Experiential Worlds Research Articles

An Introduction

An Introduction

Creative Experience–Multiple Worlds, Projects, Emotions, and Endpoints: On Glăveanu & Beghetto’s Definition of Creativity

ABSTRACT Glăveanu & Beghetto recently proposed defining creativity as the experience of novel person-world encounters with features of open-endedness, non-linearity, pluri-perspectives, and future orientation. This comment joins the discussion by bringing the phenomenological concepts of William James and Alfred Schütz into the conversation. They pointed out that, over time, we inhabit different realities, different experiential worlds, among them: the everyday world, the worlds of dreams, play, day- dreaming, music, and scientific theorizing. Each world has distinctive features with respect to the sense of self, sociality, time, typical action, and what is taken for granted. The worlds may affect one other simultaneously and successively in a figure-ground relation including the possibility of sudden reversals. Phenomenological concepts do not isolate the creative process in the mind of the creators. Examples show how encounters in creative worlds typically are embodied, involve interaction with the environment, and often are collaborations in a shared world with others. The process leading to intended products is usually non-linear, going in and out of different worlds with accompanying motives and emotions as central aspects. The process may have two kinds of endpoints, be difficult to determine, or indeterminate. Implications include possible directions for research and applications to education.

"Life is about trying to find a better place to live": Discourses of dwelling in a pro-recovery suicide forum.

In the two decades since the advent of Web 2.0, scholars of cybersuicide have identified many beneficial and harmful uses of the internet. However, the discursive meanings interactionally created by suicide website users have scarcely been attended to. The present study uses the theory and method of cultural discourse analysis (CuDA) to arrive at meanings about place that radiate from online communication among users of SuicideForum.com (SF), a pro-recovery website. Analyses of 2,119 posts across 131 threads reveal two overarching discursive themes. The first speaks to problematic discourses about place, including the role of placelessness and entrapment in the genesis of suicidality and its affective states, leading to further diminution of experiential worlds. The second theme taps into participants' notions of what constitutes safe spaces, such as the presence of empathetic others who respect one's timetable for personal disclosure, and the freedom to experiment with new ways of inhabiting the world. The study has numerous implications for clinical practice, including recasting psychological disturbances in terms of self-world relations and reconsidering involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in light of forum participants' preoccupation with entrapment.

Visual inquiry: a method for exploring the emotional, cognitive and experiential worlds in practice development, research and education

Visual inquiry: a method for exploring the emotional, cognitive and experiential worlds in practice development, research and education

Play between worlds: Inchcolm Project

Inchcolm Project was a proof of concept that aimed to make apparent the connections between video games and performance, and to blur the lines between physical and virtual worlds and bodies. In designing the two-hour experience on Inchcolm Island in the Firth of Forth we drew on both theatre and game design methods and brought the world of a video game, Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012), to life on Inchcolm. What resulted was an interplay between two islands, one real and one virtual, and three experiential worlds, the world of the performance (Dear Rachel), the world of the game (Dear Esther) and Inchcolm Island, as a world in and of itself, its physical presence in constant tension with the visiting worlds.

Writing with the sea: reflections on in/experienced encounters with ocean space

How does being with the sea change how we write about the sea? This article is constructed as a reflective/reflexive consideration of being at sea as part of an experimental week-long symposium held on board an 80-foot yacht in the Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand, in early 2016. The event focused on the ways society lives with the sea in the 21st century – how awareness is raised and action is instigated – in light of growing threats to ocean spaces worldwide. While generating conversation on this theme, the location of the symposium was also pivotal in generating embodied knowledge of the topic under investigation. This article follows the afterthoughts of the symposium organiser (an outdoor educator and professional yacht skipper) and an attendee (a geographer of the sea, non-swimmer and first-time sailor). It investigates how academic events that take place in place – in this case at sea – may generate unique knowledge on conference themes, and for academic work more generally, by opening up new experiential worlds.

Incommensurable Worlds and the Analyst’s Trauma: Reply to Maduro and Coburn

Maduro’s article is seen to constitute a powerful and moving autobiographical study through which his cardinal principles of rigorous relationality, affectivity, and the courage to know have emerged. Building on Maduro’s suggestion that the intersubjective can serve as analogue to resolving incommensurable paradigms, I have proposed the more general thesis that inter-conceptual incommensurabilities inevitably carry the traces of an underlying clash of experiential worlds. I have also suggested that absolutisms are not universals but arise out of specific trauma informed relational contexts. Coburn’s article is seen to be a clinical study of apparently incommensurable experiential worlds. By bringing the abstract and lived forms of complexity theory into a playful relational dance, the analytic dyad was able to create a third world whereby resolution of intersubjective impasse was accompanied by a more nuanced understanding of a complexity sensibility that takes into account individual agency. The discussion concludes with a brief comment on dialogic possibilities between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

"Roots and Routes": Professional Educators’ Transformative Insights Into the Linguistic and Experiential Worlds of Generation 1.5 Language Minority Students

This article explores findings of a project that addressed the academic literacy development of children who are born and/or begin their formal schooling in Canada, but who are raised in homes where the societally dominant language is not the primary idiom. It focuses on collaborating educators’ professional learning through engagement in community-referenced action research that provided opportunities for eighth graders to explore themes related to their developing personal and socially situated identities. One key insight pertained to students’ access to information regarding their family histories and trajectories; a second, to linguistic dynamics internal to generation 1.5 linguistic minority youths’ households.

Struggling Readers’ “Noticings” to Make Meaning of Picture Books

For today's elementary teacher, comprehension instruction must include strategies that include viewing to make sense of information in multimodal texts. Using case study methodology, this research describes the extent of how struggling readers notice images in picture books in order to make meaning. Data sources include written transcriptions of 13 video-taped reading sessions, the participants' criterion-based fluency measures and word identification proficiencies per book, and the researcher's field notes. Results reveal the participants most often noticed visual information in interpreting and then used the visual memory of these noticings to decode and increase oral reading accuracy. The results further reveal the ways in which the second graders' processed nonverbal information by (1) transacting with images/text via socio-cultural references, (2) interpreting images via representational aspects of the world, interactions of social relations, and compositions of integrated texts, and (3) questioning images/text. While noticings of visual information exceed noticings of verbal/written information, the students' meaning-making transactions are apparent with both images and text. Frequently, the participants' processing of information includes noticing the composition of an image. Yet, interpretations reference representations from their experiential worlds, such that gaps between what is represented/noticed and what the students' knew from prior experiences generated questions.

Books by John Cutting

Books by John Cutting

Divided space, divided attitudes? Comparing the Republics of Moldova and Pridnestrovie (Transnistria) using simultaneous surveys

Has 20 years of separation between the Republics of Moldova and Pridnestrovie (Transnistria, PMR) generated a division in attitudes and beliefs in the two populations? Using near-simultaneous social scientific surveys from the summer of 2010 in the two republics, we measured four localized geopolitical divides: the local economies, historical memories, political legitimacies, and geopolitical orientations. Our findings challenge the notion that Moldova’s territorial disunion has produced separate experiential and attitudinal worlds. Complicating geopolitical commentary that locates an East-West fault-line running through Moldova, we find that separateness has not created an attitudinal chasm, but prospects of ending the separation are not supported by the surveys.

Islam and the postsecular

AbstractThe language of the ‘postsecular’ acknowledges the enduring presence of faith in politics, repudiating secularisation theses claiming diminution or privatisation of religion in social and political life. In cognitive and experiential worlds, those presumably unfettered by these conceptions (for example, the Islamic Cultural Zones or ICZs), the postsecular presents a different order of challenge and possibility. The term ICZs refers to Muslim majority areas informed by transnational subjectivities loosely connecting varied Islamic societies around symbolic commonality, memory, and historical experience. The term stresses the plurality of Islamic cultural experience, albeit distinguished by recognisable semiotic markers, without essentialising Islamic identity. This article questions the hegemonic view pervasive in both secular and postsecular theorising of the fiction of immutability of faith in the ICZs and recognises its rupture and displacement under conditions of late modernity. The ontological dislocation in the character of religion itself under conditions of late modernity opens up the possibility to account for the assumed resistance of Islam to secular modernity, but also to explain Islam's imbrications in politics read under the sign of Political Islam. Paradoxically, under the condition of late modernity, a more homogenised Islam appears to crystallise in the ICZs at odds with an ‘open’ Islam.

The Senses in Language and Culture

ABSTRACTMultiple social science disciplines have converged on the senses in recent years, where formerly the domain of perception was the preserve of psychology. Linguistics, or Language, however, seems to have an ambivalent role in this undertaking. On the one hand, Language with a capital L (language as a general human capacity) is part of the problem. It was the prior focus on language (text) that led to the disregard of the senses. On the other hand, it is language (with a small “l,” a particular tongue) that offers key insights into how other peoples conceptualize the senses. In this article, we argue that a systematic cross-cultural approach can reveal fundamental truths about the precise connections between language and the senses. Recurring failures to adequately describe the sensorium across specific languages reveal the intrinsic limits of Language. But the converse does not hold. Failures of expressibility in one language need not hold any implications for the Language faculty per se, and indeed can enlighten us about the possible experiential worlds available to human experience.

Computing for human experience: Semantics-empowered sensors, services, and social computing on the ubiquitous Web

People are on the verge of an era in which the human experience can be enriched in ways they couldn't have imagined two decades ago. Rather than depending on a single technology, people progressed with several whose semantics-empowered convergence and integration will enable us to capture, understand, and reapply human knowledge and intellect. Such capabilities will consequently elevate our technological ability to deal with the abstractions, concepts, and actions that characterize human experiences. This will herald computing for human experience (CHE). The CHE vision is built on a suite of technologies that serves, assists, and cooperates with humans to nondestructively and unobtrusively complement and enrich normal activities, with minimal explicit concern or effort on the humans' part. CHE will anticipate when to gather and apply relevant knowledge and intelligence. It will enable human experiences that are intertwined with the physical, conceptual, and experiential worlds (emotions, sentiments, and so on), rather than immerse humans in cyber worlds for a specific task. Instead of focusing on humans interacting with a technology or system, CHE will feature technology-rich human surroundings that often initiate interactions. Interaction will be more sophisticated and seamless compared to today's precursors such as automotive accident-avoidance systems. Many components of and ideas associated with the CHE vision have been around for a while. Here, the author discuss some of the most important tipping points that he believe will make CHE a reality within a decade.

From Selfobjects to Dialogue

The intersubjective field concept is a doorway to a dialogical sensibility. A dialogical attitude recognizes just how thoroughly and intimately any effort to understand another implicates both parties in the dialogue. The therapist's task is to engage in a dialogue that stands the greatest chance of enabling the therapist to understand how our patients' experiences--and ours--make perfect sense at this time in this situation together, even when our patients' statements challenge our equilibrium or raise our defenses. In addition, many patients also struggle toward an engagement with their analyst not just as a repetitive figure (and not even as someone who merely serves their developmental needs). I think they strive for a more complex experience of the analyst in his or her subjectivity. Our ability to welcome them into our experiential worlds is often transformative in restoring a sense of dignity to emotionally alienated patients. An extended case example demonstrates these ideas.

Contextualist Sensibilities in Psychoanalysis: A Discussion of Judy Pickles's Case Presentation

This article explores Judith Pickles's case presentation through the lens of contextualism. Key questions are posed: How can we account for the nature and origin of an individual's personal lived experience? What are the theoretical and clinical implications of our quintessentially human need to substantiate what we feel to be subjectively true and real? And what is the nature of therapeutic action? It is concluded that an ongoing, dialogic, intersubjective playing with meaning reverberating across multiple experiential worlds is an essential ingredient in therapeutic action and the expansion of one's emotional horizons.

Discussion of Lucyann Carlton's “Out of the Box”

This discussion of Lucyann Carlton and Renee challenges current dissociative/multiple self theories and advances an alternate perspective centered on the idea of embodied and emotional memory. The author does this by drawing on organic systems conceptions of implicit relational knowing and on an experiential worlds idea of unconsciously organized memory, as well as on a rethinking of selfhood as embodied participation in human conversation. This kind of memory characterizes experiential worlds as a form of mutual inhabiting. From an intersubjective systems perspective, the author emphasizes the importance of understanding the experiential world of the analyst as well as that of the patient.

All of The Myriad Worlds: Life in the Akashic Plenum

This article explores some experiential implications of Laszlo's Akashic Field hypothesis as well as similar information-rich field models such as those suggested by Bohm and Sheldrake. It examines the implications of such models for both ordinary and anomalous human experience, and proposes the idea that these models allow for the possibility of alternative experiential worlds as real as ordinary “material” reality. Such alternative realities are posited by many, if not all, major mythic and religious systems, and are said to be directly experienced in certain contemplative and shamanic traditions as well as during postmortem and near-death experiences. We note that information-rich holographic fields may be able to store concentrated non-overlapping quantities of information that can be selectively activated by distinct eliciting stimuli. Individual human consciousness itself might constitute just such a stimulus, thus accounting for the individual and cultural variations on commonly shared motifs in shamanic, near death, and other experiences of alternative realities.

Potential contributions to disability theorizing and research from positive pyschology

Purpose. Within the context of taking the perspectives of disabled individuals themselves more seriously, it is imperative that researchers and practitioners accord due primacy to the experiential worlds and everyday lived experiences of individuals with disabilities. Based on the premise that theoretical groundedness (along with methodological rigour) is integral to sound research, it is argued that the existing body of knowledge regarding the lived experiences of individuals with disabilities may be complemented by a conceptual placing of understandings of disability in relation to a prominent theoretical pathway at the moment, namely, the interdisciplinary emphasis on human strengths and wellness.Method. A critical engagement with key conceptualizations of disability entailed a focus on the development, strengths, and challenges of medical, social and psychologically based conceptualizations of disability.Results and conclusion. The existing body of knowledge around disability may be extended and complemented by key concepts regarding human health/wellness from the field of Positive Psychology. Positive Psychology's keynote contribution to the study of disability and rehabilitation entails directing researchers and practitioners to the aim of building, reinforcing and extending disabled individuals' strengths and capacities in order to optimize their functioning in all areas of life, and thereby promote wellness.

Don?t You Know Me? Mutual Recognition in a Case of Mistaken Identity

Contemporary relational theories in psychoanalysis recognize the fully two-person nature of the clinical process. Both patient and therapist bring to the encounter their internal worlds in equal measure, each exerting constant influence on the other, to create a highly complex relational field. From this perspective, clinical vignettes should provide the same level of description of the therapist's as of the patient's contributions to the treatment process. It is argued that the body of clinical relational literature, in general, has not kept up with its rich theoretical contributions. This case vignette and discussion, both in structure and content, is an in-depth illustration of the mutual construction of the clinical process. Clinical material is offered from an extended phase of analytic treatment during which the therapeutic relationship and so the patient's possibilities for growth and change shifted from seeming stasis and impasse into new realms of experience of self and others. The author's intent is to demonstrate with specificity the ways in which the experiential worlds of patient and therapist collide and influence each other to create the intersubjective field that is the locus of therapeutic action and analysis. The phase of work described in this paper was challenging and ultimately successful due both to the severe and pervasive nature of the patient's struggles along with his underlying courage to persevere in the face of them, and to the ways in which the therapist's life experiences and capacities inescapably contributed to the shape, limitations and possibilities of the therapeutic process.