Non-representational Approach Research Articles

Enacting citizenship through writing: an analysis of a diary written by a man with Alzheimer's disease

Abstract Citizenship and dementia studies have, during the last 15 years, grown into a substantial body of research recognising the experiences and agentic powers of people living with dementia. This article aims to contribute to and extend this research field. We undertake the aim through a feminist posthumanist non-representational analysis of a diary written by a man with Alzheimer's disease to explore the diary's potential to enact citizenship. The first section of the article examines current approaches to democracy, citizenship and dementia, and advances the concept intra-active citizenship, an approach that extends the individual and understands citizenship as enacted in and through entanglements of human–more-than-human agents. The second section is a theory-informed analysis of the diary, in which events, relations, doings and affective resonances constitute the analytical categories. The third section discusses whether the diary and the writing of it might enact citizenship, and if so, what kind of citizenship. The article concludes with a reflection on how our posthumanist, non-representational approach might pave a new path for theorising and, hence, contribute to new understandings of dementia and citizenship.

Representationalism in Knowledge Organization and Information Retrieval: Cheer or Criticism?

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the representational approach to language using the concept of ‘Representationalism’ in philosophy and a new framework referred to in this paper as Information Retrieval Action (IRA). IRA is a theoretical construct based on Information Retrieval (IR) theory. Therefore, the methodology employed in this study is philosophical and speculative. It examines and discusses representationalism in both the mental (cognitive) and linguistic dimensions, incorporating concepts from the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language as methodological approaches. ‘Concept’ and ‘Meaning’ emerge as two critical semantic elements when considering language as a semiotic phenomenon. Representationalism in IRA is rooted in logical positivism, which serves as the foundation for interpreting meaning and concept based on mental representation. In response, the paper proposes an alternative non-representational approach to the semantic elements of language (meaning and concept) based on the philosophy of pragmatism within the IRA framework. While the emergence of new technologies like ontologies implicitly criticizes representationalism in IRA, previous research has not explicitly addressed the theoretical and philosophical criticism of representationalism within the IRA framework.

Re-thinking inspiration as in-betweens in arts-integrated literacy practices

Inspiration is a widely used concept in everyday speech, and it is used especially when people talk about what they do in their creative processes. This article presents a re-thinking of the notion of inspiration through a non-representational approach to challenge the assumption of dance as a mere stimulus to and representation of texts and vice versa when integrating creative dance into literacy education. Based on diffractive analytical engagements, this article proposes an understanding of inspiration as intra-active and rhizomatic in-betweens producing new-ness and other-ness. This understanding can produce rich and diverse opportunities that value and cherish writing and dancing non-hierarchically in the literacy classroom; both have pedagogical value, without either acting as a servant of the other. The article concludes with a discussion of the extent to which literacy education is prepared to take dance seriously, emphasizing that the proposed understanding of inspiration can contribute to that end.

Provincialising security: materiality and sensoriality

ABSTRACT Security has come to embody a self-evident and much sought-after kind of good, and has come to colonise imaginaries, debates, policies, and large swathes of what social life means in various corners of the world. Echoing postcolonial calls for decentring that which is taken for granted, my essay seeks to provincialise security in three distinct ways. Drawing on my research on the securitisation of the Roma in Italy, first, I trace the transformation of the term sicurezza from safety to security in a recent-historical perspective, showing how the notion morphed from bodily integrity to a much more blurred – though taken for granted – concept. Second, using a non-representational approach grounded in new materialism, I show that what hides beneath the ubiquitous talk of sicurezza surrounding the Roma nowadays are dimensions of materiality and sensoriality that construct insecurity in a relational and ever-shifting manner. Third, I privilege the perspective of the Roma in a decolonising move that questions their securitisation and the overall framing of Roma-related concerns as a security problem. Finally, I show the productivity of the topology framework in provincialising both security, and the western-centric theory production around it.

Getting to Know Noisiness: Moving on Concepts and Debates for (Aero)mobilities and Atmospheres

ABSTRACT Aeromobility and air travel are known to produce multilevel experiences of sound, ultimately resulting in social and environmental struggles against noise pollution. Different studies that address aeromobile sounds and atmospheres, however, do so while using highly different concepts, approaches, tools, and methods that often create disconnects between different disciplines and their capacity for dialogue. Drawing primarily on a study of Ben Gurion International Airport, and on a nonrepresentational approach to aeromobile sounds, their experience, representation, and sensing – by people and technologies – this paper provides conceptually informed empirical accounts of different ways to get to know noise, while addressing the gaps they create between different fields of knowledge. The paper concludes that nonrepresentational thinking is a valuable pillar with which shared grounds between academic discourse, practitioners, policymakers, and the public could be progressed, offering wider considerations of noise, its constitution, outcomes, and futures in aeromobile geographies and airport planning.

Digital and non-digital representations as actors in the enactment of selfhood and community on the Appalachian Trail

ABSTRACT Cultural geographers working with non-representational theories have recently returned to thinking about representations as actors in the relational processes of making spaces, selfhood and communities. A particular focus for studies of literary texts is examining how representation ‘takes place’, how texts are part of what happens in the world, and how we can better understand the force of representations-in-relation at work. In this paper I will address this question, by examining the role that representations play as actors in the production of community and selfhood among hikers on the Appalachian Trail. As hiker representations straddle digital and non-digital media in the twenty-first century, scholarly approaches continue to view them as little more than mediators, or ersatz forms of, in-person speech. Here, I take a non-representational approach to hiker writings to focus on the relationships that develop between AT hikers and the writings they encounter as a means of understanding how these representations-in-relation take place on the trail, and how they contribute to what happens – that is, to the production of community and subjectivity among Appalachian Trail hikers.

Cinematography and Storytelling

In this study, pictures and their properties are examined as instruments of storytelling. Cinematography is generally utilized to generate style and to give the film a characteristic appeal. But in some instances, images actually influence the narrative itself in ways that can re-orientate the plot, and at times, entirely modify it. The essence of the story can emerge from observation and introspection, as opposed to a plot built in a cause-and-effect arrangement. In this study, images and their properties are examined as potentially the sole instrument of storytelling. The analysis focuses on the sensuous characteristics of on-screen pictures that can be considered alternative footage, connecting shots, or intercuts and how they generate meaning. In this perspective, the story emerges as implicit, with a non-representational approach to filmmaking, in the manner poems utilize metaphors. However, this does not necessarily imply the absence of narrative. In this regard, the concept of time-image—image infused with time—is fundamental: a picture embeds connections to other time and space modules. If the story and the images of the film are intricately intertwined, in a relation of sounds, visuals and emotions, the balance between the two roles can be manipulated, resulting in a different approach to filmmaking. In this configuration, the similarly secondary elements of the story become the main narrative mechanism, through the simultaneous experience of viewing, feeling and interpreting. Keywords : Film, Cinema, Image, Cinematography, Narrative, Storytelling DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-20-03 Publication date: October 31 st 2021

When the map shakes up the territory. Researching teachers’ learning through a non-representational cartographic approach

In this article, I consider how cartographies have become a onto-methodological approach that seeks to produce, rather than represent, the world that they are enacting. Going beyond Alfred Korzybski’s famous axiom that ‘the map is not the territory,’ my point is that the map can shake up the territory. This shift is discussed in relation to the post-qualitative research project How Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Addressing Social Change, which focuses on mapping places and spheres that function as a source of knowledge and experience for thirty educators. The cartographic objects they composed around their learning trajectories became a space for rethinking and reconnecting domains that schools often keep strictly separate. Thus in this case the maps worked as a flat terrain where different layers met and linked outside of traditional hierarchies, which ignore for example corporeality and affects in favour of cognition or formal knowledge.

Public time-space, Interstices, Intersections and Traces-as-remains: Possible Chronotopes of the European District in Brussels

The most common image of the European Quarter of Brussels is built on the idea of a clean, free, safe and controlled space that attracts people with high economic, social and cultural capital, and a growing number of "passing" users (tourists or consumers). Against this background, our research aimed to investigate the nexus between the material, symbolic, normative and discursive construction of the EU district time-space, on one hand, and everyday life, on the other. To do so, we explored the potential of a rhythmic and nonrepresentational approach in deconstructing dominant socio-spatial-temporal representations, scraping off the layers of the commonly-known to unveil alternative chronotopes. In this article, we present and discuss a reinterpretation of our experience and discuss the results of our analysis through four chronotopes linked to the spatio-temporal rhythms we observed, rhythms we have called Public time-space, Interstices, Intersections and Traces-as-remains.

Drawing as an Ethico-political Practice

This essay explores drawing as an ethico-political practice. Taking London as an example, I speculate about a critical and creative, radical and imaginative engagement with speculative urbanization processes at a time when the extreme right is on the rise and the populist far right has become increasingly mainstream. Reflecting on a nonrepresentational drawing approach that responds to distantiated expert eyes by breaking free from their knowledge and pre-defined moral standards of the capitalist city, I explore different lines: lines that commodify the cityscape; lines that cross commodifying categories; lines that creatively produce alternatives; and lines of violent creativity. In so doing, I scrutinize conservative links between a visuality of capital accumulation and fascist urban aesthetics.

Beyond the Female Love-Male Sex Binary: A Non-representational Approach to Online Dating

Based on a critical literature review, this paper reveals that online dating studies on heterosexual users’ motivations and mate preferences reproduce two gendered as well as heteronormative arguments. First, women use dating technologies for seeking love whereas men prefer them for arranging casual sex activities. Second, men are inclined to prioritize physical appearance while women tend to value status during mate selection or swiping in e-dating language. The article calls these beauty-status and love-sex dichotomies as the female love-male sex binary which has become a persistent myth through a continuous reproduction. This critical literature review problematizes the binary logic embedded in the literature on heterosexual online dating. To move beyond such duality, it suggests an affective turn which attracts the attention to the mostly neglected things in e-dating studies which focus on heterosexual individuals, namely the body, its capacity, and the affectivity of non-human things like atmospheres as well as images. Among various inspiring techniques in non-representational methodologies, it proposes video reenactment, cyberflaneur or technical walkthrough, and sensory writing techniques to study the online dating phenomenon and to understand motivations as well as swiping strategies of heterosexual online daters.

Tracking destination visual narratives: photographic compositions from longer stay tourists

ABSTRACT The photographs that contemporary travellers disseminate quickly and effortlessly to a global online audience are a valuable resource for scholars and for practitioners seeking to shape destination image. They merit more in-depth understanding. However, viewers are detached from the process of producing photos for online dissemination, thereby limiting insights provided by examinations of what the photos were intended to represent. The current authors pursue deeper understanding by studying visual effects at ‘face value’, rather than interpreting intended meanings. The authors consider the visual effects of narratives that longer stay tourists to Hong Kong share on social networking sites, including content, colour, spatial organization and expressiveness elements. A longitudinal and non-representational research approach is adopted to address the disjuncture and separation between the photo production and reception processes. It is concluded that tourist photographs: a) form groupings around compositional elements; b) change in content and composition over the course of an extended visit and c) generate identifiable visual impacts, based on their compositions. Destination authorities can develop emotion-inducing visual compositions with online resonance by considering the aesthetics of tourist photographs.

Radicalizing numerical cognition

In recent decades, non-representational approaches to mental phenomena and cognition have been gaining traction in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. In these alternative approach, mental representations either lose their central status or, in its most radical form, are banned completely. While there is growing agreement that non-representational accounts may succeed in explaining some cognitive capacities (e.g. perception), there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of giving non-representational accounts of cognitive capacities such as memory, imagination or abstract thought. In this paper, I will critically examine the view that there are fundamental limitations to non-representational explanations of cognition. Rather than challenging these arguments on general grounds, I will examine a set of human cognitive capacities that are generally thought to fall outside the scope of non-representational accounts, i.e. numerical cognition. After criticizing standard representational accounts of numerical cognition for their lack of explanatory power, I will argue that a non-representational approach that is inspired by radical enactivism offers the best hope for developing a genuine naturalistic explanatory account for these cognitive capacities.

The everyday skills that get us by: Non-representational theories for a linealogy of quotidian cultures

In this article, I have three key aims. Firstly, I want to offer a particular definition and a bold defence of ‘non-representational theories’, indicating the importance of their anti-rationalist and anti-structuralist tendencies, and also pointing to their positive assertion of the primacy of practices or movement. Although a non-representational theoretical approach is closely associated today with contemporary geographic thought, I make a case here for an understanding of non-representational theories as a far broader cross-disciplinary project. Secondly, in the light of non-representational theories, I will be revisiting an old debate between culturalists and structuralists on matters of experience and representation. I consider, in a spirit of re-evaluation, Stuart Hall’s now classic essay on two paradigms in the development of cultural studies, as well as a selection of related interventions made by Hall. Thirdly, I will look to potential future directions for empirical research that is informed by a non-representational theoretical approach, in an area which I call ‘quotidian cultural studies’. My recommendations are for work that might explore, for example, acquired habits or ways of the hand in the uses of new media technologies (among other skills of tool use), and paths that are trodden along the ground on foot and through narrative or other media settings. A critical appropriation of Tim Ingold’s writings in anthropology leads me to describe such work as ‘linealogical’ investigations of everyday life.

Distal engagement: Intentions in perception

Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of long-term planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecological-enactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for "high-level" or "representation-hungry" capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a non-representational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating pre-reflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use.

Spontaneity and serendipity: Space and time in the lives of people with diabetes

This article considers the relevance of non-representational theory to understanding the lived experience of diabetes. While non-representational theory has gained traction in the social sciences, especially Human Geography, its usefulness in extending our understanding of experiences of health and illness is often restricted to an idea of wellbeing that assumes an able and healthy body. This article draws on qualitative research on the everyday experiences of living with diabetes, to consider how non-representational theory can be applied to understanding the everyday experience of ill bodies. The analysis moves through ideas of mobility, routine, anticipation and adjustment to highlight the challenges of spontaneity and serendipity in the everyday lives of people with diabetes. The article concludes by considering some of the advantages of a non-representational approach for healthcare practice.

Centrifugal Force and the Mouth of a Shark: Toward a Movement-Oriented Poetics

“No one leaves home unless / Home is the mouth of a shark” read the opening lines of Warsan Shire’s poem, “Home.” Connecting this powerful poem to the migrant/diasporic literary tradition, this article will introduce a new interpretive framework for the study of migrant literature—one which I call “kinopoetics.” I modify here Thomas Nail’s (2015) concept of “kinopolitics,” or a “politics of movement,” which suggests that “regimes of social motion” have historically created the material conditions for social and political formation (24). Kinopolitics, in turn, recognizes the migrant as the primary constitutive figure of social history and transformation. Extending from a politics to a poetics, kino-poetics takes a non-representational approach (derived from Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Nigel Thrift) that treats literary texts as aggregates of sensible experience and affective maps of migrant mobility. I will explore, then, how these texts depict the migrant experience of disenfranchisement and expulsion and the “pedetic social force” (Nail, Figure 124), or active political power, that migrants are able to enact. I emphasize how migrant literature reconfigures the static, place-based poetics built into a regime of borders and nationhood. I will conclude with a kinopoetic reading of Shire’s poem, showing not only how it foregrounds the centrifugal forces that coerce refugees into exile but also how the migrant’s poetic voice confronts and undermines nationalistic hostilities.

The History and Philosophy of Ecological Psychology.

Ecological Psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representational approach pioneered by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson. This theory aims to offer a third way beyond cognitivism and behaviorism for understanding cognition. The theory started with the rejection of the premise of the poverty of the stimulus, the physicalist conception of the stimulus, and the passive character of the perceiver of mainstream theories of perception. On the contrary, the main principles of ecological psychology are the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as unit of analysis, the study of affordances as the objects of perception, combined with an emphasis on perceptual learning and development. In this paper, first, we analyze the philosophical and psychological influences of ecological psychology: pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. Second, we summarize the main concepts of the approach and their historical development following the academic biographies of the proponents. Finally, we highlight the most significant developments of this psychological tradition. We conclude that ecological psychology is one of the most innovative approaches in the psychological field, as it is reflected in its current influence in the contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences, where the notion of affordance and the work of E. J. Gibson and J. J. Gibson is considered as a historical antecedent.

Decolonizing Family Photographs: Ecological Imaginaries and Nonrepresentational Ethnographies

This article lays out my process of developing an ecological and nonrepresentational approach for conducting an ethnography of family photos as objects of investigation, practices, and sites for the making and remaking of decolonizing stories and histories. It is rooted in a three-part project on family photographs: first, an ongoing project with a three-generation Indigenous family who has a history with Canada’s residential school system; second, revisiting my own family photo albums that include photos of missionary nuns in my family who had worked in Indigenous schools and communities in the 1950s–60s; and third, the development of a politico-ethico-onto-epistemological approach for viewing and analyzing family photos and narratives from and about photographs. The article focuses on the latter two parts of this project. Informed by my reading of Lorraine Code’s “ecological thinking” approach to knowledge making, I bring Code into conversation with Phillip Vannini’s “nonrepresentational ethnographies” combined with new materialist writing on performativity and vitality; selected Indigenous scholars’ writing on ontological multiplicity, knowledge making as relationship, and the making of life worlds; Margaret Somers’s approach to nonrepresentational narratives and ontological narrativity; and Annette Kuhn’s work on analyzing family photographs and cultural memory. I demonstrate this approach through the analysis of one of my family photos. I also reflect on the ethical challenges of attempting to analyze a different kind of family photo, such as photos of residential schooling that are increasingly on display in media, online, and in public venues. I argue for the need to address representational issues of social injustice in nonrepresentational approaches and a recognition that there are sites and times—especially in cases of human rights abuses, violence, or trauma—when nonrepresentational ethnographies and narratives call for strategic negotiation with representation.

Non-representational approaches to modeling interpretation in a graphical environment

This article presents an epistemological rationale, intellectual justification, and design outline for a non-representational approach to modeling interpretation in a graphical environment. It begins with a brief critical discussion of the representational approaches that are the common form of information visualizations and suggests that the less familiar non-representational approach could be used to augment these existing visualizations by supporting interpretative work that is closer to the practice of humanistic hermeneutic traditions. Representational display, based on large-scale processing, surrogates, and conventional visualizations, and non-representational modeling at the level of the individual interpretative act operate at very different scales to support intellectual work. In a representational approach, data precede display. Display is a surrogate produced according to automated protocols and algorithms. These cannot be altered or intervened except through rewriting their code, and the display, though interpretative and subject to interpretation, cannot be used as a means by which interpretation is actually modeled. While all visualizations express a model, they do not all provide a modeling environment. In the non-representational approach proposed here, graphical input serves as a primary means of interpretative work. More significantly, a graphical environment that supports direct modeling of interpretation allows traditional humanistic approaches, close reading, and marking of texts, documents, artifacts, or images, to be integrated with computationally produced visualizations. This research was developed as part of the 3DH (three-dimensional/digital humanities) project hosted at the University of Hamburg, between April and June 2016.