Walking in a cage: Attuning to atmospheric intensities through corporeality

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsi Heimonen

This article discusses an artistic act: walking for seven sequential days inside a cage made of chicken wire in the grounds of a former mental hospital in Lapinlahti in Helsinki, Finland and its potential to offer insights into past events in mental hospitals through the notions of corporeal attunement and atmosphere. The idea for Walking Cage was prompted by a word in the data, which included memories by patients and non-patients of Finnish mental hospitals gathered in connection with a multidisciplinary research project. Passers-by, occasional co-walkers, weather conditions and the grounds of the former mental hospital partially formed and deformed the atmospheric qualities of the artistic research event. These qualities were experienced through corporeal attuning influenced by the Skinner Releasing Technique, a somatic movement method. The article proposes a singular way of approaching the possibilities of corporeal openness and sensibility in a choreographic process in which, illuminated by, among others, the notions of threshold and limit, one becomes a stranger to oneself by surrendering oneself to atmospheric intensities. This artistic research study adopts a phenomenological approach, drawing mainly on the ideas of Jean-Luc Nancy, Mikel Dufrenne and Emmanuel Levinas.

1953 ◽  
Vol 99 (414) ◽  
pp. 123-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalton E. Sands

Since the treatment of juveniles as in-patients in a special unit is somewhat unusual in mental hospital practice, a brief introduction may not be out of place. These units might be considered as another development in a trend which has been progressing for the past 25 years. Until 1930 certification of all admissions to mental hospitals and a mainly custodial régime ensured the majority of patients being largely the end-results of psychiatric illness. Since 1930 the steadily increasing use of the voluntary system has brought many patients to hospital at a stage when their illness can be favourably influenced by modern therapeutic methods. An associated development was the increased provision of wards or units separate from the chronically disturbed cases, or even, as at this hospital, a complete villa system of detached and semi-detached wards for mainly voluntary adult patients.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-107
Author(s):  
Richard Warner ◽  
◽  
Michelle Picard ◽  

This study aims to unpack the reflective learning processes involved in developing a Masters’ research project proposal as part of a multidisciplinary Research Design course. Using inductive analysis, we explored students’ reflective blogs written over a period of a semester and defined the reflections according to an adaptation of Hatton and Smith’s (1995) framework. Our findings are that the nature of each individual blog topic affected the quality and level of reflection, which in turn is affected by the ‘learning ecology’ (Harvey, Coulson, & McMaugh, 2016 p. 12). More highly scaffolded blogs showed greater evidence of reflective practice. Likewise the nature of the practice (starting research) influenced reflection, since many processes are internal rather than requiring explicit practice to reflect on. In addition, as nascent practitioner researchers, the students are also involved in reflexivity rather than reflection and therefore some topics encouraged this form of reflection more than others did. This study is significant in that it explores reflection in research and practitioner contexts, focuses on early career researchers/practitioners and brings a multidisciplinary perspective.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Annette Arlander

Is there a way for the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic art form par excellence, the theatre, or performance art for that matter, to expand beyond their human and humanist bias? Is the term Anthropocene in any way useful for theatre and performance studies or performance-as-research? In the anthology Anthropocene Feminism (Grusin 2017) Rosi Braidotti proposes four theses for a posthumanist feminism: 1) feminism is not a humanism, 2) anthropos is off-center, 3) zoe is the ruling principle, 4) sexuality is a force beyond gender. These assertions can undoubtedly be put on stage, but do they have relevance for developing or understanding performance practices off-stage and off-center, such as those trying to explore alternative ways and sites of performing, like performing with plants? In this text, I examine Braidotti’s affirmative theses and explore their usefulness with regard to performance analysis, use some of my experiments in the artistic research project “Performing with plants” as examples, and consider what the implications and possible uses of these theses are for our understanding of performances with other-than-human entities, which we share our planet with.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Cooper ◽  
Charlotte Jones

PurposeThis paper explores the dissonance between co-production and expectations of impact in a research project on student loneliness over the 2019/2020 academic year. Specific characteristics of the project – the subject matter, interpolation of a global respiratory pandemic, informal systems of care that arose among students and role of the university in providing the context and funding for the research – brought co-production into heightened tension with the instrumentalisation of project outputs.Design/methodology/approachThe project consisted of a series of workshops, research meetings and mixed-methods online journalling between 2019 and 2020. This paper is primarily a critical reflection on that research, based on observations by and conversations between the authors, together with discourse analysis of research data.FindingsThe authors argue that co-producing research with students on university contexts elevates existing tensions between co-production and institutional valuations of impact, that co-production with students who had experienced loneliness made necessary space for otherwise absent support and care, that the responsibility to advocate for evidence and co-researchers came into friction with how the university felt the research could be useful and that each of these converging considerations are interconnected symptoms of the ongoing marketisation of HE.Originality/valueThis paper provides a novel analysis of co-production, impact and higher education in the context of an original research project with specific challenges and constraints. It is a valuable contribution to methodological literatures on co-production, multidisciplinary research into student loneliness and reflexive work on the difficult uses of evidence in university contexts.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azadeh Monzavi

This Major Research Project (MRP) examines the artistic production of British culture in the second half of the Nineteenth Century from 1850–1900, while critically engaging with existing nineteenth century art and literature, in order to deepen the understanding of the immense role played by fashion in the lives of Victorian women. I have approached this research study not through the examination of actual dress in its materiality, but instead, through its visual representation in paintings. These sartorial embodiments of women’s dress could help extend our understanding of artworks that are rooted in visual narratives—both literally and figuratively. Thus, this project aims to re-imagine histories of art through the analysis of the clothed body of women in nineteenth century paintings—for it is through their sartorial choices that women defied the Victorian ideals of femininity and femaleness.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1401-1418 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Krüger ◽  
B. Quack

Abstract. This special issue provides an overview of scientific results from the TransBrom Sonne expedition in the tropical West Pacific, conducted during October 2009. The ship cruise was part of the national research project TransBrom Sonne, investigating very short lived bromine compounds in the ocean and their transport pathways into the stratosphere. For this purpose chemical and biological parameters were analysed in the ocean and the atmosphere, accompanied by intense meteorological measurements, to derive more insights in this multidisciplinary research field. This introduction paper presents the scientific goals and the meteorological and oceanographic background. The main research findings of the TransBrom Sonne expedition are highlighted.


2020 ◽  
pp. 604-613
Author(s):  
Mette L. Baran ◽  
Janice E. Jones

This chapter serves as a guideline for outlining the core characteristics of mixed methods research (MMR) and the various steps researchers undertake in order to conduct a research study. The purpose is to create a worksheet assisting the researcher step by step from beginning to end following the seven steps to conducting research. While the focus is on MMR the steps are similar for any type of research methodology. It is important to note that MMR is not a limiting form of research. Researchers need a MMR question and a mixed methods purpose statement for the research project. This chapter will also help explain why mixed method research is one of the best approaches in answering a research question. Finally, the chapter includes a suggestion to the importance of adding a visual diagram of the MMR into the research project and into the final report.


2021 ◽  
pp. 185-193
Author(s):  
Anna Vasof

In this chapter, the media artist Anna Vasof discusses her animation project Non-Stop Stop-Motion, situated at the intersection between video, performance, the fine arts and photography. Non-Stop Stop-Motion is an ongoing practice-based artistic research project, which investigates where we can find the essence of cinematic illusion when we look into everyday life and what happens when we use everyday situations, objects, spaces and actions as cinematographic mechanisms. This question leads to multiple observations of everyday life and experimentation therein.


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