‘Thinking with Kaipara’: A decolonising methodological strategy to illuminate social heterogenous nature–culture relations in place

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110268
Author(s):  
Leane Makey
Keyword(s):  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Ecosystem Degradation ◽  
Ecosystem Based Management ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
Restoration Practices ◽  
Methodological Strategy

Decolonising methodologies continue to be critically developed to disrupt the marginalising approaches to knowledge production. By privileging Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, relations with nature are a more-than-human entanglement and a relational pursuit. Ecosystems such as estuaries and rivers are connected through kin-based relationships and treated as (or are) ancestors and family members. Such embodiment connects the body–mind–spirit to maintain relations with the mauri of ancestral beings and Deities. Within this ontology, nature is indistinguishable from culture. Our research responds to the call of how method might proceed to de-centre the human and make bodily and material encounters with the nonhuman matter. ‘Thinking with Kaipara’ is a methodological strategy that is a deliberate attempt to pursue embodied ways of producing knowledge. To work with situated knowledges, place and social difference to address the crisis of representation of such in ecosystem-based management, the problematising of ecosystem degradation and restoration practices. Research data produced is founded on human and nonhuman collaboration, an ethic of care, diverse epistemic nature–culture relations, social/nature/gender justice and equality, which makes for empirical evidence not enjoyed by scientific and technocratic methods utilised to inform and shape ecosystem-based management decisions and policy. Geo-creative practices are used by co-researchers/co-participants to recount their lived experiences and knowledges of ecosystem degradation and restoration. Storytelling, poetics, and painting, sculpting, whaikorero, waiata and writing were practices used. We argue that such geo-creative practices challenge the normative spaces and practices of disciplinary knowledge-making and enable the examination of social heterogeneous nature–culture relations in settler-colonial societies.

Ciało poza Człowiekiem, czyli Ciało Wyemancypowane w ujęciu Elizabeth Grosz

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Rogowska-Stangret
Keyword(s):  
Women's Movement ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Biological Aspect ◽  
Theory Of Evolution

The article presents the philosophy of Elizabeth Grosz, its theoretical background and methods. It concentrates mainly on the category of the body which is present in her thought from the very beginning. The author pays particular attention to the problem of materiality of the body raised in The Nick of Time and Time Travels: why is the body docile? What makes it so vulnerable? What precedes social inscriptions? Those questions underline the problem of the biological aspect of the body as a part of nature which comes together with Grosz's interpretation of Darwin. The theory of evolution shows the temporality of human being and its culture and introduces future possibilities of overcoming the humankind and creating new ways of knowing, new sexes, new forms of living etc. The author suggests that this understanding of the body takes us beyond the human being and beyond subjectivity, it faces us with the process of becoming different which is perceived as emancipating. The author also suggests that Grosz's idea of the politics of imperceptibility is close to Foucault's recognition of the value of women's movement which, in his opinion, lies not in identity struggles but above all in struggles concentrating on broader cultural, social etc. changes. Both Foucault and Grosz aim at potential practices that involve giving up the question of our identities.

scholarly journals Ways of Knowing the Body, Bodily Ways of Knowing

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Martens
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Music Cognition ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Musical Score ◽  
Research Methodologies

The central role of the body in producing music is hardly debatable. Likewise, the body has always played at least an implicit role in music theory, but has only been raised as a factor in music analysis relatively recently. In this essay I present a brief update of the body in music analysis via case studies, situated in the disciplines of music theory and music cognition, broadly construed. This current trajectory is part of a broader shift away from the musical score as the sole focus for analysis, which admittedly—though, in my view, delightfully—raises a host of challenging epistemological questions surrounding the interaction of performer (production) and listener (perception). While the concomitant research methodologies and technologies may be unfamiliar to scholars trained in humanities disciplines, I advocate for a full embrace of these approaches, either by individual researchers or in the form of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Theorising love in sociological thought: Classical contributions to a sociology of love

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihai Stelian Rusu
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Sociological Tradition ◽  
Binding Force ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
The Social ◽  
Set Up

This article sets out to explore the contributions of classical social thinkers to a sociological understanding of love. It builds on the premise that despite its major relevance and consequential importance in shaping both individual lives and the social world, until recently love was a heavily undertheorised topic in the sociological tradition. Moreover, the body of disparate sociological reflections that have been made on the social nature of love has been largely forgotten in the discipline’s intellectual legacy. The article then proceeds in unearthing the classics’ contributions to a sociology of love. It starts with Max Weber’s view that love promises to be a means of sensual salvation in an increasingly rationalised social world based on impersonal formal relationships. Next, it critically examines Pitirim A. Sorokin’s integral theory of love. It then moves to address Talcott Parsons’ view on love as a binding force whose social function is to integrate the conjugal couple of the modern nuclear family in the absence of the external pressures exerted by the kinship network. The article concludes by showing how these conceptualisations of love were all embedded in wider theoretical constructions set up to account for the modernisation process.

Queer Dance

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Wide Range

Queer Dance argues that dance has a particular charge in the larger field of queer activism and study because it emphasizes and offers language for how public, physical action can be a force of social change. It considers how queer dance has political potential and how it could productively challenge more conservative dance forms, both in terms of making meaning and in terms of institutional practices. Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project—book, website, and live performance series—to ask: “What does dancing queerly challenge us toward?” The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online, stage a wide range of genders and sexualities as a way to challenge and destabilize social norms. Queer dance is a coalitional project, a gathering that works across LGBTQ identities and in concert with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial artmaking, activism, and scholarship. The book engages with dance-making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and a host of other fields, always asking how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. Might the slide of a hand across a hipbone be just as much an act of coming out as an announcement offered in words? How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might be revealed about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?

scholarly journals Exploring Experience as a Myriad Richness: Micro-phenomenology as a Transformative Approach to Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 13-25
Author(s):  
Magali Ollagnier-Beldame
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
First Person ◽  
Knowledge Processes ◽  
Felt Sense ◽  
Transformative Approach ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Suspension Of Judgement

Over the last twenty years, researches within cognitive sciences has massively grown in the field of the ways of knowing. For instance, in recent years, the paradigm of 4-E cognition suggests that cognition involves the whole body, as well as the situation of the body in the environment. This article argues that a first-person approach enriches the understanding of the ways of knowing in their complexity - particularly by seeking to re-question classical dichotomies - through the re-integration of subjective experience. In the heart of first-person epistemology, the micro-phenomenological interview - based on the explicitation interview - consists in “guided retrospective introspections”, and allows to scientifically access subjective experience. This technique relies on the epoché – the suspension of judgement – a process at first investigated by philosophers that was made accessible to psychology to empirically investigate and study subjective experience. How does the epoché happen? What concrete acts make it up? More broadly, what is the relationship between the epoché and embodiment? This paper sheds lights on possible relations between researches describing concrete practices of the Husserlian epoché and Gendlin’s work concerning the process of Focusing, which aims at accessing the inner felt sense of experience. The process of Focusing, is a way of paying attention to one’s being-in-the-world, one’s interaction as it is experienced through the individual (but not separate) body. We will especially consider the process of “clearing a space” that Gendlin describes, as well as the rupture that occurs during the “bodily felt shift” which can be compared to the conversion happening within the process of epoché. Finally, we discuss how our proposition can allow the construction of new models of knowledge processes, the challenge of such a proposal being not only epistemological, but also ethical and societal. KEYWORDS Subjective experience, embodiment, micro-phenomenology, epoché, focusing.

scholarly journals The paradox of contemporary midwifery practice: Promoting an out-of-hospital birth setting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bronwyn Torrance
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Place Of Birth ◽  
Hospital Birth ◽  
Normal Birth ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Qualitative Descriptive ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Primary Unit

<p>In New Zealand women choose their place of birth in partnership with their Lead Maternity Care (case loading) midwife, with most choosing a hospital regardless of their lack of risk factors. The reasons why most women in western countries choose to birth in hospital have been widely investigated. Risk aversity is most commonly implicated. For both women and health professionals this powerful discourse persists despite consistent research findings indicating higher rates of normal birth, and lower rates of maternal morbidity associated with interventions for healthy women who birth in out-of-hospital (primary) maternity units, with no difference in neonatal outcomes. There is however a gap in the literature regarding what is known about how midwives might positively influence the choice to birth in a primary unit.   A qualitative descriptive design through an appreciative inquiry lens enabled insight from 12 midwives who have a higher ratio of women within their caseload who choose to birth in a primary unit. Four focus groups were formed with these midwives to explore their perspectives and approaches as they assist women to make their place of birth decisions. From thematically analysed data, five themes emerged, Ways of knowing: woman, art, science and research; Trusting in you, me, and the process of childbirth; Setting boundaries as a ‘primary birth midwife’; and Delaying and diverting, a malleable approach, centered around the theme When it matters what we say: reframing safety and risk.   Alongside supporting current research, this study adds to the body of knowledge about birthplace choice by bringing to the fore the notion of paradox in practice, setting boundaries whilst remaining malleable for example. In a contemporary maternity context, these midwives dance between two worlds fundamentally at odds with one another, effectively managing contradiction, complexity and uncertainty to achieve a high primary unit caseload. The experience of what works to promote the primary unit for a cohort of New Zealand midwives is uncovered in this research.   The social recalibrations needed to adjust the hospital birth norm are much broader issues than midwives alone can change, but in this study, we see they are staying the course in order to protect and promote normal birth. How midwives might inform decision-making for place of birth choice is described.</p>

scholarly journals Using Embodied Practices with Preservice Teachers: Teaching and Reflecting Through the Body to Re-think Teacher Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Klein ◽  
Monica Taylor ◽  
Rachel Forgasz
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Preservice Teachers ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Teacher Education Program ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Learning ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Pre Service Teacher ◽  
Embodied Pedagogy

This action research describes how three teacher educators invited preservice teachers to be in their bodies, or learn through “embodied pedagogy.” We wanted see how this pedagogy helped preservice teachers learn to reflect through their bodies, confront their own bias to cognitive ways of knowing, and ultimately begin to consider the use of embodied instructional strategies. We describe our questions, the activities we designed to help us answer them, and data collected from the first course in a pre-service teacher education program. Finally, we analyze these data and identify themes related to embodied learning and reflection and describe some potential implications for teacher educators. Although at times uncomfortable, we found the body became a tool for reflection whether through experiencing or accessing emotions or for uncovering new meanings and deep insights about themselves.

scholarly journals The knowledge of disembodied souls: Epistemology, body, and social embeddedness in the eschatological doctrine of later sixteenth-century German Lutherans

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-213
Author(s):  
Gábor Ittzés
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Embeddedness ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Knowledge Of God

In the wake of their rejection of purgatory Protestants had to rethink their eschatological views. The German Lutherans of the latter half of the sixteenth century developed a robust doctrine of the last things, including a teaching on what departed souls know prior to the resurrection. Following an overview of the sources and a brief reconstruction of the overall locus, this article focuses on an analysis of what and how disembodied souls are claimed to know. The evidence holds some surprises. First, while more than lip-service is certainly paid to the ways of knowing God, the authors’ real interest lies in the exploration of interpersonal relationships. Their primary concern is how other human beings, whether still on earth or already departed, may be known and what may be known about them. The implications are threefold. Knowledge of God and knowledge of human beings—ultimately, knowledge of self—are intertwined. Anthropology takes centre-stage, and ontology is thus superseded by epistemology. In all this, the body is never relinquished. The apparently unconscious importation of sensory language and conceptualisation of sense-based experience permeate the discussion of ostensibly disembodied knowledge. Knowing, for our authors, is ultimately a function of the body even if this means ‘packing’ bodily functions into the soul. In this doctrine, which may have had its roots in patristics but which has also demonstrably absorbed impulses from popular religion, knowledge of God is not only deeply connected with individual identity but also exhibits indelible social features and is inseparable from the (re)constitution of community.

scholarly journals Choose your own adventure: Vocal jazz improvisation, conceptual metaphor, and cognitive embodiment

2021 ◽  
pp. 102986492110627
Author(s):  
Melissa Forbes ◽  
Kate Cantrell
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Vocal Jazz ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Musical Improvisation

Creativity in the form of musical improvisation has received growing attention from researchers informed by the literature on embodiment. To date, this research has focused on the embodied experiences of improvising instrumentalists rather than those of improvising singers. This article investigates the experience of embodiment during improvisation through a systematic analysis of the metaphorical language used by an artist-level jazz singer in her reflections on practice. Extensive interview data with the participant were analyzed to identify and reconstruct metaphorical expressions into conceptual metaphors. In this process, the metaphor of IMPROVISATION IS AN ADVENTURE was identified as the overarching conceptual structure that the participant used to make sense of her experiences of improvisation. This metaphor and its mappings illuminate the cognitively embodied dimension of vocal jazz improvisation. These findings will be of interest to jazz singers and vocal jazz educators who are encouraged to explore more fully the role of the body–mind’s interactions with its environment in order to establish expertise in improvisational ways of knowing. This research illuminates the multidimensional nature of an expert singer’s experiences of improvisation and is presented as a provocation for future research to include singers as participants when investigating musical improvisation and cognitive embodiment.

Biopolitics and Asian America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Kong
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Theoretical Terms ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
Governmental Power ◽  
A Site

Biopolitics, unlike other conceptual rubrics such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, or the subaltern, does not contain a singular theoretical origin. While Michel Foucault is often cited as the progenitor of contemporary biopolitical thought, a number of other theorists and philosophers have also been credited with significantly shaping its critical lineage, from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Achille Mbembe. By extension, the relation between biopolitics and Asian America is an open-ended one, insofar as no one set of theoretical terms or axioms grounds this relation. Moreover, insofar as biopolitics in its widest sense encompasses the intersection of politics and life, including the inverse of life, its domain is potentially infinite. The conjunctions between biopolitics and Asian America, then, can be defined tactically through the following questions: what are some prominent motifs and concerns within Asian American history, culture, and scholarship that may be illuminatingly narrated within a biopolitical framework? Conversely, how have Asian American writers and scholars themselves analyzed these nexuses, and in what directions have they developed their inquiries? Finally, what does an Asian Americanist criticism bring to the study of biopolitics? These questions can be usefully pursued via three thematics that have formed core concerns for Asian American studies: orientalist exoticism and exhibitions of the Asian body, associations of the Asian body with pollution and disease, and structures of US governmental power over Asian bodies and populations. Asian Americanist criticism has often centered on analyses of the body as a site for the production of racial difference, whether or not they explicitly adopt a biopolitical theoretical lexicon. What Asian Americanist engagements with biopolitics bring to biopolitical thought is a spotlighting of intersectional politics—the insight that the politics of life never simply operates in relation to abstract bodies but always occurs within power economies of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and other forms of social difference and stratification. Conversely, biopolitical theories allow Asian Americanist criticism to develop in multiple new directions, from medical humanities and disability studies to science and technology studies, from animal studies to post-human feminisms, from diaspora studies to surveillance studies. Ultimately, an ethical impetus and an orientation toward justice continue to animate Asian Americanist critical practices, which hold out the promise of a positive biopolitics within prevailing paradigms of negative biopower.

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