A Theory of Microactivist Affordances

2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arseli Dokumacı
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Disease ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Bodily Pain ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Creative Space ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Aesthetic Performance

This article proposes a new theory of affordances that is developed through a critical disability and performance lens. Through parallels to be drawn between the creative space of aesthetic performance and the performance of everyday life lived with disability, this new theory situates affordances in the improvisatory space of performance, and introduces the notion of “micro-activist affordances” as a way to understand mundane acts of world-building that could emerge from encounters with a world of “disorienting affordances.” Experiencing disability is inherently disorienting. The environment, as years of disability activism have shown us, is built with a very limited conception of the human being in mind. But the environment can also be disorienting when experiencing bodily pain and chronic disease. I argue that disability, in all of its various manifestations, is experienced as the shrinking of the environment, and its readily available affordances. But, as I shall also argue, precisely at such moments of shrinking, something else happens. When the environment is narrowed down in its offerings, I propose that it is the creative space of performance (on or offstage) that opens up to make it afford otherwise. This very potential to invent affordances is precisely how I conceptualize everyday lives lived with disability as being analogous to the reimagined space of aesthetic performance and its reorientations.

scholarly journals Managing everyday life with chronic pain and interaction with healthcare: a qualitative study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebba Ranås ◽  
Amanda Dahlrot ◽  
Anna Grimby-Ekman ◽  
Linda Ahlstrom
Keyword(s):  
Primary Care ◽  
Chronic Pain ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Healthcare Personnel ◽  
Written Narratives ◽  
Care Plans ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The People

Abstract Background: Chronic pain is a costly, widespread condition that often reduces the quality of life of individuals who suffer from it, for whom healthcare interaction is seldom efficient or free of problems. Outcomes of coping with chronic pain can depend upon patients’ approaches towards their pain, their defensive or offensive behaviours and their choices based upon their self-efficacy. Thus, even when their symptoms and diseases seem homogeneous, patients should be regarded as multidimensional individuals and their care plans should be individually tailored. The aim of our study was to examine how individuals with chronic pain manage their everyday lives and, from their perspectives, how primary care organisations should support them. Method: We conducted qualitative content analysis on the written narratives of 21 patients with chronic pain and held a focus group discussion with 15 of them. Results: The overarching theme in the patients’ narratives was that individuals with chronic pain develop adaptability in managing their everyday lives. Therein, the first sub-theme captures how such individuals use their bodies and souls to condition themselves and adapt to the people around them, take control of their everyday lives and find empowerment, whereas the second sub-theme captures how they interact with primary care organisations, their experiences with such interaction and the need to be treated with respect. Conclusions: For patients living with chronic pain, managing everyday life, the accompanying challenges and ongoing interactions with healthcare organisations requires developing adaptability. Although the individuals indeed bear great responsibility for their own health and wellbeing, healthcare personnel can ease that burden by adopting person-centred approaches in their care. However, to that end, healthcare personnel need more knowledge about supporting individuals living with chronic pain in order to ease their suffering.

scholarly journals “Ich Bin Ein Schauspieler”: Making Crip Performance in Toronto with Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Stephen Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Physical Disabilities ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
And Performance

This paper attends to the making of crip performance in the 2015 production of Disabled Theater in Toronto, where eleven performers with intellectual and physical disabilities took to the stage to perform a series of dance solos set to popular music. The performance was directed by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel and produced by the Zurich-based Theater HORA, a professional theatre company that is fully comprised of performers with disabilities. As an experienced choreographer, Bel is portrayed in the performance program as the “brains” behind Disabled Theater. It seems as though the performers were simply executing Bel’s artistic ideas through the embodied materiality of their dance performances. As such, the performers’ desire to be seen as proper artists exists amid the specter of an ableist ideology in “normative” culture that could potentially influence the audience members’ interpretation of their dance solos. Drawing on the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Carrie Sandahl, and Robert McRuer on the intersection of disability and performance, as well as the Italian dramaturge Eugenio Barba’s concept of the “pre-expressive state” of the actor’s body, I argue that the inclusion of persons with disabilities who confidently describe themselves as “actors” through the German phrase, “Ich Bin Ein Schauspieler”, unfolds the possibility of crip performance in Disabled Theater, which, unlike an ableist conception of performance, acknowledges disability as a reality that is constitutive of everyday life. Through crip performance, persons with disabilities do not need to downplay their disability in order to be publicly acknowledged as artists.

scholarly journals Various Factors that Interfere with the Accurate Assessment of the Three-rods Test and Modified Three-rods Test to Resolve Monocular Cues

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atsuya Takeuchi ◽  
Nami Kawaguchi ◽  
Naofumi Uesaka ◽  
Yukiko Tsujimoto
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Test Performance ◽  
Visual Function ◽  
Practice Effect ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Simple Modification ◽  
Multiple Tests ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Short Time ◽  
Occupational Settings

Abstract Binocular stereopsis is a higher-order visual function and is thought to play an important role in spatial cognition in everyday life and many occupational settings. Various stereotests are used clinically to evaluate binocular stereopsis, and the three-rods test is used to assess stereopsis in various occupations in Japan. It is known that there are factors such as monocular cues in various stereotests that make it difficult to accurately evaluate the stereoscopic function, but the existence of such factors in the three-rods test has not been clarified. Here, we show that practice effect and monocular cues exist in the conventional three-rods test and that we devised a modified three-rods test to address the monocular cues. In the conventional three-rods test, performance improved when multiple tests were performed in a short time under binocular condition, and performance was significantly better in the monocular condition compared to the blind condition, indicating the existence of practice effect and monocular cues, respectively. The modified three-rod test with a wider central rod excluded the effect of monocular cues and maintained binocular cues on test performance. Their results suggest that the three-rod test with the simple modification can be a useful method for testing stereoscopic functions.

‘Feeling Brazilian’: The search for authenticity in drum kit playing

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
Daniel Marcondes Gohn
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Percussion Instruments ◽  
Online Searches ◽  
And Performance

The influence of Brazilian rhythms is pervasive in modern drum kit practices. Information about them can be accessed through drumming books or online searches, with ostinatos for the feet and sticking combinations for the hands, which usually are adaptations from patterns traditionally played with hand percussion instruments. Those patterns instruct drummers on what to play; however, the discussion on how to play them to sound authentic is scarce. This article explores this topic and suggests that timing nuances and performance gestures are fundamental for its comprehension. In that sense, an exclusively analytical approach to the rhythmic nuances, in which grooves are described in terms of milliseconds, is not considered sufficient. In order to fully grasp the ‘Brazilian feel’, it is suggested that a broader spectrum of elements of expression should be observed, as dancing, religion, spoken language and other aspects of everyday life might have effects on musical outcomes.

A Queerly Ordinary Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Cavalcante
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
The Ideal

Struggling for Ordinary exhibits how transgender participants are engaging with media culture to cope with, integrate into, and simultaneously disrupt the shared everyday world. In showing how queerness plays out on the ground, within the actual lives of trans people, the book aims to square queer theory with lived experience by documenting how queerness and ordinariness are not mutually exclusive. Rather, transgender individuals live very queer and very ordinary lives simultaneously. The conclusion theorizes this hybridity as the “queerly ordinary,” defining what the concept means and what’s at stake in its usage. It interrogates the “ideal queer subject,” a figure who embodies the apex of queer theoretical aspiration, and then shifts focus toward examining “lived queerness,” or how individuals mobilize and enact queerness in ways that work for them within the limitations and structures of their world. Finally, the conclusion elucidates the queerly ordinary as an expression of lived queerness, and explores how it can help us understand transgender experience with media and everyday life. Ultimately, the queerly ordinary is what the trans people in my study wanted to see represented in media, what they used technologies to achieve, and in the end, it is how they lived their everyday lives.

Humans, Heroes and Artists: (Re)Creating the Unexpected Situation

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Coessens
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Music Improvisation ◽  
Time Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Urgent Action

Life is difficult, never the same, always challenging acquired patterns of behavior and expectation, urging the human being to improvise. Improvisatory acts in everyday life are the result of unexpected situations, where the encounter between self and environment suddenly disrupts the banal rituals of life. Over time, experience and knowledge enhance ways to cope with unexpectedness, and to 'improvise' better, or even 'less.' In music, improvisation is often a situation of choice. The unexpected situation is created, set up, purposively leading to an improvisatory encounter between body and environment. The musician knows he/she will 'improvise' the next hour. But it can also resemble life, by way of sudden unexpected moments which the musician still did not 'set up.' Experience and expertise enhance the fluidity of improvisational acts in the arts. This paper seeks to explore these tensions between improvisation in everyday life and in arts: between 'urgent action' and 'play,' between determined and created situations. It will be argued that the shift is not radical, and the tensions but a matter of degree. The 'artification' of improvisation originates in everyday life by play, tactics (de Certeau) and experience (Dewey) and reaches an aesthetic and ethic level of kairos (Aristotle) in art, exploring actions of choice and risking failure by (re)creating unexpectedness. The artist, like the human being in life, but now from his/her own free choice, is challenged to leave security and encounter the unexpected. But isn't that also the quest of the hero?

scholarly journals Beyond Quietism: Transformative Experience in Pyrrhonism and Wittgenstein

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rico Gutschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
Transformative Experiences ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Pyrrhonian Skepticism ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

Pyrrhonian skepticism is usually understood as a form of quietism, since it is supposed to bring us back to where we were in our everyday lives before we got disturbed by philosophical questions. Similarly, the ‘therapeutic’ and ‘resolute’ readings of Wittgenstein claim that Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophical practice’ results in the dissolution of the corresponding philosophical problems and brings us back to our everyday life. Accordingly, Wittgenstein is often linked to Pyrrhonism and classified as a quietist. Against this reading, I will employ Laurie Paul’s notion of epistemically transformative experience and argue that Pyrrhonian skepticism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be interpreted as a philosophical practice that changes our self-understanding in significant ways. I will argue that this practice can evoke transformative experiences and is thereby able to yield a non-propositional insight into the finitude of the human condition. This shows that Pyrrhonian skepticism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy go beyond quietism.

Diabetes self-care in-the-wild

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristiano Storni
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Disease ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Self Monitoring ◽  
Content Type ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Care Practices

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to raise issues about the design of personal health record systems (PHRs) and self-monitoring technology supporting self-care practices of an increasing number of individuals dealing with the management of a chronic disease in everyday life. It discusses the results of an ethnographic study exposing to analysis the intricacies and practicalities of managing diabetes “in the wild”. It then describe and discuss the patient-centric design of a diabetes journaling platform that followed the analysis. Design/methodology/approach – The study includes ethnometodological investigation based on in depth interviews, observations in a support group for adults with type 1 diabetes, home visits, shadowing sessions and semi-structured interviews with a series of medical experts (endocrinologists, general practitioners and diabetes nurses). Findings informed the design of a proof-of-concept PHR called Tag-it-Yourself (TiY): a mobile journaling platform that enables the personalization of self-monitoring practices. The platform is thoroughly described along with an evaluation of its use with real users. Findings – The investigation sheds light on a series of general characters of everyday chronic self-care practices, and how they ask to re-think some of the assumptions and connotations of the current medical model and the traditional sick role of the patient – often unreflectively assumed also in the design of personal technologies (e.g. PHR) to be used by patients in clinically un-controlled settings. In particular, the analysis discusses: the ubiquitous nature of diabetes that is better seen as a lifestyle, the key role of lay expertises and different forms of knowledge developed by the patient in dealing with a disease on a daily basis, and the need of more symmetrical interactions and collaborations with the medical experts. Research limitations/implications – Reported discussions suggest the need of a more holistic view of self-management of chronic disease in everyday life with more attention being paid on the perspective of the affected individuals. Findings have potential implications on the way PHR and systems to support self-management of chronic disease in everyday life are conceived and designed. Practical implications – The paper suggests designers and policy makers to look at chronic disease not as a medical condition to be disciplined by a clinical perspective but rather as a complex life-style where the medical cannot be separated by other aspects of everyday life. Such shift in the perspective might suggest new forms of collaborations, new ways of creative evidence and new form of knowledge creation and validation in chronic self-care. Social implications – The paper suggests re-thinking the role of the patient in chronic-disease self-management. In particular, it suggests giving more room to the patient voice and concerns and suggest how these can enrich rather than complicate the generation of knowledge about self-care practices, at least in type 1 diabetes. Originality/value – The paper sheds light on everyday intricacies and practicalities of dealing with a chronic disease. Studies of self-care practices that shed light on the patient perspectives are sporadic and often assume a clinical perspective, its assumptions (e.g. biomedical knowledge is the only one available to improve health outcome, doctors know best) and implications (e.g. compliance, asymmetry between the specialist and the patient).

Life is not chess: Towards a dynamic theory on altruism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2095755
Author(s):  
Zarak Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Dynamic Theory ◽  
Grounded Cognition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Economic View

Economic theory propagates a model of the human being commonly known as homoeconomicus; an individual with a rational orientation directed towards maximizing his/her preferences. However, our everyday lives involve many altruistic acts. These can range from small gestures of kindness such as holding a door open for another person, to heroic feats such as risking one's life to save a child from drowning. During our lives we also meet certain people that instantly induce our kindness. Our nicety in these moments is not based on a pursuit to optimize our material desires. Rather, we allow our feelings and intuitions to guide the course of our actions. How do we reconcile these experiences against the economic conception of human nature as inherently selfish? Addressing this contradiction, the paper will deconstruct the economic view and repositioning it as the product of an epistemological stance that distorts our view of altruism. An alternative model on altruism will then be developed by merging anthropological theories on value with insights from cultural psychology and grounded cognition. Through this process, a passage will be shown from static and universalizing perspective towards an emergent and dynamic theory on altruism.

scholarly journals Dominion, Stewardship and Reconciliation in the Accounts of Ordinary People Eating Animals

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 669
Author(s):  
Anna Sofia Salonen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Food Consumption ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday

Despite the growing popularity of vegetarian foods and diets, the vast majority of people in North America and other parts of the affluent world still eat meat. This article explores what ordinary people think about eating animals and how they navigate the ethical questions inherent in that praxis. Drawing from interviews with 24 people living in Ottawa, Canada, the study shows how the concepts of dominion, stewardship and reconciliation manifest in the everyday lives of ordinary people as models for human relations with nonhuman others and the environment. These ideas resonate in the lives of ordinary people, both religious and nonreligious, and entwine as people try to make sense of how to live with the fact that their everyday food consumption causes suffering and harm. This study shows that in the context of everyday life, dominion, stewardship and reconciliation are not alternative views, but connected to each other, and serve different purposes. The study highlights a need for analyses that constitute practical ways to renew the broken relationships within creation and which incorporate nonreligious people into the scope of analyses that focus on the relationships between humans and nonhuman creation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document