‘… sometimes you’ve just got to get away’: On trekking holidays and their therapeutic effect

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnthora Olafsdottir

A traditional Romantic fix for the stress and strain of the everyday has been the idea of ‘getting back to nature’, exploring places of natural grandeur and beauty based on the belief in nature’s therapeutic agency on the traveller. This article introduces a theoretical framework that offers a way to explore how touristic spaces are lived within a human–non-human co-constituted affective process. It then engages with the spaces of nature-based tourism and reports findings from an ethnographic study on British-based trekking holiday to Iceland. These findings suggest that the emotions and therapeutic affect that have traditionally been reported from spending time in nature are relational outcomes; they depend both on nature’s performance and on what the individual contributes to the relations.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Yu Zhang ◽  
Su-hua Wang ◽  
Shinchieh Duh

We provide a framework of analysis for Chinese ways of learning that extends beyond the individual level. The theoretical framework focuses on Confucian principles of <i>xiào</i> (孝, filial piety), <i>guăn</i> (管, to govern), and <i>dào dé guān</i> (道德觀, virtues), which leads us to argue that directive guidance as a cultural practice nourishes Chinese-heritage children’s learning as early as in infancy. To illustrate how directive guidance occurs in action for infants, we present an empirical study that examined the interaction of mother-infant dyads in Taipei, Taiwan, when they played with a challenging toy. The dyads co-enacted directive guidance more frequently than their European-American counterparts in the USA – through hand holding, intervening, and collaboration – while infants actively participate in the practice. We discuss the early development of strengths for learning that is fostered through culturally meaningful practices recurrent in parent-infant interaction.


Childhood ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 090756822094713
Author(s):  
Barbara Turk Niskač

The paper draws on ethnographic study and goes beyond dualistic understanding of work and play to investigate the complex world of social interactions among preschoolers. While adults viewed work as an educational process through which children’s personalities are shaped in a desired way, the children perceived work as a means of social interactions. Building on the theoretical framework of sociality and intersubjectivity, the paper suggests that work, play and learning can represent complementary aspects of human existence and living.


1949 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-224
Author(s):  
G. B. Greenough

SummaryMany papers have been written on the measurement of strain by X-ray diffraction methods and on the interpretation of these strains in terms of stresses. Whereas, during the past few years, the experimental methods of determining the strains have. remained largely unchanged, research has shown that the older techniques for calculating stresses from strains are not always valid.In this paper an attempt is made to describe some of the principles of strain measurement by X-ray diffraction methods to those who are unfamiliar with the methods. The types of stress and strain systems which may exist in polycrystalline metals are then considered, particular attention being paid to the effect of the elastic and plastic anisotropy of the individual crystals. Some indication is given as to how the earlier methods of interpreting X-ray strain measurements should be modified, but no rigid routine method is proposed for use in a general case.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
P. Conrad Kotze ◽  
Jan K. Coetzee

Transformation has come to be a defining characteristic of contemporary societies, while it has rarely been studied in a way that gives acknowledgement to both its societal effects and the experience thereof by the individual. This article discusses a recent study that attempts to do just that. The everyday life of a South African is explored within the context of changes that can be linked, more or less directly, to those that have characterized South Africa as a state since the end of apartheid in 1994. The study strives to avoid the pitfalls associated with either an empirical or solely constructivist appreciation of this phenomenon, but rather represents an integral onto-epistemological framework for the practice of sociological research. The illustrated framework is argued to facilitate an analysis of social reality that encompasses all aspects thereof, from the objectively given to the intersubjectively constructed and subjectively constituted. While not requiring extensive development on the theoretical or methodological level, the possibility of carrying out such an integral study is highlighted as being comfortably within the capabilities of sociology as a discipline. While the article sheds light on the experience of transformation, it is also intended to contribute to the contemporary debate surrounding the current “ontological turn” within the social sciences.


2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (11) ◽  
pp. 2833-2849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Schultz

Background/Context Students spend a large part of their time in schools in silence. However, teachers tend to spend most of their time attending to student talk. Anthropological and linguistic research has contributed to an understanding of silence in particular communities, offering explanations for students’ silence in school. This research raised questions about the silence of marginalized groups of students in classrooms, highlighting teachers’ role in this silencing and drawing on limited meanings of silence. More recently, research on silence has conceptualized silence as a part of a continuum. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The purpose of this project was to review existing literature and draw on two longitudinal research studies to understand the functions and uses of silence in everyday classroom practice. I explore the question, How might paying attention to the productivity of student silence and the possibilities it contains add to our understanding of student silence in educational settings? Silence holds multiple meanings for individuals within and across racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. However, in schools, silence is often assigned a limited number of meanings. This article seeks to add to educators’ and researchers’ tools for interpreting classroom silence. Research Design The article is based on two longitudinal qualitative studies. The first was an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of high school students in a multiracial high school on the West Coast. This study was designed with the goal of learning about adolescents’ literacy practices in and out of school during their final year of high school and in their first few years as high school graduates. The second study documents discourses of race and race relations in a postdesegregated middle school. The goal of this 3-year study was to gather the missing student perspectives on their racialized experiences in school during the desegregation time period. Conclusions/Recommendations Understanding the role of silence for the individual and the class as a whole is a complex process that may require new ways of conceptualizing listening. I conclude that an understanding of the meanings of silence through the practice of careful listening and inquiry shifts a teacher's practice and changes a teacher's understanding of students’ participation. I suggest that teachers redefine participation in classrooms to include silence.


Author(s):  
Richard Rechtman

Veena Das has introduced a major shift in our contemporary conception of ethnography. While she brings forward a new way of looking at everyday life, which is already a major achievement, she also offers a conceptual resolution to a classical unresolved opposition between the individual and the collective, and between idiosyncratic psychology (subjectivity) and collective modes of thinking, through a challenging debate on what makes one a member of a group and yet radically distinct from all others. The ethnography in her book Affliction stands on three major pillars: The first is the ethnographer’s subjective position in the field regarding the issues of lives, testimony, and research. The second is the neighborhood as the site of fieldwork, with all of its heterogeneity, rather than the group, such as an ethnic or racial group or one cohering around another criterion of belonging. The third and final pillar is the focus on the ordinary through ethnography of the everyday. I then illustrate Veena Das’s perspective on subjectivity with my own fieldwork with survivors of the Cambodian genocide.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Jansson

What does the implementation of new communication networks mean for the spatial coherence and social sustainability of rural communities? This paper takes its key from Wittel’s discussion of network sociality, understood as the opposite of Gemeinschaft. Wittel’s argument may inform our understanding of how communicative patterns in rural communities are partly reembedded through ongoing media transitions. But it must also be problematized. Relating Wittel’s discussion to Halfacree’s model of spatial coherence and Urry’s notion of network capital, as well as to findings from an ethnographic study in a Swedish countryside community, a more complex view is presented. It is argued that global communication networks under rural conditions contribute to the integration and sustainability of the community, as much as to processes of expansion and differentiation. The results show that network sociality and community constitute interdependent concepts. Through their capacity of linking people to external realms of interest, while simultaneously reinforcing their sense of belonging in the local community, online media promote ontological security at the individual level, thus operating as a social stabilizer.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Dew ◽  
P Norris ◽  
J Gabe ◽  
K Chamberlain ◽  
D Hodgetts

© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This article extends our understanding of the everyday practices of pharmaceuticalisation through an examination of moral concerns over medication practices in the household. Moral concerns of responsibility and discipline in relation to pharmaceutical consumption have been identified, such as passive or active medication practices, and adherence to orthodox or unorthodox accounts. This paper further delineates dimensions of the moral evaluations of pharmaceuticals. In 2010 and 2011 data were collected from 55 households across New Zealand and data collection techniques, such as photo- and diary-elicitation interviews, allowed the participants to develop and articulate reflective stories of the moral meaning of pharmaceuticals. Four repertoires were identified: a disordering society repertoire where pharmaceuticals evoke a society in an unnatural state; a disordering self repertoire where pharmaceuticals signify a moral failing of the individual; a disordering substances repertoire where pharmaceuticals signify a threat to one's physical or mental equilibrium; a re-ordering substances repertoire where pharmaceuticals signify the restoration of function. The research demonstrated that the dichotomies of orthodox/unorthodox and compliance/resistance do not adequately capture how medications are used and understood in everyday practice. Attitudes change according to why pharmaceuticals are taken and who is taking them, their impacts on social relationships, and different views on the social or natural production of disease, the power of the pharmaceutical industry, and the role of health experts. Pharmaceuticals are tied to our identity, what we want to show of ourselves, and what sort of world we see ourselves living in. The ordering and disordering understandings of pharmaceuticals intersect with forms of pharmaceuticalised governance, where conduct is governed through pharmaceutical routines, and where self-responsibility entails following the prescription of other agents. Pharmaceuticals symbolise forms of governance with different sets of roles and responsibilities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 361.1-361
Author(s):  
Annie Bellamy

Neither a ‘hospital’ nor a ‘home’; the in-patient hospice has a unique architectural identity remaining largely undocumented. There is a plethora of architectural research regarding more common-place healthcare buildings such as hospitals and care-homes. (RIBA n.d) However the architecture of in-patient hospices is misunderstood in the role it can play in supporting the holistic principles of palliative care as backdrops for ‘not just a good death but a good life to the very end’ (Gawande 2014, pg. 245).Reconciling the social and spatial this research aims to establish an authentic identity for in-patient hospices; developing opportunities and situations for environments that become ‘sympathetic extensions of our sense of ourselves’ (Bloomer KC + Moore CW 1977, pg. 78) enabling those at the end of their life to dwell with dignity.An ethnographic study involving practise led design research; the research engages with experiences of the researcher and users of Welsh in-patient hospices alongside interrogations of existing architectural strategies. This inter-disciplinary methodology will provide a ‘back and forth’ movement to reflect with the community of practise upon design projects and fieldwork.Foundation work concluded that ‘homely’ is a too broad and subjective concept with which to define meaningful architectural responses for the variety of users and uses of in-patient hospices. Building upon this initial visits to Welsh in-patient hospices and design primers of key moments of inhabitation aims to provide conclusions on how architecture can create and balance the individual phenomenological experiences and needs of patients family and staff.References. RIBA. Health buildings and hospitals [Online] (n.d). Available at https://www.ribabookshops.com/books/health-buildings-and-hospitals/010503/ (Accessed: 31 May 2018). Gawande A. Being mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end2014;245. New York: Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company.. Kent BC, Charles MW. Body memory and architecture1977;78. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 718-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Imose ◽  
Lisa M. Finkelstein

Science designed to understand the effects of diversity in organizations and science designed to understand the processes and outcomes of emotional labor have accumulated with increased rapidity, but rarely have the two research streams merged. We present a conceptual framework to integrate diversity with emotional labor, with the goals of prompting new research pathways and forging better understanding of the role emotional labor processes play in diverse work environments. This multilevel framework allows for conceptualizing and testing ideas about the interplay of both of these concepts at the individual and team levels, and introduces potential boundary conditions for their effects.


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