistance of Place”: Foregrounding Time and Experience

Time and experience lie at the heart of urban life. While extensive research on the social implications of the spatial transformation of urban landscapes has been undertaken since the 1980s, the discussion of the impact that manifold temporalities and sensory experiences might have in shaping or constraining the physical and social change of a neighbourhood have been limited, however. Existing research has a tendency to focus on a specific period in time within the remaking of a neighbourhood and draws conclusions from this window in time on the impact of the regeneration. By drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the regeneration of el Raval, Barcelona from 1996 to now, this article interrogates how a focus on temporality and experience produce interruptions of power in contemporary urban regeneration processes leading to what I define as a `resistance of place’. While there have been attempts to regenerate el Raval since the early 20th century, most dramatically during the last 20 years to create Barcelona’s new cultural quarter, the neighbourhood has not been gentrified and developed as expected by Barcelona’s city council. I argue that while elements of control, discipline and gentrification are certainly part of global contemporary regeneration strategies, temporal and experiential dynamics destabilise their full implementation so that these elements are only partial in their imposition.

Internationalization Pace in a Fragmented Industry: Experiential Learning and Competitive Dynamics

Internalization theory maintains that firms expand globally to exploit the value of their intangible assets. Yet, internationalization theory maintains that internationalization is an incremental p...

From Sacred to Commodity and Beyond: Colour and Values in India

A venture in a less traversed terrain of Indian scholarship, this article looks at the transformation in the value regimes that go into the making of colours in the Indian milieu. At one level, this study traces the sacredness imbued in colours and at another level the article delves into the genealogy that gives rise to a complex where colour, colonial investment in the economy of colours (with an aim at capitalizing colours as commodities), values and experiential dynamics enshrined in the imageries and practices associated with colours all come together. With these entanglements, the idea is to engage with the social fabrics and the politics of colours in the Indian milieu. In this rendering, the distinction between values and forms collapses giving us in turn a field of aesthetic experience. Mobilizing a wide range of registers (written as well as pictorial, archival as well as literary), this story is narrated with key rubrics, such as, ambiguous location of colour in the discourse on visuality, social and cultural life of colours and the manner in which Western science and modernity has influenced the values pertaining to colours. However, the core anxiety is parked on the relation between colour, aesthetic experience and the question of value.

Plotting belonging: interrogating insider and outsider status in faith research

Fifteen years ago an outpouring of new academic material asserted the value of being an insider in religious research. Conventional assumptions that linked objectivity with outsider status were challenged. This valuable burst of scholarship worked hard to critique the kind of research that preceded it, where faith or identity was seen to compromise research values, and undermine integrity and rigour. This special edition interrogates the legacy of the shift towards practitioner-research with religious-spiritual-magical-secular communities, particularly, but not only, when research examines broader social, historical and political concerns as well as the processes of faith and belief. It examines some more experiential dynamics of research to consider how the insider/outsider debate plays out from the inside of the research process.

HEALTH - ILLNESS - DISEASE. A PERSON-CENTERED PERSPECTIVE

Health, illness and disease are terms that appear to be used interchangeably amongst health professionals when describing their roles and responsibilities. However, health, illness and disease are distinctively different entities. Health, illness and dis-ease, the original meaning of the term disease, are subjective states, whereas disease now defines an objective pathologic/patho-physiologic state. Health, illness and dis-ease are experienced as much in the presence as absence of identifiable “pathology” and result from the experiential dynamics that define complex adaptive states. These states result from the dynamic interactions between the somatic, psychological, social and semiotic or cognitive domains that characterize a person’s integrity. These insights are the basis for a proposed re-definition of health.

Scanning the Dynamics of Participatory Research (PRIT) in Heritage Tourism Management: The Case of Chitharal in Tamil Nadu, India

Chitharal, located at Kanyakumari District in Tamil Nadu, South India is quite an amazing and enamouring heritage destination preserved by the Archaeological Survey of India. Tourism being a multi-disciplinary area must be open to innovative yet impactful research methods. The researcher in this work conceptualizes and adopts the Participatory Research in Tourism (PRIT) approach devised over the years, in consonance with the fabric of tourism, which is a people-centric and activities based academic subject. This study attempts to map the experiential dynamics of a chosen group of tourists who possess extraordinary interests and affinity for heritage manifestations. The various parameters to be analysed, coded, and inferred are pre-determined by the researchers by way of a preliminary visit and empirical observations, collection of tourist literature, compilation of expert opinion and review of literature and travel blogs. They are recorded for every individual member of the group on a real-time basis by the accompanying researchers. Many an aspect is researched on the spot. The present study is the first work in this direction which can be shaped and nourished to form a productive method of research in tourism. In the present paper the behavioral aspects of tourists are also recorded at Chitharal - an unsung tourism haven and Jain heritage destination.

Challenges in the history of colours: The case of saffron

This article delineates the emergence of saffron as a colour of national importance in the late 1920s, when Nehru recognised it as an ‘old colour’, and Suniti Kumar Chatterji claimed that it was symbolic of ‘Indian life’, thus elevating it from its humble position as a kacha colour. The need to assess such claims has prompted a longue durée approach to unravel the complexities of writing a history of colours in the Indian milieu. An attempt has been made to analyse the role played by history in defining saffron and equating it with Hinduism—marginalising the colour red in the process. This study argues that through a selective interpretation of the past, regional and local usages and meanings of geru, kesari or kusumba came to mean a well defined shade of saffron in the second half of the 1920s and were eventually equated with the nation’s history. At another level, this is a story of the triumph of history over the past, precision over ambivalence, singularity over multiplicity, standardisation over fluidity, and knowledge over the experiential dynamics of seeing.

Cross-temporal explorations: Notes on fashion and nostalgia

Abstract The article explores intersections among nostalgia, the circulation of images and temporalities of fashion. It traces shifting meanings of nostalgia from its spatial connotation as a diagnosis for homesickness to its temporal connotation as longing for the past. While homesickness became counterproductive to ideals of modernity, consumer culture became a key site for the processing of spatio-temporal longings – potentially associated with the production of ‘false’ memories. This article highlights how nostalgia and memory are dynamically configured and intimately bound up with the development of sociotechnical practices, mediation and commodification. Uses and experiences of nostalgia range from the idealization of the past to its demystification. A perspective on the current enactment of nostalgia through vintage dress and photography points to its potencies in embodied practice as performative exploration of the experiential dynamics of temporality and being/becoming in time.

‘I feel more at home here than in my own community’: Approaching the emotional geographies of neighbourhood policy

This article explores the dynamics of UK neighbourhood policy in a new way, by bringing together an attention to emotions and identities in social policy governance with approaches to the experiential dynamics of place from social and cultural geography. The article draws on two sets of fieldwork among residents and professional workers in ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods in the UK. These neighbourhoods frame contradictory emotional dynamics for both citizens and workers, in particular around geographies of ‘deprivation’ and ‘community’, producing multiple experiences of closeness and distanciation, inclusion and exclusion, visibility and invisibility. The article shows how the processes and outcomes of neighbourhood policy interventions are unavoidably bound up with these complex emotional geographies of place, especially those that seek to engage residents in change, and that this makes such policy interventions fragile and time-consuming.

Wanting, having, and needing: Integrating motive disposition theory and self-determination theory.

Four studies explored the motivational and experiential dynamics of psychological needs, applying both self-determination theory and motive disposition theory. In all 4 studies, motive dispositions toward achievement and affiliation ("wanting" particular experiences) predicted corresponding feelings of competence and relatedness ("having" those experiences). Competence and relatedness in turn predicted well-being, again indicating that these 2 experiences may really be "needed." Illuminating how wanting gets to having, in Studies 2 and 3, participants reported greater self-concordance for motive-congruent goals, which, in longitudinal Study 3, predicted greater attainment of those goals and thus enhanced well-being. Study 4 replicated selected earlier results using an implicit as well as an explicit motive disposition measure. Supporting the presumed universality of competence and relatedness needs, in no studies did motive dispositions moderate the effects of corresponding need-satisfaction on well-being. Discussion focuses on a "sequential process" model of psychological needs that views needs as both motives that instigate and outcomes that reward behavior.