Embodiment Theory Research Articles

Paul’s “Thorn in the Flesh” and Christian Mission to People with Disabilities

AbstractThis article attempts a holistic theological analysis of what the mission of the church to people living with disabilities (PLWDs) should be. The article pays attention to Paul’s reference to a “thorn in his flesh” using the theory of complex embodiment. It counters the emphasis in some churches on healing as the proper response to the needs of PLWDs. Rather, the article seek to present a theology that gives PLWDs greater knowledge of and control over their bodies to live meaningful lives even with their disabilities. The article argues that Paul lived with a disability and that although he sought to have it healed, he later accepted it and lived fully and meaningfully with it. It concludes that, from the example of Paul, the church’s mission to PLWDs should not necessarily be the healing of disabilities but their empowerment and integration in our societies.

Motor content norms for 4,565 verbs in Spanish.

Embodiment theory suggests that, during the processing of words related to movement, as in the case of action verbs, somatotopic activation is produced in the motor and premotor cortices. In the same way, some studies have demonstrated that patients with frontal-lobe damage, such as Parkinson's patients, have difficulties processing that kind of stimulus. At the moment, no standardized data exist concerning the motor content of Spanish verbs. Therefore, the aim of the present research was to develop a database of 4,565 verbs in Spanish through a survey filled out by 152 university students. The value for the motor content was obtained by calculating the average value from the answers of the participants. In addition, the reliability of the results was estimated, as well as their convergent validity, using diverse correlation coefficients. The database and the raw responses of the participants can be downloaded from this website: https://inco.grupos.uniovi.es/enlaces.

Embodied Semantics in a Second Language: Critical Review and Clinical Implications.

The role of the sensorimotor system in second language (L2) semantic processing as well as its clinical implications for bilingual patients has hitherto been neglected. We offer an overview of the issues at stake in this under-investigated field, presenting the theoretical and clinical relevance of studying L2 embodiment and reviewing the few studies on this topic. We highlight that (a) the sensorimotor network is involved in L2 processing, and that (b) in most studies, L2 is differently embodied than L1, reflected in a lower degree or in a different pattern of L2 embodiment. Importantly, we outline critical issues to be addressed in order to guide future research. We also delineate the subsequent steps needed to confirm or dismiss the value of language therapeutic approaches based on embodiment theories as a complement of speech and language therapies in adult bilinguals.

Making Meaning Count: A Phenomenological Approach to Understanding Student Meaning-Making Processes and Academic Outcomes

The income-gap between Canadian families has widened in recent years. Students from low-income households often start their educational careers behind their peers. This gap in educational attainment and advantage often follows them throughout the duration of their educational development (Davies and Guppy 2010). While these systemic inequalities continue to perpetuate social processes resulting in the limitations of student capabilities, this paper works towards establishing a phenomenological lens which may be used to mitigate the disparity in the academic performance of students from low-income households compared to those of their peers – in particular, the ways in which poverty impacts self-concept and, ensuingly, academic performance amongst students. To establish this framework, this paper explores the phenomenological concepts of the life-world and the theory of embodiment.

Niva Piran,Journeys of embodiment at the intersection of body and culture: The developmental theory of embodiment.

Niva Piran,<i>Journeys of embodiment at the intersection of body and culture: The developmental theory of embodiment.</i>

Sport horse leisure and the phenomenology of interspecies embodiment

ABSTRACTThis article presents an auto-ethnography of the experience of sport horse riding. Drawing on phenomenological and anthropological theories of embodiment, I argue that the aspirational goal of sport riding is co-embodiment between horse and human, in which kinesthetic perception, intention, and volition merge. Co-embodiment requires time and practice to develop a shared multi-species culture in which bodies can be attuned to one another, and profound attention to both the immediate moment and the other being. I suggest that the interspecies component of sport riding, and the sport component of the interspecies engagement, is a significant part of what makes it appealing as a leisure activity. It invites (and requires) an experience of corporeal immediacy and intimacy that is both deeply satisfying and absent from many work or social environments in contemporary, wealthy, Western societies. Methodologically, this article draws from two decades of personal experience in sport horse riding, and engages auto-ethnography as a way to use the researcher’s body as phenomenological tool while keeping broader cultural contexts in mind.

Embodiment and the foundation of biographical disruption

The concept of biographical disruption has now enjoyed nearly 40 years of use in medical sociology. This paper argues that taking an embodied approach to biographical disruption helps to explain the concept's enduring efficacy. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and contemporary theories of embodiment inspired by his phenomenology, this paper advances that biographical disruption involves, in the first instance, a disruption to the ability to enact an embodied orientation towards the world. Biographical disruption does not, from this perspective, result from illness as such, but from the ways that illness impinges on one's physical ability to engage with daily life.This paper examines the experiences of solid organ transplant recipients for the purpose of shedding light on the conditions under which biographical disruption arises in experience. The analysis includes interviews with 36 post-operative solid organ transplant recipients (heart, liver, lung, and kidney) living in British Columbia or Ontario, Canada. These participants exhibit a wide range of illness experiences, some of which manifest as biographical disruption and others that do not. Tracing the contours of these experiences, this paper argues that the efficacy of biographical disruption for describing the illness experience depends not only on the illness experience but also, fundamentally, on the content of embodiment prior to the onset of that experience.

Embodiment Effect on the Comprehension of Mandarin Manual Action Language: An ERP Study

Embodiment theories argue that language comprehension involves activating specific sensory-motor systems in the brain. Previous research performed in English and other Indo-European languages suggests that, when compared to compatible sentences referring to the same actions performed sequentially (e.g. 'After cleaning the wound he unrolled the bandage'), incompatible sentences describing two manual actions performed simultaneously by an agent (e.g. 'While cleaning the wound he unrolled the bandage') were worse understood and increased the event-related potentials (ERPs) component N400. The present ERP research aims to further investigate brain response to motor compatibility in native Mandarin speakers. The Chinese experimental sentences described two manual actions either in incongruent conditions marked by the Chinese parallel structure … … ('yibian…yibian…'/'while… while…') or congruent conditions marked by the sequential structure … … ('xian…ranhou…'/'firstly… then…'). The last action clause elicited larger fronto-central N400 in the incongruent condition, which reveals that there are semantic embodiment effects on the comprehension of Mandarin manual action language.

Designing women: modernist mass culture and the formation of the female body

ABSTRACTThis essay argues for charm as feminist heuristic through which we may re-examine contemporary theories of gendered embodiment. Charm as a form of bodily habitation for women in modernity seems to be another facet of cultural or sociopolitical control over female subjects. However, this is not the entire picture. I argue that charm denotes a superficiality or refusal of depth in female embodiment that interrupts, yet also acknowledges, the physiological marks inscribed upon socially written bodies by addressing theories of the body. I then locate these interruptions in the early experimental poetry of Gertrude Stein and in selected works of mass culture including magazines, beauty pamphlets, and self-help books. Ultimately, by looking to Stein and these cultural texts, I find that women's charm exhibited by their bodies is not what it seems. There is both a seem and a seam to women's bodies, a fissure or stitching that appears when we examine how bodies are formed. This occurs through a repetition that – in contrast to contemporary theories of gendered embodiment by Judith Butler, bodily biopower by Michel Foucault, or bodily mattering in feminist new materialism – presents the body as a styled set of desires.

Genetic Bodily Fragments and Relational Embodiment: Judicial Rhetoric about ‘Biological Truth’ in Paternity Disputes in the Family Courts

In an era of quick, cheap and readily available genetic heredity testing, the Family Courts are increasingly asked to determine legal parentage in light of DNA evidence. For the children involved, that can mean that their genetic bodily fragments are used to retrospectively ‘correct’ their legal kinship relationships and legal identity. Where genetic paternity has been misattributed, judges have erased children’s legal connections with misattributed fathers (and their kin) from birth certificates irrespective of any social and relational meaning that these relationships and identities may have accumulated. This article critiques the genetic thinking apparent in family law judgments on legal parentage. It draws on theories of embodiment to argue that judges use a rhetoric of ‘biotruth’ to engage with the child’s body only as genetic fragments. In reconstructing children’s ‘true’ legal parentage and identity from their genetic fragments, law disembodies children themselves, relating to them as evidence of a reproductive transaction in which men who did not get the genetic child they bargained for may be able to obtain a refund of child support paid. In doing so, the current model of legal parentage fails to engage with the children involved in these disputes as embodied and relational legal persons.

The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt

One of the peculiarities of 17th and 18th centuries literature is the link between knowledge and imagination, a relationship in which narration sometimes accompanies science, sometimes goes beyond it. The idea of imagination as a true means of knowledge is the subject of Margaret Cavendish’s best known work, The Blazing World (1666), where her alter ego is free to built a whole social and philosophical system based on corporality and subjectivity.From the same conception of imagination starts Siri Hustvedt when in 2014 rewrites The Blazing World: the story of an artist who still in the twentieth century tries to face the overwhelming misogyny with the performance of the body and the theory of embodiment. The protagonist is really close to the Duchess of Newcastle, especially for the desire to overturn the artificial categories of the gender through a real masquerade. The voices of Cavendish, Hustvedt and of all their alter ego follow each other through documents, diary pages and pure narration, in which it is difficult to say what is fiction and what is truth

Journeys of Embodiment at the Intersection of Body and Culture: The Developmental Theory of Embodiment

Journeys of Embodiment at the Intersection of Body and Culture: The Developmental Theory of Embodiment

Against ‘Aging’ – How to Talk about Growing Older

Language shapes thought, and ageist language invisibly spreads ageist thinking. Observing that embodiment theory has largely neglected to theorize age (a universal intersection), the author expands that theory. Here is a first attempt to fully critique the term ‘aging’ wherever it implies ageism, and to suggest alternative language for ‘aging’ in both its adjectival and its nominative forms. The essay also historicizes the recent move in cultural studies of age toward using the term ‘age’ (as in Age Studies) instead of ‘aging’. Gullette argues that wording that replaces aging and explicates ageism helps undo submission to the ideology of life-course decline, liberating observation, potentially undoing internalized ageism and lessening the widespread fear of growing older.

Book Review: Journeys of embodiment at the intersection of body and culture: The developmental theory of embodiment

Book Review: Journeys of embodiment at the intersection of body and culture: The developmental theory of embodiment

Homo Includens: Surveying DiGRA�s Diversity

This article examines which bodies have access to participate in Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) events, and to DiGRA as an organization. It is based on a survey (N=174), among subscribers to the DiGRA 'Gamesnetwork' mailing list. The survey included questions on age, gender, location and career level to gain insight into who is included in the DiGRA community, with further questions on problems and challenges faced by those who have had trouble accessing DiGRA. This paper does not proceed solely by statistical methodology, but draws on feminist theories of embodiment and qualitative methods. Through this diverse methodological approach, the paper analyzes which bodies have difficulties accessing DiGRA�s academic communities and conferences, which practices cause these difficulties, and which policies might be introduced to address these. The survey indicates that young, early-career and women�s bodies are in particularly precarious positions. This situation is perpetuated through various practices of economic and social inaccessibility. Upon reflection, the paper proposes a set of policies to address these practices. We conclude that this survey and its analysis are only a first step to making DiGRA a more diversely inclusive organization.

Topology highlights mesoscopic functional equivalence between imagery and perception

The functional equivalence between mental images and perception or motion has been proposed on the basis of neuroimaging evidence of large spatially overlapping activations between real and imagined sensori-motor conditions. However, similar local activation patterns do not imply the same mesoscopic integration of brain regions active during imagery and perception or action. Here we present the first EEG evidence of topological equivalence between functional network organization at intermediate and global scales during tasks. We show that the degree of functional equivalence varies in the population and is associated with different magnitudes in the restructuring of the functional connectivity between imagery and real tasks. In particular, changes observed during imagery with respect to basal conditions account for the cognitive effort experienced during imagery, and subjects characterized by stronger functional equivalence exhibit smaller topological deviations in the imagination tasks performed after real tasks, thus showing learning effects. Altogether, our findings point to different sensori-cognitive information processing in the subjects showing different functional equivalence. We anticipate our results to be a starting point for a novel dynamical description of functional equivalence, which will be relevant for socio-cognitive theories of embodiment and cognitive formulations of how different selves emerge from neurophysiological assets.

Revisionen

Abstract Referring to the video testimony of Holocaust survivor Mrs. K. and interviewer and psychoanalyst Kurt Grünberg, I propose to analyse the body movement behavior in interaction in this interview as the “Gestalt” of memory units. According to the theory of embodiment and following Daniel Stern, I show how it is possible to co-construct sense while watching nonverbal aspects of giving testimony. Using different methods of movement analysis such as KMP, LMA, NEUROGES and MEA, this study was conducted by means of phenomenological inquiry. I suggest that a hermeneutic perspective on movement aspects can thus be used to enrich the transcript and provide a broader and highly specific understanding of this testimony. Movement can thus be seen as an integral part of transmission.

Chronic Kidney Disease and Older African American Adults: How Embodiment Influences Self-Management.

Patients living with chronic kidney disease (CKD) must balance the medical management of their kidney disease and other chronic conditions with their daily lives, including managing the emotional and psychosocial consequences of living with a chronic disease. Self-management is critical to managing chronic kidney disease, as treatment consists of a complex regimen of medications, dosages, and treatments. This is a particularly important issue for older African American adults who will comprise a significant portion of the older adult population in the coming years. Yet current conceptualizations of self-management behaviors cannot adequately address the needs of this population. Embodiment theory provides a novel perspective that considers how social factors and experiences are embodied within decision-making processes regarding self-management care among older African Americans. This paper will explore how embodiment theory can aid in shifting the conceptualization of self-management from a model of individual choice, to a framework that cannot separate lived experiences of social, political, and racial factors from clinical understandings of self-management behaviors. This shift in the conceptualization of self-management is particularly important to consider for CKD management because the profound illness burdens require significant self-management and care coordination skills.

“Hopefully I Won’t Be Misunderstood.” Disability Rhetoric in Jürg Acklin’s Vertrauen ist gut

This essay brings together the fields of German literature, disability studies, and rhetoric in an analysis of the rhetorical strategies and representational implications of disability in Jürg Acklin’s 2009 novel Vertrauen ist gut. Resting on the theory of complex embodiment, the analysis considers the rhetoric of anmut as a literary strategy that invites readers to share imperfect, yet profound, embodied rhetorical connections with the protagonist without rendering invisible the differences that shape embodied experience. Although the characters in Vertrauen ist gut are fictional, this novel provides important insights regarding experiences of precarious embodiment and affirms the value of interdependence while challenging ideals of autonomy and independence. Furthermore, the novel’s narrative within a narrative—and the consequences of the narrator’s interpretation of their significance—challenges readers to use caution when interpreting literary narratives, as their relationship to personal narratives may not always be straightforward.

“Today is a Four”: How Students Talk About their Chronic Pain

According to critical embodiment theory, people notice the acts and functions of their bodies only when their bodies are not normalized, which causes them to perceive a difference between normalized bodies and their own. People with chronic pain likewise perceive a disconnect between themselves and people without chronic pain. This study examines, through semi-structured interviews with university students who have chronic pain, how participants conceive of their pain in different ways. This study confirms that participants considered themselves different from those without chronic pain, although nearly all participants identified one or more individual out-group “allies.” Further, participants conceived of their pain differently, as evidenced by the various established and unestablished frameworks they used to communicate their pain. Because these concepts of pain are grounded in bodily experiences, it is impossible to fully “translate” pain to others.