Phenomenological World Research Articles

Entering Into a Sonic Intra-Active Quantum Relation with Plant Life

Abstract In the speculative research of plant bioacoustics, one enters into a sonic intra-active relation, by humans with non-human beings (plant life), activated through acoustic wave signals emitted by plants to create electronic patterns of sounds composed by humans and emitted by machines. Plants emit sound waves at relatively low frequencies of 50–120 Hz. Experimenting with patching and modulation by tracking these sonic lines of data can indeed lead to unique sonic experiences that tap into the universe’s musicology. It is fascinating how we can interact with sounds on such a deep level to create acoustic energy. We are and have always been attached to the universe in a relational processual way. We are all interconnected with plant life vibrating at different internal frequencies. This article focuses on a symbiotic relation between humans and plant life as an acoustic shimmering ecology – to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter as a morphological force that (re)shapes, (re)affirms our sonic intra-relations to the natural world. This proposition is molecular and metaphysical, as sound matter is of a qualitative multiplicity in the quantum field of listening. By acknowledging ontologically that cosmopolitics brings into relation different practices, practitioners, and the non-human (they assemble in a field of forces and intensities), I argue that there is no sovereign power under which all modes of existence can be organized, and there is no meta-language through which one can master the diversity of all discursive or material practices; but there are intra-relations in which one can get lost in a quantum field of sonic matter by moving into the cracks of the sensorium and the plant biosphere, which includes Indigenous voices. The alterity of plant life is daunting from an eco-feminist materialist position in that relationships are the default state of existence and sonic experiences uncover alternative or additional explanations in a (post)phenomenological world – which is embedded in the stuff of acoustics in the many ways humans hear the world. Thus, to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter necessitates understanding how sound matter intra-performs through a sonic language – where intra-relations with plant life have complex boundaries for humans. As a creative practitioner, how does one define the mutually beneficial engagement in plant communication with creative musical encounters? Entanglement is messy and a becoming with the universe as a philosophical sonic meditation and worlding. This entails expanding on plants as cosmogonic beings, world builders, and we, perhaps, are the by-products of the lives of our vegetal others.

RATIONALITY IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL EDEN

In the postmodern world, the transition from the unconditional trust in human reason and power to the hope in moral responsibility is justified by the criteria that have been more and more insistently formulated over the past two decades. Rationality, underlying the understanding of the phenomenological world, can be seen as an expression of the will of power, with an emphasis on its instrumental and technical side. According to this approach, reason is a threat to mankind, its aggressive function being felt not only by the instruments of technique, by machines, but by the fact that technique separates the being from its essence. Algorithmic rationality is radicalized in a powerful irrational sense, being represented as the most stubborn opponent of thought. Reasoning, like science, is based on concepts.

Presence, Absence, Transience: The Spatiotemporalities of Sand

Sand grains are ubiquitous in the Earth’s system, and are found in different environmental settings globally, but sand itself as a physical object has multiple conflicting meanings with respect to both its agglomeration into landforms such as sand dunes and beaches, and how sand and its dynamics have cultural significance and meaning. This study takes a transdisciplinary approach towards examining the multiple meanings of sand, focusing on sand as a spatiotemporal pheneomenon that exists in different contexts within the Earth system. The nature and spatiotemporalities of sand are framed in this study through the concepts of presence, absence and transience, which are key interpretive approaches that lie at the interface of how the physical and phenomenological worlds interact with each other. This is a new and innovative approach to understanding people–environment relationships. These concepts are then discussed using the examples of the dynamics of and values ascribed to desert dune and sandy beach landscapes, drawn from locations globally. These examples show that the dynamic geomorphic changes taking place in sand landscapes (sandscapes) by erosion and deposition (determining the presence and absence of sand in such landscapes) pose challenges for the ways in which people make sense of, locate, interact with and value these landscapes. This uncertainty that arises from constant change (the transience of sandscapes) highlights the multiple meanings that sandscapes can hold, and this represents the comforting yet also unsettling nature of sand, as a vivid symbol of human–Earth relationships.

What can listening do?

Documentary has traditionally been used and understood as a communicative tool to frame and impart knowledge about a subject matter. For Paula Rabinowitz, documentary’s “purpose is to speak and confer value on the objects it speaks about” (1994). But what other functions might documentary have if it were to draw attention to how we can also listen? Over the past twenty-five year, listening scholarship has focused on a number of domains including the public sphere (Lacey 2013), participatory democracy (Bickford 1996; Couldry 2010), and media practices (Dreher 2009). Yet, while ‘voice’ as authorship and social participation has been well theorised in documentary, there has been little scholarly attention given to how audiences listen, and what strategies creators can use to evoke different ways of listening. The possibilities for listening as an active role in documentary have further been enhanced through interactive technologies. In this presentation, I draw on my current research and practice around the possibilities for interactive and expanded documentary to promote listening as a way to attend to ethical and political questions. Listening is not a singular action, rather, it can fulfill multiple functions. I propose that practices of listening can reframe the self as collective, reveal multiple co-existing narratives, counter erasure, promote engagement with difference and destabilise a anthropocentric perspective. Drawing on frameworks which include political, non-representational and sound theory, I ground my propositions through a range of interactive and immersive documentaries from the past ten years, each of which attempts to implicate the audience in new and responsible relationships to the historical and phenomenological world.

Finalitatea Simbolic-Mitică a Creaţiei De Sens În Configurarea Onto-Teofaniei Poetice Blagiene

Abstract In this paper, we seek to demonstrate how Lucian Blaga’s poetic universe is double layered, in the sense that one can distinguish between, on the one hand, a phenomenological plane, characterized by a pervasive sense of the inexorable passage of time and of human mortability and, on the other hand, a supramundane (noumenal) plane which, in a profane world, has become unattainable and therefore intensifies the individual’s sense of loneliness and estrangement from a sacred universe. We attempt to show how there two planes interfere, mainly through revelations of the divine (epiphanies). In our paper, we follow a poetic and stylistic approach, founded on Mircea Borcilă’s attempt to formulate a poetic typology aiming to highlight the intrinsec mechanisms of a poetic finality oriented towards the creation of meaning, therefore inscribing Blaga’s poetry on the coordinates of a symbolic-mythical pattern. The linguist’s theory draws on Blaga’s conception of the duality of metaphor (“plasticizantă” and “revelatorie”), the latter having a revelatory function and being subdivided by Borcilă according to a cultural finality into a “plastic” finality in creating poetic meaning, whose universe of reference will be modelled upon the phenomenological world, and a ”revelatory” finality, whose universe of reference will be modelled upon a noumenal, transmundane world.

The Chinese version of Posttraumatic Growth and Depreciation Inventory-Expanded version (PTGDI-X) for cancer survivors.

Many patients with cancer report positive changes often referred to as posttraumatic growth (PTG). Some of these self-reported PTG may represent maladaptive illusions created by individuals to cope with the illness. A recently established Posttraumatic Growth and Depreciation Inventory - Expanded version (PTGDI-X) includes both PTG and posttraumatic depreciation (PTD) items. This inventory may provide a more balanced picture of the phenomenological world of cancer survivors. We examined the Chinese version of the PTGDI-X's applicability to cancer patients, and how PTG and PTD were related to posttraumatic stress symptoms. Two hundred sixty-five cancer survivors in Taiwan completed the Chinese version of the PTGDI-X, along with the PTSD Checklist for the DSM-5 to measure posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the factor structure of the PTGDI-X established in a multi-national study fit our data from cancer patients modestly well. The PTD score had a significant and positive correlation with PTSD symptoms, whereas the PTG and PTSD showed a significant curvilinear relationship in the form of an inverted U-shape. This study's results indicate that PTG and PTD are separated constructs with differential relationships with cancer outcomes. The Chinese version of the PTGDI-X is a viable instrument for psycho-oncological research. The PTD scores can provide useful information to guide cognitive interventions to reduce distorted cognitions. In contrast, the PTG scores can provide further information on the phenomenological world of cancer survivors. In this study, clinical implications and future studies were considered.

Homecoming and College Transition Narratives of Student Military Veterans

ABSTRACT The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the homecoming and college transition narratives constructed by student veterans in order to help college clinicians a) to more holistically understand these veterans and their experiences, b) to more fully enter their phenomenological worlds, and c) to form more genuine and effective therapeutic relationships with them. Twelve student veteran participants were interviewed, and six common themes emerged from the analysis. Theoretical and clinical implications are provided, as well as more practical recommendations for college clinicians on how to increase campus-wide support and inclusivity for their student veterans.

Exploring the landscape of psychological threat: A cartography of threats and threat responses.

Over the recent years, research in the field of threat and defense has accumulated evidence on how encounters with various psychological threats influence human behavior, cognition, motivation, affect, and health. Unifying different theoretical threat models, the General Process Model of Threat and Defense claims that different threatening concerns have a similar underlying dynamic. Some years after the publication of this theory, we deem it important to take a comparative look at psychological threat, comparing threats regarding their properties and outcomes on personal and social level. As potential dimensions to describe psychological threats, we discuss the existential nature of concerns, phenomenological worlds involved, and thwarted needs in threat encounters. We also discuss data‐driven approaches to threat classifications, describing first empirical efforts to create threat taxonomies, and suggest directions for future research. This research will enhance our understanding of threat dynamics, and will help us make stronger, more clear‐cut assumptions about human behavior upon experiencing threat.

The COVID-19 and the figure of the undesired guest: the right to travel in scrutiny

The nation's state and mobilities were inevitably entwined. British Sociologist John Urry coined the term tourist-gaze to describe the phenomenological world of tourists and travellers who are move...

Drama-in-Education for Understanding: an Investigation from the Perspective of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Mediation

Drama in education (DiE) is a lively and productive area of art entering into education. This article tries to establish dialogues between DiE and psychology by revisiting the phenomenological world opened by DiE from the theoretical lens of cultural psychology of semiotic mediation. First, we propose to distinguish three main approaches in DiE towards production of new understandings and conceptualize them into different models of meaning making processes from the lens of cultural psychology. Based on the three approaches, we will theorize participants’ experience in DiE into three layers: the layer of everyday, dramatic, and existential. Each layer of experience contains unique potential to produce signs from different generalization process, and the three approaches can be mapped out on different interacting zones between layers. To illuminate the theoretical discussion, the case study of a DiE workshop “The green child” is used to investigate the characteristics of its artistic form and structure, in launching participants into travelling among the three layers of experiences and in facilitating different levels of affective generalization for aesthetic experience to emerge.

Analyzes of Life World of a Young Girl With Myasthenia Gravis: Qualitative Case Study

Background and Aim: Myasthenia Gravis (MG) is a neuromuscular disorder and auto-immune disease that is associated with symptoms of fluctuating muscle fatigue and dysfunction of the neuromuscular junction system. This disease greatly affects various aspects of the patient's life and impacts the person's perception of the quality of life. The aim of this study was to explain and analyze life experiences with myasthenia gravis disease in a young girl. Methods & Materials: This report is a qualitative case with interpretive phenomenological approach that examines the life experiences of a young girl with myasthenia gravis in 2019. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using Van Manen's phenomenological approach. Ethical Considerations: This study was registered in the Research Ethics Committee of Khatam University (Code: 3299/100/P/98). Results: Thematic analysis indicated that myasthenia gravis disease affects all aspects of person's life world. These four aspects include living and feelings with time, body, space, and others. Eventually, three interrelated themes emerged from the patient's perception of the world around her, including physical weakness, future ambiguity, and frustration. Conclusion: The present study shows a clear image and understanding of the problems of living with MG in a young girl. The phenomenological world of mixed by physical weakness, ambiguity in the future, and frustration that indicating the suffering and distress that the patient experiences following the illness. The results of this study contribute to the awareness of health and rehabilitation specialists in the field of work and research in myasthenia gravis as a neurological disease.

Initial fundamentals for the generation of a pre model of phenomenological analysis focused on the concept of violence

The article proposes an investigation for the construction of a pre-analysis model, based on the phenomenological conception from the psychology referred to by Fisas Vicenç, to then address the construct of violence, based on the cultural perspective from Rojas Blanco, stripping himself from the dualistic conception of gender that arises from the Cartesian philosophical conception, aspect that prevents addressing the issue of violence as a great psychosocial phenomenon, leaving it in a purely legal problem, without transcending the psychological as an alternative solution to the current problem. The methodology used is of a hermeneutical nature, focusing the interpretation on the theoretical position, the statistics are analyzed, as the interpretative scenario related to the topic, using the main elements of the pre-model as a form of empirical application of the same, to the social contexts that require it. For this, then, the interpretative analysis of the primary elements of the family violence category is used, in relation to the various manifestations of this, at the social level. Essentially, the pre-model, its elements and the way of articulating them to the phenomenological world are presented as a result, for a more objective view at the reality of violence in the different scenarios. It is important to refer to the need to transform the perspective of violence from the complex, dissolving the notion of duality that stands around this category at the level of national and international institutions. A more humane and in-depth look at this category allows more objective decisions to be made, about the different issues that emerge around the concept of violence.

Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism, by Caroline Hovanec

Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism, by Caroline Hovanec

Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis

AbstractConceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far‐reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material‐cum‐materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi‐sited ethnographies but otherwise side‐lined as merely “extra‐situational” in much talk/text‐directed scholarship. I propose we think more geographically by properly engaging spatiality à la Harvey (1990) and especially the radical politics of simultaneity (Massey, 2005)—the literal, “right‐now” connectedness of places and people. To this end, and allied with deepening interest in political economy, I combine the principles of articulation theory with the procedures of commodity chain analysis for picking apart an epitomic, contemporary manifestation of extreme privilege: the business‐class meal. The proposed discourse‐centred commodity chain analysis offers an ecumenical but systematic framework for tracking how commodity fetishism is actually and discursively accomplished (or not) across dispersed voices, stories, and social meanings.

A phenomenology of love, thanks to Lacan, Miller, and Jellybean

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a phenomenology of love, indicating some complexities in working with the lover in psychotherapy and counselling, while taking into account Lacanian ideas about love. Experience and Lacan’s ideas seem to intersect, the latter perhaps announcing a harsh ‘truth’ from which experience flinches. Reference to a small dog illustrates to an extent the real but illusory cause of desire we find in Lacan’s object a. The paper begins with exploring how language can speak of the private, the phenomenological world, and therefore also says something that addresses everyone to an extent. Theory may emerge in this addressing and it can be noticed where perhaps Lacan is coming from. The lover and the broken-hearted person in therapy presents a challenge, to stay with experience or take refuge in theory, or perhaps stay with both, avoiding a collapse into technicalities. It seems that healing may begin to come through relinquishing a precious image/idea/story, of oneself, if at all possible.

Deconstrucción de la montaña como paisaje sublime en las estrategias artísticas contemporáneas.

Esta aportación teórico-práctica nos propone un desestabilizador viaje al mito de la montaña sublime, donde los ojos contemplativos del sujeto romántico, en su obsesiva búsqueda de belleza, quedan relegados a un segundo plano. Nos presenta el paisaje desde una mirada híbrida, ya que muestra a través de la visualización de un video, textos e imágenes dos visiones paralelas: aquella visión subjetiva de la naturaleza interiorizada por el ser humano, junto a la visión deshumanizada de un hipotético animal hambriento –cabra, vaca, lobo– otrora depredador asiduo de aquel lugar. La aportación reflexiona sobre el paisaje desde una concepción del mismo como espacio transcultural, fruto de la fusión de las distintas nociones de paisaje que el ser humano proyecta sobre la naturaleza desde el mundo urbano, rural, científico, vital o fenomenológico.

The experience of translation: hermeneutic motion in textual reiteration

ABSTRACTLanguage constructs subjective reality out of experience with the phenomenological world. The translator experiences the phenomenological thing of the text in its first iteration and then through a process elucidated by George Steiner as hermeneutic motion reiterates it into a new cultural realm. This article reviews the experience of a translator rewriting Chinese literary prose into English from a perspective of phenomenological hermeneutics using Steiner’s four stages of hermeneutic motion as the discursive backdrop.

Creativity and pedagogical innovation: Exploring teachers’ experiences of risk-taking

ABSTRACTObjective: The purpose of this paper is to share the results of research into the experience of teacher risk-taking in the classroom. The development of children as risk-takers is featured prominently in curriculum documents and reports calling for the competencies of 21st century learning. Teachers are expected to become 21st century learners who model risk-taking. The repeated calls for the development of risk-taking students through the modelling of risk-taking teachers makes the experience of risk an important pedagogical question. However, 21st century learning documents do not take up substantively the meaning of teacher risk-taking.Research Design: Phenomenological research is concerned with the unique and the individual and in that regards each teacher-participant represents particular perceptions of risk-taking experiences and responses to risk in the classroom. The six (6) teacher-participants responded to a call distributed widely to teaching staff in a Canadian school district. The inquiry relied on phenomenological interviews and experiential life world material. In this paper three phenomenological themes are described: risk and readiness; risk and the in-between spaces of pedagogy, and risk as exploration and finding a way. This research allows us to understand teachers’ lived experience rather than assume the meaning of the terms risk and risk-taking.

A feel for the game: Exploring gaming ‘experience’ through the case of sports-themed video games

Video gaming is often understood and narrated as an ‘experience’, and we would suggest that this is particularly notable with sports-themed video games. However, we would argue that how the game experience is curated and consumed, and how this relates to wider social process and forces, is rarely given any detailed consideration within the existing game research literature. Hence, this article explores how game experiences can be understood and articulated around four key themes. First, we begin with the argument that video games connect with, but also lead, a wider social trend: understanding social reality as a set of designed experiences. The real is progressively becoming a repository of technologically mediated experiences, and the logic of video games is anticipating this process. Second, we suggest video games are translations of phenomenological worlds: When successful, key aspects of the meaning of things remain similar even as one moves between spaces, domains, mediums and platforms. Developers often seek to bring others’ experiences into a game environment, such as translating the geography and mechanisms of sporting locations and competitions into a game environment. Third, following this translation of meaning across domains, gamers often narrate their encounters with video games as they would with any other experience, such as winning the Champions League in Football Manager becomes recounted by gamers like any other achievement. Fourth, video games are interactive and explicit bodily experiences because they must be enacted in order to exist.

Using a Feminist Interpretation of the Bible’s Book of Ruth to Address Taiwanese Female Pastors’ Financial Autonomy and Self-Esteem

This study used Ruth’s story in the Bible and reinterpreted it with feminist theological perspectives to address the related issues of Taiwanese female pastors’ economic independence and autonomy. This study explored the phenomenological and contextual world of 27 female pastors’ mental wellness and specifically how they deal with the hardship of financial inequality when living in a culturally patriarchal society and serving within the male dominant church system. Four themes were generated to report these female pastors’ shared experiences through qualitative method. Counseling applications were provided and discussed in this article.