scholarly journals Chewing Demosthenes’ Pebbles: Embodied Experience Making the Scientist’s Persona, ca.1830-1910

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Josephine Hoegaerts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Visual Observation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Diverse Field ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Unique Source ◽  
The Voice

This paper argues for an embodied approach to the scientist’s persona, using ‘experience’ as its focal point. Rather than noting that embodied experiences influenced scientists’ practices and identities amidst (or despite) ideals of objectivity, I want to draw attention to the ways in which personal, embodied experiences were celebrated in nineteenth century science, and presented as primordial for the practice of competent research.I am focusing on those scientists involved in the study of the voice in order to do so. Because the physical workings of the voice are largely hidden inside the body, fields such as laryngology and phoniatry developed a number of touch-based, experiential scientific practices before and alongside tools of visual observation. These non-visual practices were very closely connected to researchers’ sensations of their own bodies, and connected to their identity (as a middle-class amateur singer, a hoarse professor, a stammerer, etc.). As scientific disciplines studying the voice developed over the century, personal ‘experience’ (understood both as particular practices and notions of personal background and identity) was increasingly brought forward as a unique source of understanding and expertise. This resulted in a highly diverse field of experts on the voice, in which otherwise non-elite researchers could participate and even rise to fame. They did so because, and not despite, their physical and social impediments. Studying the experiential practices and memories brought forward by this network of experts allows me to look at the construction of their scientific personae from an intersectional perspective. A focus on the nineteenth century notion of ‘experience’ and its inclusion in scientific discourse allows us an insight into the various constituent elements of a ‘persona’ built within the context of a particular field, and drawing liberally on aspects of identification that do not always fit the classic categories of gender, class, age, health, etc.

scholarly journals "The Pyrenees are not hollow": the mountain as a boundary object

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 789-801
Author(s):  
Jérôme Lamy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Visual Observation ◽  
Boundary Object ◽  
Mathematical Science ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Local Newspapers

In Toulouse, around 1850, a controversy about the structure of the Pyrenees pitted observatory director Frederic Petit against geology professor Alexandre Leymerie. The object of the debate was an assumption formulated by Petit: that the inside of the Pyrenees was practically hollow. This proposal was based on work that Petit initiated in order to determine the latitude of Toulouse. The debates, which took place within the Toulouse Academy of Science and also in local newspapers, illustrate the organization of disciplinary spaces in the nineteenth century. Petit defended his research method based on calculation; the geologist's perspective was from the field. The emergence of the less mathematical science of geology came up against nineteenth-century astronomical practices, centered on calculation. Dissected by calculation or by visual observation, the mountain was an object of controversy from the perspective of distinct scientific practices.

scholarly journals An embodied approach to consumer experiences: the Hollister brandscape

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 806-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Stevens ◽  
Pauline Maclaran ◽  
Stephen Brown
Keyword(s):  
Primary Source ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Consumer Experience ◽  
Sensory Marketing ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Consumer Experiences ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
On Line ◽  
Sensory Activation

Purpose This paper aims to use embodied theory to analyze consumer experience in a retail brandscape, Hollister Co. By taking a holistic, embodied approach, this study reveals how individual consumers interact with such retail environments in corporeal, instinctive and sensual ways. Design/methodology/approach The primary source of data was 97 subjective personal introspective accounts undertaken with the target age group for the store. These were supplemented with in-depth interviews with consumers, managers and employees of Hollister. Findings The authors offer a conceptualization of consumers’ embodied experience, which they term The Immersive Somascape Experience. This identifies four key touch points that evoke the Hollister store experience – each of which reveals how the body is affected by particular relational and material specificities. These are sensory activation, brand materialities, corporeal relationality and (dis)orientation. These may lead to consumer emplacement. Research limitations/implications The authors propose that taking an “intelligible embodiment” approach to consumer experiences in retail contexts provides a deeper, more holistic understanding of the embodied processes involved. They also suggest that more anthropological, body-grounded studies are needed for the unique insights they provide. Finally, they note that there is growing consumer demand for experiences, which, they argue, points to the need for more research from an embodied experience perspective in our field. Practical implications The study reveals the perils and pitfalls of adopting a sensory marketing perspective. It also offers insights into how the body leads in retail brandscapes, addressing a lack in such approaches in the current retailing literature and suggesting that embodied, experiential aspects of branding are increasingly pertinent in retailing in light of the continued growth of on-line shopping. Originality/value Overall, the study shows how an embodied approach challenges the dominance of mind and representation over body and materiality, suggesting an “intelligible embodiment” lens offers unique insights into consumers’ embodied experiences in retail environments.

Cultures of Embodied Experience: Technology, Religion and Body Pedagogics

2007 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Shilling ◽  
Philip A. Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Technological Culture ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Large Growth ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
The One ◽  
Religion And Body

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.

‘The voice of the stomach’: the mind, hypochondriasis and theories of dyspepsia in the nineteenth century

2020 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2097074
Author(s):  
E Allen Driggers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Physical Symptoms ◽  
The Body ◽  
Physical Problems ◽  
Bowel Diseases ◽  
To Come ◽  
Irritable Bowel ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Voice

Physicians and surgeons during the nineteenth century were eager to explore the causes of stomach and intestinal illnesses. Theories abounded that there was a sympathy between the mind and the body, especially in the case of the dyspepsia. The body was thought to have physical symptoms from the reactions of the mind, especially in the case of hypochondriasis. Digestive problems had a mental component, but mental anguish could also result from physical problems. Dissertations from aspiring as well as established physicians probed the mental causes of irritable bowel diseases and other diseases in the medical literature. Healing was thought to come from contextualizing the link between the problems of the mind and the resulting physical problems of the body.

The Sound of Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-402
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Access Point ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Music ◽  
History Of

AbstractIn the early 1800s, Jonah Barrington, an Irish judge, bemoaned that the air chosen as the march for the Irish Volunteer Movement had “no merit whatever, being neither grand, nor martial, nor animating,” contrasting it with the zeal of French revolutionary music. The emotional impact of music might be a matter of taste, but such a statement is suggestive of an aesthetics, where political music, or music used for political purposes, should have specific qualities that could be identified and judged by listeners. This article explores how people in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland identified music as political, using theories of the effects and affects of sound during the period and a corpus of Irish political music as an access point into historical experiences of musical enjoyment. While the impacts of music on the body are challenging for historians to retrieve, scholarship from the history of emotions highlights the important role of normative frameworks of emotion in accessing embodied experience. Working from this perspective, this article argues that we can begin to access the sound of politics for audiences of this period, contributing to our understanding of the role of music in political life.

scholarly journals Vocal Colour in Blue

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Masi Asare
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Black Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Voice Pedagogy ◽  
Bessie Smith ◽  
Pedagogy Literature ◽  
The Voice

This essay invokes a line of historical singing lessons that locate blues singers Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters in the lineage of Broadway belters. Contesting the idea that black women who sang the blues and performed on the musical stage in the early twentieth century possessed “untrained” voices—a pervasive narrative that retains currency in present-day voice pedagogy literature—I argue that singing is a sonic citational practice. In the act of producing vocal sound, one implicitly cites the vocal acts of the teacher from whom one has learned the song. And, I suggest, if performance is always “twice-behaved,” then the particular modes of doubleness present in voice point up this citationality, a condition of vocal sound that I name the “twice-heard.” In considering how vocal performances replicate and transmit knowledge, the “voice lesson” serves as a key site for analysis. My experiences as a voice coach and composer in New York City over two decades ground my approach of listening for the body in vocal sound. Foregrounding the perspective and embodied experience of voice practitioners of colour, I critique the myth of the “natural belter” that obscures the lessons Broadway performers have drawn from the blueswomen’s sound.

Touching Blind Bodies: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogical and Cultural Constructions of Visual Disability in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Tilley ◽  
Jan Eric Olsén
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Blind People ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Visual Disability ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Educational Challenges ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.

Feminist Cyber-Artivism, Musicing, and Music Teaching and Learning

2020 ◽  
pp. 291-312
Author(s):  
Marissa Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Music Teaching ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Voice

This chapter asks an important, yet seemingly illusive, question: In what ways does the internet provide (or not) activist—or, for present purposes “artivist”—opportunities and engagements for musicing, music sharing, and music teaching and learning? According to Asante (2008), an “artivist (artist + activist) uses her artistic talents to fight and struggle against injustice and oppression—by any medium necessary. The artivist merges commitment to freedom and justice with the pen, the lens, the brush, the voice, the body, and the imagination. The artivist knows that to make an observation is to have an obligation” (p. 6). Given this view, can (and should) social media be a means to achieve artivism through online musicing and music sharing, and, therefore, music teaching and learning? Taking a feminist perspective, this chapter interrogates the nature of cyber musical artivism as a potential means to a necessary end: positive transformation. In what ways can social media be a conduit (or hindrance) for cyber musical artivism? What might musicing and music sharing gain (or lose) from engaging with online artivist practices? In addition to a philosophical investigation, this chapter will examine select case studies of online artivist music making and music sharing communities with the above concerns in mind, specifically as they relate to music education.

Hope and anxiety: The study of female embodied experience with assisted reproductive technology

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-170
Author(s):  
Chengpu Yu ◽  
Wanlin Li ◽  
Mingfen Deng
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technology ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Infertility Treatment ◽  
Reproductive Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
Infertile Patients

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is hailed as “the holy grail” for infertile patients in the mainstream narrative. The existing studies have clearly demonstrated how external social factors shape how ART is to be used, but they ignore the recipients of the technologies, and especially the experiences of women. Based on an investigation conducted in Z hospital’s reproductive center, this article regards embodiment as the methodological orientation for integrating socio-cultural context with female embodied experience in order to show their bio-social entanglement. As fieldwork evidence indicates, ART in practice is far from simple “hope technology”; instead, it throws women into a paradoxical world in which hope and anxiety coexist. Embodied experience, hope, and anxiety are transmitted through the bodies of women, which reveals the inscription of social-cultural context and technical uncertainty on the female body and, meanwhile, women actively learn strategies by which to cope with the technical uncertainty and moral pressures from local culture (including healing the body, folk religion, etc.), so as to hold onto infertility treatment with hope.

scholarly journals Heart, Mind and Body: #NoMorePage3 and the Replenishment of Emotional Energy

2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062199450
Author(s):  
Lauren McCarthy ◽  
Sarah Glozer
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
Emotional Energy ◽  
Online Abuse ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Feminist Organization ◽  
Online Misogyny

Emotional energy is key to disruptive institutional work, but we still know little about what it is, and importantly, how it is refuelled. This empirical paper presents an in-depth case study of ‘No More Page 3’ (#NMP3), an Internet-based feminist organization which fought for the removal of sexualized images of women from a UK newspaper. Facing online misogyny, actors engage in ‘emotional energy replenishment’ to sustain this disruptive institutional work amid emotional highs and lows. We introduce ‘affective embodiment’ – the corporeal and emotional experiences of the institution – as providing emotional energy in relation to disruptive institutional work. Affective embodiment is surfaced through alignment or misalignment with others’ embodied experiences, and this mediates how actors replenish emotional energy. Alignment with others’ embodied experiences, often connected to online abuse, means emotional energy is replenished through ‘affective solidarity’ (movement towards the collective). Misalignment, surfaced through tensions within the movement, means actors seek replenishment through ‘sensory retreat’ (movement away from the collective). This study contributes to theorization on institutional work and emotional energy by recentring the importance of the body alongside emotions, as well as offering important lessons for online organizing.

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