Ritual and Thought: Spirituality and Method in Philosophy of Religion

This paper outlines a strain of French Spiritualism, a philosophical tradition extending from Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, and Jules Lachelier to their reception in the work of Maurice Blondel and his protégé Henry Duméry. In receiving and transforming this tradition, Blondel and Duméry have helped to provide a distinct philosophical paradigm in philosophy of religion, capable of providing insight into the spiritual nature of the human being, both in how spirituality relates to the advanced stages of religious culture in addition to its primitive presence in spontaneous action. As a tradition consecrated to the study of human consciousness, and the operations of the mind [l’esprit], the French spiritualist tradition provides a rich conceptual matrix for analyzing the nature of human thinking and its relationship to action. In such an analysis of human thought, Maurice Blondel set up a moral psychology and metaphysical anthropology, highlighting how the consciousness of the human being is linked to the objective order of existence, both in its material form and in the intelligible realities behind the nature of existence. This philosophical matrix helps to show how religious practices, through embodied engagement with the material world, are effective at generating a consciousness of metaphysical or transcendent realities. As such, this philosophical paradigm provides the means for constructing a theory of ritual, where ritual acts with symbols and signs may be rendered intelligible as the sensible means for the cognitive expression of spiritual activity.

Epistemic Disobedience and Grief in Academia

Drawing on conversations with foreign women in academic positions at one major University in Norway, this article is inspired by Barad’s and Haraway’s theorizing on how matter and discourse are mutually constituted through a diffractive approach. Understanding diffraction as an embodied engagement, a becoming with the data through shared entanglements, this article argues that the researcher’s personal background cannot be separated from the data produced. Departing from the decolonial theorist Castro-Gómez concept ‘hubris of zero-point epistemology’, the existence of an abstract and transcendental western universalism, where ‘the observer observes without been observed’ (Domínguez 2020; Mignolo 2009), assemblages of foreign female academics are explored through posthuman feminism and decolonial perspectives (Jackson and Mazzei 2012; Taguchi 2012; Puwar 2004). Through immersion in assemblages of contradictions, strength, and resistance, this article contends that policymakers’ good intentions of diversity in higher education, and the existence of different bodies, are shaking the world of academia, albeit slowly. Academia is still immersed in zero-point epistemology, favoring western, upper-class, paternalist, and meritocratic thought, detached from academics’ embodied knowledge. This brings into existence ‘bodies out of place’, re/producing grief, resistance, and epistemic disobedience when some academics are not suitable of becoming real academics.

Wonder as Feminist Pedagogy: Disrupting Feminist Complicity with Coloniality

This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context.

Multimodal Interaction Analysis: a Powerful Tool for Examining Plurilingual Students’ Engagement in Science Practices

Science teaching and learning are discursive practices, yet analysis of these practices has frequently been grounded in theorizations that place language at the forefront of interaction and meaning-making. Such language-centric analytic approaches risk overlooking key embodied, enacted aspects of students’ engagement in science practices. This manuscript presents a case of a plurilingual student’s participation in science inquiry to demonstrate how multimodal interaction analysis can be used to examine the highly diverse array of communicative resources that she draws upon while participating in science, including gestures, facial expressions, vocal intonations, and languages. Grounded in dialogic theorizations of language, we first detail the multimodal interaction approach, and second, we show how multimodal interaction analysis beginning first with her embodied engagement, then coupled with her subsequent written and spoken engagement, reveals robust views of her engagement in science practices. Key to this methodological approach is multilayered analysis that backgrounds verbal or spoken communication to allow for an identification of embodied interaction resources employed. We emphasize how this analytical method allows us to conceptualize science as a practice that unfolds through and in interaction, as compared to a static body of concepts to be learned.

Memory as the Aspatial Domain for the Perception of Certain Genres of Contemporary Art Music

This paper enquires into the nature of the connections between memory and certain genres of contemporary art music whose unique features rely particularly on our early mnemonic processes. Specific sound configurations of this music are often associated, during listening, with visual and tactile sensorial qualities and with abstract geometries. They are perceived fundamentally as the results of acoustic-physical forces and energies and are organized according to Gestalt and kinesthetic principles. This kind of music calls for a specific listening attitude, which we define as the vertical stance, and seems particularly apt to respond to mechanisms of the working memory where echoic, short- and long-term memories assume a central role. In this vertical stance, memory is involved in the mental construction (segregation, storage, and prediction) of the Gestalt configurations of this music within a perceptual domain that crucially has no spatial connection to the external world. In tying in neurophysiological and psychological research with musicological theories, we discuss the perceptual approach to these music practices in the light of the philosophical concept of the ‘No-Space world’ as conceived by the philosopher Peter Strawson. We propose that – under certain conditions – memory may be the realm of the purely spectro-temporal features of music. The sound configurations of this music in particular are part of an internal-external perceptual framework, being decoded in the conceptual space of perception and able to elicit high-order recollections typical of an embodied engagement with the external world.

Immersive Intelligent Aesthetics as Conduit for Digital and Public Humanities Research

The article outlines conceptual frameworks and experimental studies developed at the University of New South Wales, surveying a selection of creative arts industry research projects. These deliver fully immersive interactive visualisation systems that enable new forms of embodied engagement with artistic, cultural and performance datasets, deploying Artificial Intelligence to analyse and augment user navigation for improving data identification, access and processing. Sketching the developmental trajectory of intelligent aesthetics across these projects, the paper closes with a critical consideration of effects and implications of human-machine co-agency in this new context of cultural reflection.

Everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten

This article addresses how art and spatial practise can increase the potential for knowledge transfer and celebrate diverse forms of embodied expertise. By examining the intersection of creative practise and psychological enquiry, I explore memory as embodied or sensory remembering, and ask how the encounter with material forms can engage with memory to generate meaning through the embodied associations of the materials used. Processing emotions and lived experiences through reflection, and then re-imagining and re-materialising them in a contemporary context, reveals trauma as an element of a fractured then re-forming identity. Integration in this context is a process where an awareness of painful memories of trauma is incorporated into a sense of self, and the trauma no longer constrains the individual. Through an analysis of my own multimedia practise, which references my traumatic memories, I propose that creative practise is a form of somatic experiencing. The embodied gestures involved in artmaking, together with reflection that is an intrinsic part of the process, lead to release of the unconscious pent energy embedded in trauma. I consider whether a material investigation and experimentation with the sensory aspects of memory, including affect, embodied perception, intuition and felt knowledge, is a means to transform past trauma. By releasing traumatic energy through an embodied engagement with an expanded spatial practise, I am increasing the potential for knowledge transfer, which is then expressed in the artwork. Trauma is exposed, moving from silence to testimony, and the witnessing by an audience further increases the potential for transfer of knowledge. Diverse embodiment emerges through the employment of a disparate range of materials and methods, including the creation of spatial encounters.

Re-thinking and re-positioning ‘being in the moment’ within a continuum of moments: introducing a new conceptual framework for dementia studies

This article draws upon six social research studies completed by members of the Dementia and Ageing Research Team at The University of Manchester and their associated networks over an eight-year period (2011–2019) with the aim of constructing a definition of ‘being in the moment’ and situating it within a continuum of moments that could be used to contextualise and frame the lived experience of dementia. Using the approach formulated by Pound et al. (2005) in synthesising qualitative studies, we identified this continuum of moments as comprising four sequential and interlinked steps: (a) ‘creating the moment’, defined as the processes and procedures necessary to enable being in the moment to take place – the time necessary for this to occur can range from fleeting to prolonged; (b) ‘being in the moment’, which refers to the multi-sensory processes involved in a personal or relational interaction and embodied engagement – being in the moment can be sustained through creativity and flow; (c) ‘ending the moment’, defined as when a specific moment is disengaged – this can be triggered by the person(s) involved consciously or subconsciously, or caused by a distraction in the environment or suchlike; and (d) ‘reliving the moment’, which refers to the opportunity for the experience(s) involved in ‘being in the moment’ to be later remembered and shared, however fragmentary, supported or full the recall.