Meaning in Our Bodies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Peckruhn
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
The World

What do our everyday experiences and bodily movements have to do with our theological imagination? How should we draw the connection between lived experience and theology? Feminist theologians, as well as other scholars, appeal to the importance of bodily experiences and perceptions when developing claims regarding social and cultural values and argue that our actions are always meaningful. But where and how do these arguments gain traction beyond mere thinking about methods in religious studies or theological exploring of metaphors? Religious scholars and theologians need to acquire a robust grasp on how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts that are bodily meaning making. This book presents a method of tracing embodied experience in order to account for meaning in everyday movements and encounters by strengthening and refining the concept of “experience” through a set of analytical commitments built on Maurice Merlau-Ponty’s phenomenological concepts. The notion of bodily experience is extended to that which makes up our social and theological knowledges. Bodily perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting in the world, therefore comprising theological imagination. This is demonstrated in historical and cultural comparisons where taste, touch, and emitted sounds may order normalcy, social status, or communal belonging. Constructive body theology as analytical tool is tested in feminist projects known for their explicit turn to experience and embodiment (Carter Heyward, Marcella Althaus-Reid). This book concludes with presentations of constructive possibilities that emerge when everyday bodily experience is utilized effectively as a source for religious and theological inquiries.

Language and Perception of Normalcy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Peckruhn
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Social Experience ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Perceptual Orientation ◽  
Social Habits ◽  
Bodily Difference ◽  
Normal Health

Chapter 5 connects language, bodily experience, perception, and meaning-making via an exploration of normalcy. Disability and perceptions of bodily difference show how language interrelates to bodily experiences, supporting and challenging socio-cultural habits of perceiving what is normal, health, and human. It points out that language is a bodily and social experience that expresses and shapes our bodily perceptual orientation in the world. To learn a different language is to learn of different bodily social habits, of different ways of perceiving and extending into the world. To be forced to give up a native language, or operate dominantly in a colonizing language, is to be forced to change one’s being in the world, to be dominated by another group’s tacit knowledges which may not resonate with my own.

scholarly journals Allowing one's own bodily experience to "count": Elaborating on inter- subjectivity and subjectivity in phenomenological studies

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 24-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Synne Groven ◽  
Gunn Engelsrud
Keyword(s):  
Research Process ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Phenomenological Studies ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Personal Reflections

Phenomenology, according to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, looks at human beings in the world. Drawing on their perspective, one could argue that inter-subjectivity, like a researcher’s subjectivity, should be explicitly acknowledged in phenomenological studies. In the following pages we explore how using this approach can make findings more transparent and trustworthy. This study is based on a review of five articles focused on subjectivity and inter-subjectivity in phenomenological studies. In addition, we draw on the first author’s experiences as a PhD candidate studying to become a “phenomenological” researcher. Our findings reveal that reflecting explicitly on bodily subjectivity during the research process can reveal connections between the context of the interview, how the material is created socially and textually and how the researcher utilized information from her own body in the interpretation of the material. This, in turn, is likely to make the findings more inter-subjective and transparent, and thus more trustworthy and valid. Our findings point to the value of letting one’s own bodily experiences “count” in the process of determining how to explore the phenomena in question. Although the literature offers guidelines, each project and each researcher is unique. In this light, personal reflections are likely to highlight the value of critically engaging – and making explicit – the researcher’s own experiences, both during and after the interview process.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jer.v3i0.7850Journal of Education and Research March 2013, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 24-40

scholarly journals Therapeutic creativity and the lived experience of grief in the collaborative fiction film Lost Property

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesel Dawson ◽  
Jimmy Hay ◽  
Natasha Rosling
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Participatory Action Research ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Collaborative Project ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Narrative Images

This collaborative project aimed to represent the embodied experience of grief in a fiction film by drawing on research, and on the personal and professional experience of all involved: academics; an artist; bereavement therapists and counsellors; and professional actors, cinematographers, sound engineers and other film crew. By representing grief in a more phenomenologically minded manner, the project sought to capture the lived experience of loss on screen while contributing meaningfully to the discourse on practice-as-research. Hay, Dawson and Rosling used a collaborative fiction film and participatory action research to investigate whether storying loss, and representing it through narrative, images and embodied movement, is therapeutic. Participatory action research was beneficial in facilitating changes in the co-researchers’ thinking, feeling and practice, and in enabling participants to inhabit multiple roles in a manner that expanded their disciplinary boundaries. However, while the project’s effect on some of the participants demonstrated the ways that creativity and meaning making can support adaptive grieving, it also revealed the risks of using participatory action research and fiction film to investigate highly emotive topics such as grief.

Deep Vein Thromboses in Injecting Drug Users: Meanings, Bodily Experiences, and Stigma

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (11) ◽  
pp. 1641-1650
Author(s):  
Charles Cornford ◽  
Lorraine Fraser ◽  
Nat Wright
Keyword(s):  
Support Groups ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Opioid Use ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
Deep Vein ◽  
Deep Vein Thromboses

Deep vein thromboses (DVTs) are common sequelae of injecting drugs into the groin. We explored meanings and experiences of DVTs in a group of 19 patients from the North East of England with a DVT and in treatment for opioid use. We report three themes: (a) DVT meaning making, (b) embodied experience, and (c) Stigma. Patients attributed DVTs to groin injecting, though thought other factors were also partially responsible. Medication performed both treatment and preventive functions. The most pertinent worry was amputation. Patients recognized stopping injecting as important, but it did not necessarily occur. Stigma resulted in delayed admission to hospital and feelings of isolation; support groups might alleviate the latter. Although groin injecting was undertaken partly to avoid the censure of being a drug user, ironically, a DVT led to long-standing stigmata that were discrediting signs of that exact status.

scholarly journals Husserl and Merleau Ponty: The Affective Bodily Experience of Architectural Space

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-302
Author(s):  
Irene Breuer
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Architectural Space ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Existential Dimension

SummaryThis paper deals with the development of Husserl’s and Merleau-Pontys analyses of the affective lived experience of body and space. Both the concept of „flesh“ (Merleau-Ponty) and „Hyle“ (Husserl) stand for a sensuous principle that underlies the original givenness and solidarity of body and world and I claim that this interaction and the concomitant intertwining of body and place make up the existential dimension of architecture, i.e. the, being-here-in-a-place’. In this connection, I argue that the fact that bodily affective experience endows the world with sense has led to a double break: On the one hand with representation and on the other with perspectivity and compossibility of the realms of being in Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s respective approaches. Finally, I will exemplify this break and the development of genetic insights – from an anthropocentric, organic and harmonious space conception to a topologic space made up of incompossibilities expressing an ambiguous sense – with paradigmatic works of architecture, so as to make evident the explanatory potential of phenomenology for architecture.

scholarly journals YULETIDE IDEOLOGY AS ADVERTISING IDEOLOGY: AN HISTORICAL ILLUMINATION FROM SAINT NICHOLAS TO THE PRESENT DAY

2018 ◽  
pp. 143
Author(s):  
Taofeek Dalamu
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
The Political ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Santa Claus ◽  
The World ◽  
Interdisciplinary Nature ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Global Affairs

The study traces the historical phenomenon of Saint Nicholas, the renowned icon known as Santa Claus. The objective is to demonstrate how advertisers have seized the virtues of Santa Claus as an article of persuading consumers. Owing to the interdisciplinary nature of this enquiry exemplified in the domains of history, linguistics and advertising, the concept of ideology enraptured in interpellation is adopted as both the analytical tool and discursive assistant to unravel the data meaning-making potentiality. The author utilizes twelve adverts associated with Santa Claus as illustrations in which six of them are from the Coca-cola Company® as a reference of honour as well as a signal to the role the institution plays in promoting the heroic persona. The study reveals the universality and acceptability of Santa Claus in global affairs during the Yuletide season. That hegemonic influence is perceived as motivation for advertisers to project Santa Claus in a civilized way as a cook, a dove or an angel, a car lover or owner, an alcoholic or a lover of alcohol, and a banker. Santa Claus with his traditional values enthralled in kindness to humanity is further represented as a parsimonious person somehow addicted to sugary contents without any unhealthy resultant effects. In all, the traditional etiquette of Santa Claus established by Saint Nicholas and promoted by Coca-cola®, the study suggests, is worthy of emulation for all. Perhaps, through such characteristic adoption the political violence and terrorism intimidating the world can be laid to rest in no time and at less cost.

scholarly journals Storytelling to Teach Cultural Awareness: The Right Story at the Right Time

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary McCullum Baldasaro ◽  
Nancy Maldonado ◽  
Beate Baltes
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Awareness ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
The World ◽  
Building Community ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Right

Stories contain the wisdom of the world, teaching cultural values, building community, celebrating cultural diversity, and preserving cultural identity. Where truth is suppressed, story is an instrument of epiphany and develops metaphorical understanding. A storytelling guild in Canada had been a cultural institution for 23 years, so when the center faced permanent closure, members were devastated. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to investigate the moment of this lived experience using interviews and focus groups. Findings indicated story strengthens content retention and language acquisition. These findings led to the development of a project focused on story-centered lessons for teachers.

scholarly journals Affective loop experiences: designing for interactional embodiment

2009 ◽  
Vol 364 (1535) ◽  
pp. 3585-3595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Höök
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Text Messages ◽  
Important Lesson ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Body Sensors ◽  
Affective Experiences ◽  
Design Requirements ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Affective Interaction

Involving our corporeal bodies in interaction can create strong affective experiences. Systems that both can be influenced by and influence users corporeally exhibit a use quality we name an affective loop experience. In an affective loop experience, (i) emotions are seen as processes, constructed in the interaction, starting from everyday bodily, cognitive or social experiences; (ii) the system responds in ways that pull the user into the interaction, touching upon end users' physical experiences; and (iii) throughout the interaction the user is an active, meaning-making individual choosing how to express themselves—the interpretation responsibility does not lie with the system. We have built several systems that attempt to create affective loop experiences with more or less successful results. For example, eMoto lets users send text messages between mobile phones, but in addition to text, the messages also have colourful and animated shapes in the background chosen through emotion-gestures with a sensor-enabled stylus pen. Affective Diary is a digital diary with which users can scribble their notes, but it also allows for bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors mapping to users' movement and arousal and placed along a timeline. Users can see patterns in their bodily reactions and relate them to various events going on in their lives. The experiences of building and deploying these systems gave us insights into design requirements for addressing affective loop experiences, such as how to design for turn-taking between user and system, how to create for ‘open’ surfaces in the design that can carry users' own meaning-making processes, how to combine modalities to create for a ‘unity’ of expression, and the importance of mirroring user experience in familiar ways that touch upon their everyday social and corporeal experiences. But a more important lesson gained from deploying the systems is how emotion processes are co-constructed and experienced inseparable from all other aspects of everyday life. Emotion processes are part of our social ways of being in the world; they dye our dreams, hopes and bodily experiences of the world. If we aim to design for affective interaction experiences, we need to place them into this larger picture.

Religious Studies of Democratic Ukraine

2001 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Anatolii M. Kolodnyi
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Integral System ◽  
The World

Ukrainian religious studies have deep roots. We find the elements of it in the written descendants of the writings of Kievan Rus. From the prince's time, the universal way of vision, understanding and appreciation of the world for many Ukrainian thinkers becomes their own religious experiences. The main purpose of their works is not the desire to create a certain integral system of theological knowledge, but the desire to convey their personal religious-minded perception of the divine nature, harmony, beauty and perfection of God created the world.

The problem of periodization of the history of religion

1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Religion

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.

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