Haptic Knowledge Research Articles

Hitchhiking and the Production of Haptic Knowledge

Hitchhiking and the Production of Haptic Knowledge

Thinking with My Hands: Embodied Cognition in Practice

The act of reflection is often considered to be one of the conscious mind – a cognitive act reflecting on one’s lived experience. By adopting principles of reflection defined by Donald Schön in 1983 as reflection-in and reflection-on action, this positioning paper attempts to develop a new methodology for examining and reinterpreting the embodied nature of material reflective thinking. The practice discussed responds to and reinterprets walking acts through methods of stitching-in and stitching-on action. The stitched mark acts as a line that considers concepts of wandering minds, wandering bodies and embodied cognition (Candy 2020). Correlations of mind and body wandering through physical and metaphorical space will be drawn on and considered in the context of material thinking and tacit and haptic knowledge. Schön (1983:73) asks the question, ‘In practice of various kinds, what form does reflection-in-action take?’, through this paper I intend to explore what critical-reflective-creative-thinking looks like in a textile practice and examine how the moment of making (stitching/walking) offers opportunities for critical-reflective-creative-thinking with practice.

A new patient-specific overformed anatomical implant design method to reconstruct dysplastic femur trochlea

Patellar luxation with condylar defect is a challenging situation for reconstruction in humans. Patella reluxation, cartilage damage and pain are the most common complications. This study aims to present a new patient specific method of overformed implant design and clinical implantation that prevents luxation of patella without damaging the cartilage in a dog. Design processes are Computer Tomography, Computer Assisted Design, rapid prototyping of the bone replica, creation of the implant with surgeon’s haptic knowledge on the bone replica, 3D printing of the implant and clinical application. The implant was fully seated on the bone. Patella reluxation or implant-related bone problem was not observed 80 days after the operation. However, before the implant application, there were soft tissue problems due to previous surgeries. Three-point bending test and finite element analysis were performed to determine the biomechanical safety of the implant. The stress acting on the implant was below the biomechanical limits of the implant. More cases with long-term follow-up are needed to confirm the success of this method in patellar luxation. Compared with trochlear sulcoplasty and total knee replacement, there was no cartilage damage done by surgeons with this method, and the implant keeps the patella functionally in sulcus. This is a promising multidisciplinary method that can be applied to any part of the bone and can solve some orthopaedic problems with surgeon’s haptic knowledge.

Object Based Learning in the Social Sciences: Three Approaches to Haptic Knowledge Making.

Object-based learning, where students learn by hands-on interactive experiences with skills and objects, provides an active, multi-layered learning experience. Engaging haptic perceptual styles to build meaning and understanding through tactile stimuli, object-based learning can increase student engagement and satisfaction, and improve knowledge retention and higher-level critical thinking. This paper examines three case studies where haptic pedagogical principles were employed to develop learning experiences for key themes, practices and challenges of anthropology. The first, an archaeological laboratory interaction, gave students physical artefacts to touch, manipulate and critically consider, embedded within real-life archaeological case studies. The second, an interactive session using hand-written letters from asylum seekers drawn from an archival collection, connected students with otherwise-inaccessible asylum-seeker voices and multi-sensory modes of critical archival research. The third, a museum curation task, gave students the opportunity to curate and reflect critically on their own museum exhibition of household objects, both meaningful and mundane. All three case studies demonstrate the benefits of utilising the haptic perceptual style in learning design, with engaged and critically reflective understanding being developed. However, there are limitations and considerations inherent in such learning activities, including the ethics of handling objects and the constraints of digital formats for online learning.

Three Observations on Filming Tactility and Movement in Crafts-based Practice

This film makes three observations on the filming of tactility and movement in order to adequately convey tacit knowledge in embodied ways. The author, Wuon-Gean Ho, studied the craft of traditional woodblock printmaking in Japan, and demonstrates planning, carving and printing of a woodblock print.
 The first observation is that an alteration of the time-base of the film and subsequent manipulation of the soundscape can provide embodied affects. Secondly the film refers to the effect of mirror-touch-synaesthesia with close macro shots and intimate angles. Thirdly, the use of a birds’ eye point of view, with the hands of the artist in the same anatomical position as the viewers’ hands, enables the gaze of the viewer to mimic that of the maker, conveying haptic knowledge through poetic means.The voiceover to the film is made with deliberate reference to ASMR videos that engender a sense of intimacy. The non-objectivity of the recording process is commented upon. The conclusion is that constructed scenarios might convey more than real-time truthful indexical footage.

Vivir entre mar y tierra: geografías marítimas desde el conocimiento háptico

En este artículo se analiza la constitución de conocimientos hápticos entre un grupo de pescadores y la etnógrafa como un elemento central en la comprensión de una geografía sensorial durante el trabajo de campo dentro de un muelle industrial pesquero en el puerto de Mazatlán, ubicado al noroeste de México. Se busca enriquecer los estudios de los sentidos y las emociones desde un análisis sobre el papel que tiene el conocimiento háptico y su entrelazamiento entre lo humano y no-humano en la producción de una geografía marítima particular. Al respecto, se efectúa una reflexión en torno a la generación de información en el proceso de investigación, la cual está interconectada con ciertos artefactos como la cámara fotográfica que contribuyen al establecimiento de vínculos afectivos fundamentales para adentrarse en una comunidad. El texto apela al lector o lectora a sentir a través de las fotografías y la descripción de la autora tanto los desafíos de la entrada a campo como las experiencias sensoriales de los pescadores con las formas de materialidad que hacen del muelle un espacio esencial para comprender los saberes hápticos de una cultura marítima particular.

Transforming Fashion Expression through Textile Thinking

The focus of this research is on the experiences of a new fashion pedagogy linked to textile studios at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, in Espoo, Finland. Rich practice-based research and skilled use of materials and textile techniques are elements of transforming fashion design implemented through studio-based pedagogy. Effective learning is constructed by adding tacit and haptic knowledge of textiles into fashion expression. Furthermore, while textile design combines elements from aesthetic creativity with technical skills, this knowledge, textile thinking, can form a new grounding for fashion design. Through reflective learning, practically oriented and theoretical knowledge can be combined, and hands-on studio pedagogy has established the platform for this type of learning. Fashion students’ textile studies extend to woven fabrics and jacquards as well as knits, embroideries, prints, and other finishing techniques and aim to teach them about industrial manufacturing and provide them with an understanding of industrial processes and requirements. This research observes this transformation process of fashion expression through textile thinking based on observations, teachers’ reflections, and student interviews. Further, the learning outcomes have been reflected against the transformation of the curriculum to provide understanding for this development process.

Colonial hauntings in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons

Abstract This article traces two interrelated affective economies present in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons. First, I begin with a discussion of colonial hauntings demonstrated by the numerous demons in Barry’s text whose title also bears this word. The demons of Barry’s text are ghostly presences that are the aftereffects of colonial trauma. Second, I examine the ways in which Barry employs what I call are ‘sticky visual rhythms’ that produce haptic knowledge that reverberates colonial hauntings of racism, sexism and empire. These affective rhythms not only echo the haunting effects of colonization, empire and intimacies, but also offer new ways of countering patriarchal and imperial desires. The ‘sticky visual rhythms’ of One Hundred Demons allow us to think through issues of self-loathing, anger and depression that disproportionately affect those who have been subjected to traumas of colonialism and other structural inequalities.

“Present Your Bodies”: Film Style and Unknowability in Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes and Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross

Since 2005, a number of European films have emerged examining the legacy of Christianity in Western Europe, and the ways in which men, women and children struggle to negotiate questions of religion and secularity, the personal and the institutional, faith and doubt. This article looks at two of these films—Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes (2009) and Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross (2014)—in relation to questions of religious experience, the female body and film style. In both films the battle between these opposing categories is played out on the bodies of women—a paraplegic MS sufferer in Lourdes, an anorexic teen in Stations of the Cross—and both the films end ambiguously with what may, or may not, be a miracle of sorts: a confirmation of faith or a rebuttal. I wish to connect this ambiguity to the use of a very distinctive mise-en-scene in both films, which relies on a heavily restricted colour palate; highly formalised, painterly-compositions; and crucially what David Bordwell has termed “planimetric photography”: a shooting style that eschews depth or diagonals, refusing the spectator entrance into the image and holding her instead at a deliberate distance. My argument, in short, is that these stylistic choices—while gesturing towards a tradition of Christian art—also refuse the spectator either visual or haptic knowledge of the events that the characters undergo. Rather, they are suggestive of the fundamental unknowability that characterises religious experience, leaving us alone, outside of the action, forced to negotiate ourselves between belief and doubt.

Crafting masculinities: gender, culture and emotion at work in the surfboard industry

This article examines the masculinities of male workers in the context of an emotionally rich form of labour: surfboard-making. Contributing to emerging research around the emotional and embodied dimensions of men's working lives, the article maps the cultural, emotional and embodied dimensions of work onto masculine identity construction. Combining cultural economy theory, emotional geographies and in-depth ethnographic methods, I reveal how surfboard-making has become a gendered form of work; how jobs rely on (and impact) the body and what surfboard-making means to workers outside of financial returns. Following a manual labour process, and informed by Western surfing subculture, commercial surfboard-making has layered onto male bodies. Men perform ‘blokey’ masculinities in relation with one another. However, doing manual craftwork evokes close, personal interaction; among co-workers but also through engagements with place and local customers. Felt, embodied craft skills help workers personalise boards for individual customers and local breaks. Beneath masculine work cultures and pretensions, surfboard-making is a deeply emotional and embodied work. Labour is dependent on haptic knowledge: sense of touch, bodily movement and eye for detail. Contrasting their blokey masculinity, surfboard-makers rely on intimate links between their bodies, tools, materials, customers and surfing places. These ‘strong bodied’ men articulate a ‘passion’ and ‘love’ for ‘soulful’ jobs, demonstrating how waged work comprises alternative masculinities, shaped by working culture, relations and labour processes. A cultural economy framework and emotionally engaged research approach are valuable for challenging hegemonic masculinity, important for achieving more inclusive, tolerant and equitable workplaces.

Going to bed with a camera

• Many sexual encounters are nowadays photographed by the participants. The article examines the photographed sex in the historical contexts of the visualization of sexuality, pleasure and desire, and the new norms of photographed self-documentation. Based on research conducted in Israel, I show that photographed sex produces not only new sorts of pleasure, but also knowledge: about one’s self, partner, sexuality and relationship. This ‘objective’ visual knowledge is often privileged over subjective, haptic knowledge. Photography also introduces new peformativities, and encourages borrowing from media-representations of sex and rational self-improvement. •