Negotiating Underwater Space: The Sensorium, the Body and the Practice of Scuba-diving

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Merchant

The desire to escape from land-based bodily constraints, to become enchanted by the spectacle of technicolour reefs, sunken ships and otherworldly creatures, is growing in popularity despite the expense and training required to explore the ocean depths. This dense water world, where a person’s resistance to gravitational pull results in differing feelings of weightlessness, where sound travels about five times faster yet more unevenly than in air, and where verbal communication is impractical such that visual cues are necessary, calls for a different ‘way of being’ to the everyday spaces of the home or the workplace. It is these different ways of being and feeling that I explore in this paper. To do this I present a sensual phenomenology that pays particular attention to the reorganization of the sensoria of a group of novice divers as they start to gain an awareness of the different perceptual means by which they move through and sense underwater space. The paper concludes by highlighting that phenomenological accounts of tourist space can shed light on the intricacies of tourists’ lived experiences, which in turn could prove useful in the structure and organization of tourist activities.

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (02) ◽  
pp. 413-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Hudson

While feminists usually try to ground the meanings that they study, theorizing the mundane or the everyday may very well represent a detour—or even a dead end—if bread-and-butter issues related to the security and economic well-being of ordinary women and men are ignored. What value does feminist theorizing (even if it draws from women's lived experiences) have in war-affected contexts where meeting immediate needs is paramount? At what point does the theorizing of the body under such circumstances become a means to satisfying intellectual fetishes? Theorizing the everyday is messy because it has to contend with the immediate social setting in which popular culture is inseparable from the economic materiality of the conditions of oppression.


2020 ◽  
pp. 144078332097870
Author(s):  
Richard Hornsey ◽  
Laura Gubby

From the perspective of a final year physical education and sport and exercise science undergraduate student, this article explores the relationship between learned and lived experiences related to the body. The research uses an autoethnographic approach that focuses on the educational and social issues that the first author faced as his physical identity changed. The author reflects on the ways in which his once acceptable body experienced declining capital as his body became too ‘fat’ within the spaces that he was connected to. In an attempt to resist institutionalised understandings that imply that larger bodies are a result of neglect and poor lifestyle choices, this research demonstrates the impact of cultural understandings on the everyday life of a university student seeking an ‘acceptable body’.


Author(s):  
Chantal Jaquet

Lastly, on the basis of this definition, the author shows how affects shed light on the body-mind relationship and provide an opportunity to produce a mixed discourse that focuses, by turns, on the mental, physical, or psychophysical aspect of affect. The final chapter has two parts: – An analysis of the three categories of affects: mental, physical, and psychophysical – An examination of the variations of Spinoza’s discourse Some affects, such as satisfaction of the mind, are presented as mental, even though they are correlated with the body. Others, such as pain or pleasure, cheerfulness (hilaritas) or melancholy are mainly rooted in the body, even though the mind forms an idea of them. Still others are psychophysical, such as humility or pride, which are expressed at once as bodily postures and states of mind. These affects thus show us how the mind and body are united, all the while expressing themselves differently and specifically, according to their own modalities.


Author(s):  
Labeeb Bsoul

This article aims to shed light on a particular area in the field of Islamic International law (siyar) treaty in Islamic jurisprudence. It addresses a comparative view of classical jurists of treaties both theoretically and historically and highlights their continued relevance to the contemporary world. Since the concept of treaty a lacuna in scholarship as well as the familiar of international legal theorists to study and integrate the Islamic treaty system into the body of modern international law in order to have a mutual understanding and respect and honor for treaties among nations. I would like to present a series of three parts the first one addresses the concept of treaty in Islamic jurisprudence the second addresses the process of drafting treaties and their conclusion and the third addresses selected treaties, including the treaty of H{udaybiya that took place between Muslims and non-Muslims..


Author(s):  
Siraj Salman Mohammad ◽  
Renata Oliveira Santos ◽  
Maria Ivone Barbosa ◽  
José Lucena Barbosa Junior

: Anthocyanins are widely spread in different kinds of food, especially fruits and floral tissues, there is an extensive range of anthocyanin compounds reach more than 600 exist in nature. Anthocyanins can be used as antioxidants and raw material for several applications in food and pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, a plenty of studies about anthocyanins sources and extraction methods were reported. Furthermore, many studies about their stability, bioactive and therapeutic properties have been done. According to the body of work, we firstly worked to shed light on anthocyanin properties including chemical, antioxidant and extraction properties. Secondly, we reported the applications and health benefits of anthocyanin including the applications in food processes and anthocyanin characteristics as therapeutic and prophylactic compounds. We reviewed anticancer, anti-diabetic, anti-fatness, oxidative Stress and lipid decreasing and vasoprotective effects of anthocyanins. In conclusion, because the importance of phytochemicals and bioactive compounds the research is still continuing to find new anthocyanins from natural sources and invest them as raw materials in the pharmaceutical and nutrition applications.


Author(s):  
Richard A. Dienstbier ◽  
Lisa M. Pytlik Zillig

This chapter presents an overview of the concept of toughness, which at the abstract level is about the harmony of physiological systems, and more concretely is about how the body influences the mind. Toughness theory begins with the recognition that there is a “training effect” for neuroendocrine systems. Following a review of the characteristics of interventions and training programs that can promote toughness, the authors present a model in which the effects of toughness are mediated by neuroendocrine systems such as the pituitary-adrenal-cortical system and the central nervous system. The elements of toughness (e.g., having a greater capacity for arousal and energy when needed) are proposed to promote positive outcomes by facilitating the use of adaptive coping strategies and improving emotional stability. Toughness therefore appears to be a promising concept within positive psychology in that it helps to explain how the dynamic interactions between psychological and somatic processes can promote positive outcomes.


Birds ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-146
Author(s):  
Eduardo J. Rodríguez-Rodríguez ◽  
Juan J. Negro

The family Ciconiidae comprises 19 extant species which are highly social when nesting and foraging. All species share similar morphotypes, with long necks, a bill, and legs, and are mostly coloured in the achromatic spectrum (white, black, black, and white, or shades of grey). Storks may have, however, brightly coloured integumentary areas in, for instance, the bill, legs, or the eyes. These chromatic patches are small in surface compared with the whole body. We have analyzed the conservatism degree of colouration in 10 body areas along an all-species stork phylogeny derived from BirdTRee using Geiger models. We obtained low conservatism in frontal areas (head and neck), contrasting with a high conservatism in the rest of the body. The frontal areas tend to concentrate the chromatic spectrum whereas the rear areas, much larger in surface, are basically achromatic. These results lead us to suggest that the divergent evolution of the colouration of frontal areas is related to species recognition through visual cue assessment in the short-range, when storks form mixed-species flocks in foraging or resting areas.


Author(s):  
Jonna Nyman

Abstract Security shapes everyday life, but despite a growing literature on everyday security there is no consensus on the meaning of the “everyday.” At the same time, the research methods that dominate the field are designed to study elites and high politics. This paper does two things. First, it brings together and synthesizes the existing literature on everyday security to argue that we should think about the everyday life of security as constituted across three dimensions: space, practice, and affect. Thus, the paper adds conceptual clarity, demonstrating that the everyday life of security is multifaceted and exists in mundane spaces, routine practices, and affective/lived experiences. Second, it works through the methodological implications of a three-dimensional understanding of everyday security. In order to capture all three dimensions and the ways in which they interact, we need to explore different methods. The paper offers one such method, exploring the everyday life of security in contemporary China through a participatory photography project with six ordinary citizens in Beijing. The central contribution of the paper is capturing—conceptually and methodologically—all three dimensions, in order to develop our understanding of the everyday life of security.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110034
Author(s):  
Dang Nguyen

This article explores the temporality of liveness on Facebook Live through the analytical lens of downtime. Downtime is conceptualized here as multiscale: downtime exists in between the micro action and inaction of everyday life, but also in larger episodes of personal and health crises that reorient the body toward technologies for instantaneous replenishment of meaning and activity. Living through downtime with mobile technology enables the experience of oscillation between liveness as simultaneity and liveness as instantaneity. By juxtaposing time-as-algorithmic against time-as-lived through the livestreaming practices of diện chẩn, an emergent unregulated therapeutic method, I show how different enactments of liveness on Facebook Live recalibrate downtime so that the body can reconfigure its being-in-time. The temporal reverberation of downtime and liveness creates an alternative temporal space wherein social practices that are shunned by the temporal structures of institution and society can retune and continue to thrive at the margin of these structures and at the central of the everyday.


Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Slatman

AbstractThis paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”—a collection of pieces without a unity—together with his idea of corpus-writing—fragmentary writing, without head and tail—can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style—hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization.


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