Modes Of Experience Research Articles

Navigating the body’s double nature in a sedentary environment: Swedish primary school children’s use of physical activity during the school day

ABSTRACT The structuring of time and space in schools influences when children’s bodies should be active and when they should be still. The growing interest in physical activity interventions in schools today highlights a pattern where schools act as sites meant to regulate and educate children’s bodies according to adult-centric interests. Drawing on existential phenomenology, particularly the dual nature of the body as both object and subject, this article examines how children themselves use physical activity in school. Sixty-three children aged 8 – 13 in Sweden participated in semi-structured focus groups where they discussed the significance of movement for them in the school environment. Reflexive thematic analysis in an ‘experiential mode’ was used to understand how the children related to their bodies in terms of objectivity and subjectivity, creating different types of incentives for movement. This is illustrated through two themes: ‘Physical activity for a healthy body (The body as object)’, which shows how children use physical activity based on instrumental motives, and ‘The sentient body (The body as subject)’, where the feeling body is presented in two states: both as trapped and as liberated. The children used movement as a way to balance the structuring of time and place imposed by their school environment, which generated various subjective corporeal states. Thus, the analysis shows that the school environment produces subjective bodies that children understand in objective terms influenced by contemporary health discourses, which in turn shapes their use of movement.

Sameness and Solidarity in the Supervisory Environment

Supervisees who have experienced disturbing therapeutic incidents that undermined their professional self‐experiences need a supervisory environment of sameness and solidarity to process and learn from these lived experiences. To create such an environment, supervisors need to minimize the sense of safety asymmetry between themselves and their supervisees by awakening to the ‘dark,’ ominous truths of professional life. This process is facilitated by summoning memories of therapeutic experiences of failure, vulnerability and frustration at having insufficient time to achieve wished‐for therapeutic goals. Awakening to these truths inspires a dark experiential mode that helps the supervisor share the supervisee's destiny and existential anxiety. Despite the contradiction between the dark and the playful, experiential modes, both are essential for creatively understanding the supervisee's disturbing therapeutic experiences and learning from them. Moreover, when these modes are interwoven, they enrich and strengthen the supervisory process by diversifying the supervisory dyad's ways of perceiving the unfolding therapeutic interaction and of coping with supervisory challenges.

Childhood’s Charms and Nature’s Enchantments: Listening to Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance

AbstractEnescu’s Impressions d’enfance is notable for the ways in which it evokes a childlike fascination with the world. This article considers not only how this experiential mode is constructed, but also how the topic of childhood overlaps with Enescu’s conception of an enchanted dwelling-place, particularly in the context of how humans interact with the natural world. I argue that exploring such ‘strategies of enchantment’ and their musical framing allows not only for a more nuanced understanding of Enescu’s aesthetics and his music, but also of the role that enchantment as an aesthetic category occupies within musical modernity more broadly.

Sensing weather: scientific and experiential modes of knowledge production for small-scale farming in western Kenya

Abstract. Agriculture depends in large part on relations with weather phenomena, such as rain and temperature. Anticipatory knowledge about the atmosphere therefore is vital in agricultural livelihoods. Based on an ethnographic case study of weather forecasting for small-scale farming in western Kenya, in this paper I discuss different ways in which knowledge about the future weather is produced. While development organizations promote expert forecasts that draw on meteorological sensing technologies as a solution to dealing with climate change, I show how knowing the weather is an entangled affair in a sensory assemblage that simultaneously draws on scientific instruments and on other entities such as animals, plants, clouds and embodied sensoria associated with experiential knowledge. Building on concepts related to science and technology studies that address the relations between humans and nonhumans, I suggest to treat scientific and experiential devices symmetrically by looking at their more-than-human sensoria, proxies and imaginations to understand how farmers attune to the weather. In practice, then, navigating the uncertainties of the weather is not enabled by scientific meteorology alone, but by combining different sensory devices and practices of interpretation that together mediate the weather as something to be known and acted upon.

Reproducing experiential meaning in translation: A systemic functional linguistics analysis on translating ancient Chinese poetry and prose in political texts.

Ancient Chinese poetry and prose (ACPP) are the essence of traditional Chinese culture and also literary gems of the world. Despite the long tradition of previous Chinese Presidents using ACPP in their political addresses, the translation work on the three volumes of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China with much ACPP still poses a daunting challenge to the translation of literary texts in non-literary texts. As experiential meaning is inherent in all kinds of texts, literature, and non-literature, this study, drawing on the sights of Halliday's experiential mode of meaning and register theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), explored how the ACPP's experiential meaning was rendered in the political texts, and factors motivating transitivity patterns and shift tendencies. Statistics showed that the translations tend to reproduce the experiential meaning such that it involves more representations of the flow of events and the creation of relationships among entities, focusing more on construing the experience of the physical world rather than personal emotions, feelings, or cognition. Besides, the target text is also inclined to simplify the experiential meaning by compressing and omitting unnecessary transitivity processes and the participant and circumstance nominalization. This research found that the factors responsible for such tendencies include the features of political texts, language differences, the distribution of process types, the delicacy of the transitivity system, and register variations of fields of activity. With these findings, the study is expected to contribute to the SFL approach of studying literary translation in non-literary texts through the prism of experiential meaning and offer guidance in the translation of political literature with ACPP.

Knowing the Knowing. Non-dual Meditative Practice From an Enactive Perspective.

Within a variety of contemplative traditions, non-dual-oriented practices were developed to evoke an experiential shift into a mode of experiencing in which the cognitive structures of self-other and subject–object subside. These practices serve to de-reify the enactment of an observing witness which is usually experienced as separate from the objects of awareness. While several contemplative traditions, such as Zen, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta emphasize the importance of such a non-dual insight for the cultivation of genuine wellbeing, only very few attempts in contemplative science have turned toward the study of non-dual-oriented practices. This article starts from a recently developed theoretical cognitive science framework that models the requirements of a temporary experiential shift into a mode of experiencing free from cognitive subject–object structure. This model inspired by the enactive approach contributes theoretically grounded hypotheses for the much-needed rigorous study of non-dual practices and non-dual experiences. To do so, three steps are taken: first, common elements of non-dual-oriented practices are outlined. Second, the main ideas of enactive cognitive science are presented including a principled theoretical model of what is required for a shift to a pure non-dual experience, that is, an experiential mode that is unbound by subject–object duality. Third, this synthesized theoretical model of the requirements for the recognition of the non-dual is then compared with a specific non-dual style of meditation practice, namely, Mahāmudrā practice from Tibetan Buddhism. This third step represents a heuristic for evaluating the external coherence of the presented model. With this, the aim is to point toward a principled enactive view of non-dual meditative practice. In drawing the implications of the presented model, this article ends with an outlook toward next steps for further developing a research agenda that may fully address the concrete elements of non-dual practices.

On Some Epistemological Advantages of the Notion of “Intervenient Aesthetic Field”

The reality of the aesthetic seems to manifest itself more and more in relational and immersive ways that defy analyses that follow the trail of the modern tradition of philosophy, based on the dual gnoseological relationship between subject and object. Even some areas of the new cognitive sciences seem to converge towards a conception of experience as a complex horizon in which variously related vectors operate. From this point of view, it is worth exploring the notion of “field” as a conceptual tool to describe the aesthetic. In this paper we will consider two possible uses of this notion in reference to the aesthetic: to describe experiential modes (following Arnold Berleant), and to describe social dynamics (following Pierre Bourdieu). Yet, the starting point will be some considerations provided by Peter Abbs. We will thus try to show how the notion of “aesthetic field” can be consonant with scientific settings that advocate models of mind that stress its being extended and situated. A particular test bed will be the psychology of art as a discipline spanning philosophical knowledge and empirical investigation. In this key will also be considered the so-called “experiential revolution” in psychology, which indicates an extra-cognitive horizon variously coinciding with the perspective of an aesthetic research focused on the conception of aisthesis as a system of practices of perception, emotion, and expression. According to this conception, the dynamics within the aesthetic field, such as those related to the nexus between perceptual contents and aesthetic properties, or between emotional content and the practices of sensing could prove to be dynamics of “intervenience,” rather than of supervenience.

Teaching through urban sensorium: urban spatiality as a smart learning environment

This paper qualitatively analyses the implication of urban sensorium as a pedagogic mode in the teaching of Urban Studies. Underpinned by the frames of smart learning environments, the paper reiterates experiencing urban ontologies as spatial learning environments. By drawing from a range of transdisciplinary and experiential modes of learning, this paper maps how an undergraduate course on Bangalore city in India served learners to critically engage with and experience spatial urban ontologies both digitally, and in real-world experiences of learning, furthering learner autonomy and reflection. The methodological prisms of this paper are autoethnography and critical reflection. It is organised around enabling learners recognize the experiential, embodied urban spaces through the urban sensorium via real-life engagements with urban spaces, and creation of digital portfolios that map this learning. Findings from the learners’ knowledge of sensory learning, the city’s intersectional aspects, and the student’s embodied and emplaced self in built environments and digital spaces are analysed via cognitive and affective-reflection levels; the course instructor's reflection is analysed via a process-reflection level. These reflections hold implications for the pedagogy of urban studies in undergraduate classrooms by foregrounding spatiality and urban sensorium as significant critical and affective pedagogic tools. The paper has also accommodated critical engagement with an external faculty member as a co-author, in order to manage any bias or researcher subjectivity in the design.

Filme, música e experiência sensória: questões em torno de um projeto de filmagem de performances musicais participativas

Abstract This text sets out to discuss questions arising from the work of filming Brazilian popular festivals, celebrations and rituals in which music-making involves a process of collective musical production, practices linked to what Turino (2008) has called ‘participatory music.’ By making music together, the participants take part in intense non-verbal social interactions that very often reach a collective climax or trace, an experience difficult to translate into words. How can film express and communicate this type of musical experience involving all the senses? Setting out from technical guidelines developed in a project to film participative musical performances for a documentary series, Taquaras, Tambores e Violas, the text aims to reflect on the potential of the audiovisual medium as an experiential mode that both apprehends the musical context and enables the spectator to access and discover the participatory performances depicted through the evoked experience and senses.

Total Cinema, Total Theatre, Total World: From Set as Architecture to Set as Virtual Performer

Sets are a construction within André Bazin’s “recreation of the world in its own image.” During the 1920s, advances in film stock (which improved image clarity) and better lenses (which expanded depth of field) meant that the visual fidelity of sets had to increase. Most critical was more sophisticated camera motion. Cranes could now take the camera into sets, which required more complete environments. Sets have mutated and spread ever since. Architects began working in the movie industry and movie people began working as architects. With the introduction of the first Disney theme park, this practice became codified and thematic placemaking has since proliferated globally. Sets later provided the blueprint for digital games, and as embodied in the game engine have reached virtual holism. Today, Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft pairs LED display walls with game engine technology on a soundstage called the Volume. StageCraft replaces both CGI and the traditional set with mixed reality, photorealistic digital environments. Filmmakers can also make design changes in real time and move these virtual backgrounds around the players. This article posits a new history of the spatial philosophy of set design in which the experiential mode of themed spaces, video games, and virtual reality each become a unified recombination of Bazin’s rigid theatre/ cinema dichotomy.

Embodied Reflection of Images as an Arts-Based Research Method: Teaching Experiment in Higher Education

This paper discusses a teaching experiment in which 20 university students in Finland participated in the course Critical and Novel Approaches to Management and Organisational Studies, which familiarized them with the method of embodied reflection of images. First, the paper presents the method and the teaching experiment. Then, it presents and discusses the students’ experiences while experimenting with the method. The students’ written reflections form the data of the study, which were analyzed qualitatively using content analysis. The findings of this small-scale study show that the method of embodied reflection of images provided students with a novel perspective into management and organization, fostered collaboration, and promoted critical thinking. In addition, rational knowledge was furnished with experiential and affective modes of knowledge. Based on students’ positive feedback, the experiment succeeded in elucidating the method and its applicability in research on management and organization. This study promotes teaching arts-based research methods in higher education.

Expressivity and Transformation through Language in Work with Serious Disorder

ABSTRACT Amidst today’s growing interest in nonverbal modalities, I highlight the value of language with some seriously disordered patients, using excerpts from a case. Drawn upon theories in philosophy and psychoanalysis, language is viewed broadly as entailing semantic and phonetic aspects, yielding a range of expressivity serving concreteness, expulsiveness, and/or symbolic thought. I apply these theories to fragmented psyches and illustrate how language can reveal, and instantiate, disparate entities of self and object, including psychotic forms, that beset such minds, helping the analyst forge a cohering container. Citing Ogden, I also describe how talking itself can become an experiential mode of transformation, if the analyst finds the genre of talking that promotes dreaming and the patient’s own discovery of meaning.

Characterizing and Shaping the Formation Process of Embodied Experience of Chinese Outbound Volunteer Tourists

ABSTRACT Volunteer tourism has been increasingly developed as an experiential mode of alternative tourism option. Apart from the western sources of volunteer tourists, potential market from mainland China is gaining more academic and marketing attention, with its distinctive characteristics of volunteer spirit and embodied experience. This study presents a qualitative content analysis of the collection of online travel notes provided by Chinese volunteer tourists between January 2016 and June 2019. Based on the Embodiment Theory (ET), this study elucidates the characteristics and the formation process of the embodied volunteer tourist experience, especially the components during their stay in the destinations. The content-analyzed components were further verified by an Exploratory Factor Analysis to extract the determinants to the embodiment of volunteer experience. Confirmation Factor Analysis was then performed using a sample of 211 volunteer tourism participants to create a relational structure of the dimensions of volunteer tourist experience. These results shape and advances the theoretical understanding of the volunteer tourist experience by Chinese participants, and provide practical implications to the planning, organization, and management of volunteer tourism destinations.

Consumer Identity and Loyalty in Electronic Product Offline Brand Operation: The Moderator Effect of Fanship

Continuous enhancements of the intelligence of electronic products can lead to the homogenization of products and innovation of offline experiential marketing modes. The diversified development of brand sales channels is inevitable, to fulfill the diversified shopping demands of consumers. Based on 226 valid questionnaires, this study conducts empirical research with SPSS and AMOS to examine the impact of experience characteristics on consumer brand identity and brand loyalty. Then, the fanship consumer attribute is added to conduct path-moderating analysis. The results illustrated the following: (a) consumers act and relate experiences, which affects brand cognitive identity; thinking, acting, and relating experiences positively affect brands’ emotional identity; (b) cognitive identity and emotional identity can jointly create brand loyalty, and play a partial mediating role between offline experience and brand loyalty. Finally, the higher the fanship, the higher the consumer identity and the higher the brand loyalty. Overall, this study provides a certain basis for decision-making and suggestions for the offline operation of electronic brands.

The Phenomenology of “Pure” Consciousness as Reported by an Experienced Meditator of the Tibetan Buddhist Karma Kagyu Tradition. Analysis of Interview Content Concerning Different Meditative States

A philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist conversed with Buddhist lama Tilmann Lhündrup Borghardt (TLB) about the unresolved phenomenological concerns and logical questions surrounding “pure” consciousness or minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), a quasi-contentless, non-dual state whose phenomenology of “emptiness” is often described in terms of the phenomenal quality of luminosity that experienced meditators have reported occurs in deep meditative states. Here, we present the excerpts of the conversation that relate to the question of how it is possible to first have and later retrieve such non-dual states of selflessness and timelessness that are unrelated to sensory input. According to TLB, a “pure” experience of consciousness contains the phenomenal quality of luminous clarity, which is experienced solely in the transitional phase from the non-dual state of absolute emptiness to the state of minimal emptiness, when the person gradually returns to duality. However, this quality of luminous clarity can also be experienced in non-minimal states as in the experiential mode of being awakened. TLB describes this transition as a kind of ephemeral afterglow in the form of a maximally abstract phenomenal quality, i.e., luminosity, which justifies the conclusion of having been in a state of “pure” consciousness.

Participant Reports of Mindfulness, Posttraumatic Growth, and Social Connectedness in Psilocybin-Assisted Group Therapy: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

The primary objective of this qualitative study was to explore the therapeutic trajectories of individuals undergoing psilocybin-assisted group therapy. This interpretive phenomenological analysis focused on an enriched study sample of gay-identified cisgender men ( n = 9) with human immunodeficiency virus diagnosed before 1996 and clinically significant trauma symptoms. Microphenomenological interviews were carried out 1 day after participants’ individual psilocybin sessions to elicit fine-grained descriptions of the psilocybin-assisted treatment. Two major thematic change processes were identified using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. During their psilocybin sessions, participants reported transitioning out of habitual, evaluative modes of processing and into mindful, experiential modes of processing (from “autopilot” to “meta-aware”). Freed from their emotionally avoidant tendencies, participants were able to process and release previously disowned feelings (grief, shame) and access relational and self-transcendent feelings and prosocial attitudes (joy, gratitude, love, care, compassion). The treatment also supported processes of meaning-making and the realization of posttraumatic growth (in psychological, relational, spiritual dimensions) as participants integrated past traumas into their life narratives and identities (from “trauma-dominant” to “growth-dominant”). These findings suggest that administering adjunctive group therapy with psilocybin may enhance the effectiveness of trauma processing by reinforcing social cohesion, safety, trust, and belonging. These data provide the first empirical suggestion of psilocybin’s efficacy in alleviating trauma symptoms in a group-facilitated format and provide a deeper understanding of the potential psychological change processes involved in this novel treatment approach.

Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century AmericaRespawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life

Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century AmericaRespawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life

Eating and Being Eaten: The Meanings of Hunger among Marind

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how Marind communities in West Papua experience and interpret hunger. Drawing from Indigenous discourse and practice, I examine how agro-industrial expansion and commodified foodways provoke multiple, conflicting hungers among Marind – for sago, “plastic” foods, money, and human flesh. In tandem, Marind themselves are subjected to the insatiable appetite of various invasive entities – corporations, the government, roads, cities, and oil palm. I argue that hunger constitutes a symbolically charged, culturally constructed, and morally laden experiential mode through which Marind characterize and contest capitalist modernity and its more-than-human dynamics of eating and being eaten.

Cognitive mechanisms underlying interaction and contribution in online health communities: the perspectives of doctors and patients

PurposeActive interaction and knowledge contribution are vital yet challenging elements of the sustainable development of online health communities (OHCs). To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying these behaviours in doctors' and patients' use of OHCs, this study develops a theoretical model to examine the relationships among cognitive modes, patterns of interaction, perceived usefulness, and contribution behaviour and the impact of user identity on these relationships.Design/methodology/approachTo test the research hypotheses, structural equation modelling and multiple-group analysis were used to analyse survey data from 207 doctors and 213 patients.FindingsThe results indicate that dual processes and perceived usefulness are the key cognitive antecedents of interaction and knowledge contribution, respectively. However, the correlation of the rational mode and instrumental interaction is significantly stronger in the doctors' group than in the patients' group, while a stronger correlation between the experiential mode and instrumental interaction is observed in the patients' group.Practical implicationsThese findings support the development of information and system strategies to support the operation of dual processes underlying doctors' and patients' instrumental and affective interactions, facilitate evaluation and sense-making of interaction activities, and motivate knowledge contribution.Originality/valueThis study uncovers the invariance and variability in the relationships between salient cognitive activities and behavioural responses in doctors' and patients' use of OHCs and the impact of user identity on variability.

The Poetics of Allegory and Enchantment in Melville's Americas

This essay addresses the poetics as well as the politics of comparison in Melville's two short fictions that represent the territories and oceanic environs of Spanish America: "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" and "Benito Cereno." I argue that the hemispheric poetics of these narratives are not ethnographic so much as allegorical, generating what José de Onís has called the "vital" figurative relation in Melville's work between "the two Americas." Drawing on Walter Benjamin's and Paul de Man's theorizations of "allegory" as a dialectical mode, I show how Melville's allegorical fictions deploy "enchantment" both as an experience and as a style. That is, they invite us to take pleasure in enchantment while also thinking critically about how its effects are produced and registered. I suggest that enchantment provides the engine for Melville's American allegories, signaling the contingency and complicity of the United States within hemispheric histories of exchange and exploitation. While "enchantment" in Melville's fiction is not unique to "the two Americas," I argue that this poetic and experiential mode has a particular resonance in articulating the uncanny likeness as well as the inscrutable difference between hemispheric North and South.