Felt Sense Research Articles

Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

How Cognitive Frames about Nature May Affect Felt Sense of Nature Connectedness

Abstract Nature connectedness tends to be understood as a relatively stable trait, studied using survey-based methods. But this approach is not well suited to investigating the nuances and unconsci...

Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters

Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters

Claiming What Is Rightfully Mine.

Although adopted persons did not choose to be adopted, their life-long task is to come to terms with its meaning, which includes absence of important information about their family health history. Problematic encounters with health care professionals inspired contributors' narratives recognizing compelling need for accurate information about themselves as well as access to empathic and resourceful medical professionals. A key issue pervading the narratives was loss: loss of birth name and identity, loss of birth relatives and history, and often loss of birth culture. In response to this deeply felt sense of loss, many authors expressed the need to claim what they believe to be rightfully theirs, namely, information about their own history. Policy and practice recommendations regarding training of health care professionals as well as access to original birth records and ongoing family health information are discussed.

Socio-economic and psychological problems of third gender people living with HIV/AIDS: A study in A.P.

Transgender means that one doesn’t view their birth gender as their “true” or “real” gender. Instead, a transgender person finds his or her true “self” somewhere along the spectrum of a wider concept of gender. Transgender people living with HIV/AIDS generally face gender identity crisis. Gender identity refers to a person’s internal deeply felt sense of being either male or female. Their gender expressions are different. Gender identity is internal and personally defined. Gender expression is external and socially perceived either masculine or feminine. Due to their gender identity crisis, they bear the brunt of social, economic and cultural marginalization and discrimination. The Supreme Court given favorable judgment on 15th April, 2014 and stated that these Transgender people should be recognized as” Third gender people or third sex”. It provided legal protection to them by giving education and employment opportunities to them and also any reservation in jobs etc., It also recognized their citizenship as par with other citizens of the country. The Supreme Court declared that they have reservation in education as well as employment opportunities. Welfare activities should be provided by the Central and State Governments. Trans Genders are high risk population in spreading HIV/AIDS. However, they don’t have any awareness on safe methods of following sexual behavior because of illiterate. The recent Supreme Court judgment was also not known to them due to lack of proper education. The police, Doctors, lawyers and the Government employers are the four pillars of our society. However, these people are discriminated by them and they don’t have necessary protection in the society. Family members often do not support transgender.&nbsp

Embodied self-awareness among South African social services therapist-practitioners: An exploratory study

We explored South African social service therapist-practitioners’ experiences of their own lived body in the context of practice. The participants consisted of a convenience sample of 13 therapist-practitioners registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa and the South African Council for Social Service Professions, in private practice (n = 9) or government departments (n = 4) in the Western Cape and Gauteng Provinces of South Africa. They provided data on their embodied self-awareness by means of naïve sketches and/or drawings, experiential body awareness activities, and in-depth one-on-one semi-structured interviews. Findings from the thematic analysis of the data indicated bodily self-awareness; including experiences of bodily felt sensations while doing therapy, intuitive knowing, a sense of warning/ danger, and a sense of the body-schema-in-relation. Most of the therapist-practitioners reported a tendency to deny, suppress, or control their sensory cues or to rationalise them. Embodied self-awareness appears to be a true phenomenon among South African therapist-practitioners.

Being Well and Leading Well

Purpose of the paper – The paper aims to raise awareness about the interconnected nature of lead-ers’ wellbeing and the wellbeing of the organisations which they head. Leaders have a key role to play in recognising individual and collective responsibilities and showing the way towards a more human and healthier way of life. The benefits of connecting mind, heart and the felt sense are high-lighted in the paper. It is argued that integrating practices of mindfulness and embodiment into the organisational culture can increase the levels of wellbeing, trust, honesty and the openness of com-munication. Design/methodology/approach – This is a proposition paper based on a critical review of some as-pects of the literature on leadership. Findings – The paper provides evidence to support the interconnected nature of leaders’ wellbeing and the wellbeing of their organisations. Development programmes are recommended to support not only the intellect but also the physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing of individuals. Research limitations/implications – This is a piece of secondary research and does not offer first-hand empirical evidence to support the findings. Originality/value – This paper highlights the need to study individual and organisational wellbeing in a more multi-disciplinary and interconnected way.

How Is a Label of Borderline Personality Disorder Constructed on Twitter: A Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACTThis research took a social constructionist stance and explored how Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is constructed by Twitter users who identify with this diagnostic label. Consistent with this position, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology was employed. The data comprised two-hundred and twenty-five tweets. Tweets from professionals, or links to blogs, were excluded, in an attempt to ensure only personal tweets were used. Two interpretative repertoires were produced from the analysis: BPD as an existence of tension and BPD as a different existence. The findings indicated that authors were involved in a negotiation between themselves and BPD, which had an impact upon their felt sense of agency/control over BPD. Likewise, authors constructed themselves in opposition to individuals who did not identify with the diagnosis of BPD. Whilst this provided more favourable positions, it potentially limited access to healthcare professionals and services. The research highlights the importance of the terminology and language clinicians employ when working with clients and other professionals, as they may inadvertently disempower or stigmatise. As CDA does not assume equivalence between individuals' accounts and their internal experiences, future research may need to explore the experience of stigmatisation through social networking sites.

Environmental Law from the Inside: Local Perspective, Local Potential

We live and learn in an allusion to nature, subject to a bit of mediation by cultural priorities to direct what we are experiencing. The thrust of this observation is that perception and experience are important both to understanding the relevance and effectiveness of how we relate to and regulate our natural surroundings. Referred to in this article as environmental law, the term is intended to distinguish local environmental governance capacity on grounds of how the environment is experienced. This article suggests that local needs should serve more of a driving role in the formulation of environmental law and policy. To accomplish this task, this article is intended to identify the footings and lay the foundation for local ecosystem governance based on the way communities regulate their environments locally as insiders to ecosystems. First, this article introduces the insider environmental perspective by observing the ways that the environment is experienced. This discussion helps in grasping how a perception of nature derives from experiences with it. This discussion also facilitates an understanding of why ecosystems are regulated differently by different levels of government. Second, this article distinguishes the value of insider environmental law from the more traditional understanding of local ecosystem governance as local protectionism. The act of being in an ecosystem prioritizes the notion that ecosystem governance is coextensive with local governance, where community identity, economy, equity and human well-being are fundamentally linked to the location and ecological place of community. Third, this article introduces ecosystem services to grasp the manner in which local perspective can be motivated by an open and honest consideration of the costs of environmental governance. The ecological economics of ecosystem services posits that where ecosystems fail, humans, and particularly humans as situated in communities, suffer real, calculable harm. Insider environmental law is, to its credit and confusion, concerned with the difficulties of identifying an objective description of environmental quality that is consistent with a real and felt sense of place.

The Feeling of Seeing: Factical Life in Salsa Dance

Salsa dancing, a partnered dance premised on the felt sense of connection, is well suited to an exploration of Henry’s radical phenomenology of immanence and Heidegger’s facticity of life. Birthed in social celebratory contexts, salsa carries a particular motile freedom. What matters most is not how the dance movements are created from an outer frame of reference, but the experience of interactive responsiveness that emerges from unanticipated acts of giving life to another. Connecting to one’s partner and exuding a presence filled with life is revealed in an indepth interview with two-time world champion salsa dancer, judge, choreographer and coach, Anya Katsevman. This interview attempts to invoke the kinetic, kinesthetic and affective registers of the lividness and livingness of salsa dancing. As a phenomenological inquiry into factical life, the inter-view is presented not so much as a matter of shared perspectives or viewpoints, but more in the way of an inter-feeling, a practice of life engagement. This affectively-oriented approach provides both promise and challenge to the field of phenomenology. It invites us to delve more deeply into feeling acts of seeing. It also helps us understand how, through attending more fully to acts of seeing, we can increase the intensity with which we feel the upsurge of life.

Naming and Calling

‘Naming and Calling: missing words’ by Lynette Hunter analyses the differences in Juliet’s ‘What’s in a name’ speech, found among editions printed during Shakespeare’s time, to explore the distinction between naming and calling. Naming is social, it conjures, it has power over the one who is summoned. Calling uses the ‘word’ to draw speaker and listener into a relational process. Shakespeare’s plays work at the fulcrum between earlier routes of power based on birth and blood, and different processes of selving that eventually coagulated into psychology. At the same time as words were recognised as loosened from divine and human control, they became more material as objects, and hence more elusive and unknowable, like the sentient beings who became ‘humanists’. Words are independent material objects that can never be named – they are always missing, and names that aim at them always miss. Names are anthropomorphic tools, words are materials in a person’s relational ecology. In the sixteenth century, naming transformed from an inheritable characteristic into a sociocultural identity that was tied to liberal capitalism and became known as a modern ‘subject’. Yet running alongside throughout the modern period is the echo of calling, of searching for the word that will generate the felt sense of the person, so they happen into becoming.

Tourism and gratitude: Valuing acts of kindness

Explorations of kindness and gratitude, a felt sense of thankfulness, are missing from tourism studies. Such explorations shed light on psychological value of relationships and social capital. We adopted a positive psychology theoretical lens to explore acts of kindness from strangers towards tourists and to understand how these acts are valued. To meet that aim, we conducted a study with twenty Canadian tourists. Through thematic analysis of semi structured, in-depth interviews, we identified these themes: trust in the other person; a sense of risk or adventurousness; novelty or authenticity of the experience; and eudaimonic growth, that is, receiving kindness from strangers indicated well-being beyond experiencing pleasures. Costs and benefits to benefactors were identified. We developed a model that explains how acts of kindness are personally valued by tourists.

Transgender Patient Screening: Breast Cancer Risk Assessment and Screening Recommendations .

When a discrepancy exists between an individual's biologic sex and the deeply felt sense of being male or female, a transgender orientation may result. . The purpose of this article is to summarize breast cancer risk assessment and screening recommendations for transgender individuals. . A review of the literature was done to determine if evidence-based screening guidelines exist for transgender individuals and how they can be applied to clinical practice. . Most of the available research is descriptive of this patient population and identifies barriers in accessing healthcare services rather than how to provide care. The medical community must address transgender individuals' specific healthcare needs in a comprehensive and affirmative manner.

Powerless to parent; powerless to protect: The experiences of alienated parents in the UK

Parental alienation is the unwarranted denigration or rejection of a parent where there was a previous loving relationship. Despite thirty years of study establishing its aetiology, preva-lence, appropriate interventions and outcomes for children, parental alienation remains a highly contentious concept in the UK. Additionally, there has been minimal exploration of the experiences of alienated parents across the globe. A recent Q analysis uncovered the subjective and intersubjective experiences of British alienated parents. An unexpected con-sensus became apparent which merited further analysis of the data. Through this phenome-nological exploration of the participants’ narratives, a pervasive sense of emerged. The source of this felt sense of powerlessness is considered and recommendations for policy and practice are suggested.

Using Aesthetic Response - A Poetic Inquiry to Expand Knowing, Part I: The Rx6-Method

A step-wise research procedure of arts-based research (ABR) called the Rx6 method is presented. This ABR method is informed by expressive arts therapy, heuristic inquiry, attachment theory, and contemporary affective neuroscience, and is aimed at deepening the understanding of embodied felt sense. The Rx6 approach is based in aesthetics and a pragmatic pre-understanding inspired from an interpretive and a constructivist tradition. The method is a heuristic endeavour where art is applied towards the creation of meaning. For the purpose of exemplifying this method, artwork, produced within the context of a randomized control trial as part of a mixed methods study involving women treated for gynaecological cancer, was used. Response art consisting of short written aesthetic responses to pictorial artifacts was applied in a structured manner. The data provided a rich artistic material in which to dialogue with artifacts in search of a condensed response statement. The Rx6 method involves six steps: to relate, resonate, respond, reflect and react to results. Engaging in ABR can offer clinicians and researchers a deepened, expanded, and embodied understanding of the studied phenomena. The complexity of sharing implicit processes and tacit knowledge, its caveats and gains, along with theoretical perspectives of such undertakings, are presented and discussed.

Using Aesthetic Response - A Poetic Inquiry to Expand Knowing, Part II: Theoretical Perspectives on Arts-based Research

Apart from being inspired from both an interpretive and a constructivist tradition, research methods based in aesthetics can thrive from a clear rationale concerning its perceptual building-blocks in both the intersubjective and intra-psychological domains. This article aims to address the complexity of sharing implicit processes and tacit knowledge in the arts-based inquiry. Layers of this inquiry is reflected along with theoretical perspectives of such undertakings. The article also offers a theoretical rationale for why to add and acknowledge important perceptual and affective building blocks in arts-based research (ABR). Through theories from expressive arts therapy, heuristic inquiry, attachment theory and contemporary affective neuroscience some thoughts on the embodied felt sense as a perceptual hub is shared. Based in contemporary attachment theory and psychotherapy research, a rationale is given for why engaging in ABR can offer clinicians and researchers a deepened understanding of the studied phenomena. Our undertakings are presented in part 1 of these two articles. From this embodied perspective, the described arts-based inquiry can be considered as a privileged way to nuance and enlarge understanding in both the intersubjective and intra-psychological domain, which could be particularly helpful to ABR researchers who are informed by a psychodynamic perspective.

Transferring Responsibility?

This article examines the influence and interpretation of international law in Australia’s policy and conduct regarding captured individuals during the recent Afghanistan Conflict. By critically analysing declassified government documents, Parliamentary statements, and original interview data with former Foreign Minister and Defence Minister Stephen Smith, I advance a two-pronged argument. First, contrary to what other sombre studies of the anti-torture norm might predict, Australia’s understanding of fundamental international legal rules pertaining to captured individuals in armed conflict – including the humane treatment principle and the prohibition on torture – helped regulate its policies and actions during the Afghan war. By regulate, the article posits that Australia’s policies and behaviour were governed or controlled in part by a felt sense of legal obligation among some key policy-makers. Second, like its allies Britain and Canada, Australia claimed it did not formally detain individuals during the initial years of the Afghanistan Conflict, even though it appears to have factually captured and transferred some people to United States (us) and Afghan authorities. As the war dragged on, and Australia’s troop contributions increased and local hostilities worsened, Australia – again like its allies – relied on detainee agreements and changed its conduct to try to protect captured individuals and transferees from abuse. Despite such agreements and changes, critics contend that transferred captives faced a significant risk of torture in Afghan jails, particularly those run by the country’s intelligence agency. This suggests that state and non-state views of what the prohibition on transferring to possible torture requires in practice are less settled than related shared understandings of other fundamental prisoner protections in international law and armed conflict.

Making Spiritual Sense of Disability

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Spiritual Care Australia National Conference held in Melbourne in 2016. The article explores the spiritual and relational significance of “felt sense” for children with special needs or “diffabilities” (Dubbeld 2015) in the context of Christian worship. “Diffabilities” is short for different abilities. There are three key areas used in this reflective article: (i) work by the Australian researcher, Hyde (2008) on the “felt sense” with regard to Christian understanding of spirituality and children; (ii) a neurophysiological perspective, the science of sensory integration in relationship to sensory processing difficulties (Kranowitz 1998) in children with “diffabilities”; (iii) and spirituality or the “multifaceted living of faith” (Schnieders 2003) in Christian worship for children with “diffabilties” whose experience and processing of sensory stimuli is significantly different to that of other children.

IS WITTGENSTEIN PRESENTING AREDUCTIO AD ABSURDUMARGUMENT IN THE ‘PRIVATE LANGUAGE’ SECTIONS OFPHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS§§ 243–315 ?

The ‘Private Language’ sections of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein: 1958) §§ 243–315 serve to undermine the idea that our ordinary felt sensations, e.g., of heat, or cold, or pain, together with our experienced impressions of colour or of sound, are ‘private’ or ‘inner’ objects, where an object mirrors in the mental realm what we associate with that of the physical. This paper explores Wittgenstein's method in these sections, together with the work of several of his commentators who agree with his ‘therapeutic’ approach to the denial of a possible private language. More significantly, however, it discovers a paradox in the fact that a number of philosophers who claim that his ‘Argument Against Private Language’ is unsuccessful point in reaching this conclusion to the very features concerning first-person sensation ascription that Wittgenstein employs to reveal that our ordinary sensations are not ‘private’ to us in that sense identified in § 243, which talks of ‘a language used to refer to what only its speaker can know’, viz, ‘his immediate private sensations’. This helps to explain why there is still no general agreement on the significance of §§ 243–315.

Bewegt (moved): Dancing among

Abstract This article examines felt sense as a tool for making the prearticulated qualities of affect and feeling more tangible. It looks at situations, practices, and performances to clarify the relationship of felt sense and affect. Looking at felt sense this way foregrounds formative processes that direct ‘what happens next,’ that is, our being moved.