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This paper describes work with two patients who experienced an early undercathexis of the body-self. It explores the relationship between this type of deficit and the use made by the patient of the analyst's body and by extension of the body of the analytic room. I propose that in work with patients who have experienced an early undercathexis of the body-self, it is vital to identify those instances when the patient tries to make an "aesthetic link" with the analyst. This refers to how the patient may apprehend by the senses (aesthetic) a feature of the analyst's physicality, or of the physical space of the consulting room, and uses it to make a connection (link) with an as yet unrealized and wished-for embodied self that for some time can only be experienced through an identification with aspects of the analyst's body/room. This has technical implications; I suggest that interpretation of what can appear to be an idealized and/or erotic transference, but is in fact the patient's attempt to establish an aesthetic link, can be experienced as disorganizing and as undermining of a developmental thrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the findings of a mixed-methods study which investigates the socio-cultural impacts of UK gendered school sport uniform and the role uniform plays in shaping female school sport experiences. Drawing on an extensive analytical survey with over 400 women of all-ages and 8 interviews with women aged 18–24, it explores how school sport uniform directly impacts female sporting experiences and participation in physical activity, and how uniform policy could be changed to promote greater female sport participation. Gendered school sport uniform continues to operate as a socio-spatial mechanism that names, frames and positions young people in heteronormative school sport spaces. This paper assesses how gendered school sport uniform contributes to the disciplining of the 'ideal feminine body' in schoolgirls and the construction of behavioural gender binaries in sport. The data reveal gendered sport uniform influences the development of a 'fear of masculinisation' in sport and common athletic-feminine identity tensions in teenage girls. The research finds gendered school sport uniform plays a major role in the high drop-out rates of teenage girls in school sport and offers practical insight into how policy could be changed to promote inclusivity, comfort and greater female sport participation. This paper proposes redesigning traditional gendered school sport policy to focus on 'enabling' participation has huge potential to transform female embodied and psychological experiences of school sport and increase school sport participation and enjoyment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Merleau-Ponty's perspective on intercorporeality to inquire into the role of the body in virtual collaboration. Merleau-Ponty redefines the human body beyond pure physicality, as material-semiotic processes between self and other. From this perspective, meaningful engagements are based on the intertwinement of bodily activities including gestures and displays. Drawing on a rich case of an exclusively virtual collaboration, this paper illuminates how bodily expressivity is rematerialised through digital technology. The findings show how distributed bodies pattern an intercorporeal armature constituted of processes of co-presencing, co-orienting, and co-investing. The paper problematises claims of virtual disembodiment and advances current understanding of how body and technology merge to make virtual collaboration possible. The rich empirical insights are synthesised into four main theoretical propositions that constitute a novel perspective on virtual intercorporeality. This perspective advances our understanding of virtual embodiment and elaborates the role of technology and language in the process of mutual attunement between bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores what is understood by the phrase ‘spontaneous movement’. We discern five different understandings of spontaneity in the usage of the phrase: 1) spontaneous movement as automatic machine-like mechanistic, 2) spontaneous movement as free, 3) spontaneous movement as primal animateness of the body, 4) spontaneous movement as embodied responsive dealing in the world, 5) spontaneous movement as a force of nature. The first two understandings are rooted in a dualistic view, with the dichotomies of voluntary/involuntary and mind/body in the Western philosophical tradition. The next two arise from a phenomenological reflection on the body, drawn from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, while the last comes from a holistic Eastern view of the body, human beings and nature. We argue that the latter three understandings of spontaneity demonstrate three aspects of a more comprehensive picture of the spontaneity of human movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the memoirs of two Bengali revolutionary women, Bina Das’ Srinkhal Jhankar published in 1948, translated as Bina Das: A Memoir, and Kamala Dasgupta’s Rakter Akshare (Written in Blood) in 1954 to argue how their subjective desire and experience dismantle the gendered rhetoric of nationalism in colonial Bengal. The accounts of Bina and Kamala present their involvement in militant activism and subsequent imprisonment. Notably, there is an inherent urge in their writings to sacrifice life for the nation and a determination not to retreat from the torturous conditions of the colonial prison. The paper contends that the rhetoric of nationalism in colonial Bengal is embedded in hegemonic masculinity that initially confined women to the spiritual and domestic realm and later allowed them to be educated and modern without acknowledging their subjectivity. Activities of these political women thus destabilise the gender discourse prevalent in the private and public sphere of colonial society, which calls for a revision of the nationalist historiography. So, this essay will examine how tropes of the body, self-sacrifice, and penal experience, as produced in these memoirs, negotiate the nationalist ideology, subvert the binary of masculine and feminine, and establish their political subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physicality has been, and still is, an important part of the embodied identity of many physical education (PE) teachers. PE teachers' understanding and representation of their bodies influence both their teaching and act as role models for their students. PE is therefore an important site for exploring how ideals of the body shape both understandings and practices within this school subject. In this study we employed participatory visual methodologies in the form of participant-produced drawings to explore primary school children's experiences of PE teacher bodies and subjectivities. By drawing on poststructural and Foucauldian understandings of the body, we in this paper explore the construction and embodiment of PE teacher bodies as inextricably linked to students' understandings and experiences of this school subject. The findings demonstrate how dominant discourses of fitness, health, sport and even consumerism shape expectations around PE teacher bodies. They also draw attention to how those bodies enable and restrict certain educational purposes and practices. We argue that the ongoing reproduction and perpetuation of idealized PE teacher bodies is responsible for (re)producing meanings around the normal versus the abnormal PE teacher body with significant impact on students' bodily understandings and experiences in PE. We conclude by reasserting the need to challenge how dominant discourses of PE teacher bodies has the cumulative effect of restricting the possibilities for a multiplicity of bodies and physicalities to co-exist in PE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrutinising Santner's comments on his own method in his recent book Untying Things Together, the paper argues that at the heart of Santner's theoretical endeavour lies something that might be called "the flesh of all words." To elaborate this thesis, I begin, following a corresponding hint by Santner himself, with a description of Freud's peculiar "way of working with concepts" in his The Interpretation of Dreams. From there I move on to the analysis of an author who has been one of Santner's main points of reference at least since his Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Franz Rosenzweig. The paper outlines Rosenzweig's self-interpretation in his essay "'The New Thinking'" and compares the specific methodology explained and developed in this text with the main work of Ferdinand Ebner, whose closeness to his own work Rosenzweig himself emphasised. Finally, against the background of these theoretical conceptions, I will borrow one of Santner's own neologisms and use it to describe his work as the "encystance" on/of this flesh of all words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractRecently, the concept of mobile labour has garnered increasing attention among mobilities scholars. Yet, the preponderance of research has emphasised workers’ movements that are fairly large-scale and routes-based. This paper proposes another kind of mobility that is of equal significance—that of micro-mobilities by labour, or more accurately by their bodies. Using original research conducted through semi-structured interviews with 40 customer service agents working in an international airport in Asia, the paper examines three kinds of aesthetic labour that these workers perform alongside passengers. Enacted through various bodily motions intended to speed up aeromobile processes and augment productivity, I argue that these performances produce a (tenuous) aesthetics of assuring presence, orderly movement, and passing time. As more and more work tasks are redistributed across the airport between staff and passengers, ‘new’ automation presents an opportunity to reflect on the mobile practices being invented as self-service technologies infiltrate customer service and other work where human relations and decision-making skills are required. More broadly, it also uncovers the gendered politics of bodily comport, gaits, gestures and other micro-movements in labour (re)production in a wider age of technological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People have different ways of developing knowledge about their 'selves', what has come to be called 'technologies'. Apart from technologies of production, of sign systems, and of power, the 'technology of the self' enables individuals to effect certain operations on their bodies, thoughts, behaviour, feelings and other ways of being. Such technologies involve the application of certain modes of training by individuals not only for the sake of acquiring skills but also for effecting change in their values, attitudes and beliefs. This paper argues that applied theatre practice involves not only the technology of the self but also of the other. Using the case study of a practice based project that was carried out among disabled students at the University of Zimbabwe, the paper examines how disabled students not only subverted ableist discourses of hopelessness but also acted upon their own bodies to assert their own agency, power and authority. Thus the focus will be specifically on the politics of the disabled body as a site of ableist perceptions that construct the disabled body in terms of lack, incapacity, pathology, deformity and deficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all heroin users that enter the prison estate continue to use heroin or access opiate maintenance or detoxification treatment programmes. Some prisoners decide to self-detoxify. The literature on self-detoxification is thin and focuses on the decisions and practices of self-detoxification in community settings. Less attention has been given to the role of the body and the lived experience of self-detoxification in prison settings. The aim of this paper therefore is to examine the process of self-detoxification in prison, with a particular focus on the role of the body, embodiment and prisoner social relations. This paper draws on Drew Leder's (1990) absent body theoretical framework and the literature on prison masculinity to analyse qualitative interviews with recently released prisoners. It shows how the decision to self-detoxify can be understood as part of the masculine performance of keeping a low profile. Keeping a low profile helped the participants minimise the risks of victimisation. The self-detoxification techniques the participants used were underpinned by an awareness of the body as poisoned by heroin, suffering because of its presence, rather than its absence. This study has implications for prisoners' access to opiate maintenance and detoxification treatment programmes and harm reduction services upon release. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on original ethnographic research in Australia focussing on the handling, management, and conceptualisation of death and the dead human body in 2020–2021. Analysis produced themes of secrecy and (in)visibility regarding both death and the collection of data. Key findings discussed are the withdrawal of information and off-the-record comments from participants, controlling of public access to information, and the (in)visibility of death and the body in the context of the mortuary, viewings and identifications, and the presentation of the body in virtual spaces. The paper argues that those who work with death and the dead in this particular context have power to shield their work, the body, and their processes from the public. Future research exploring the attitudes held by the general public towards death and the body and whether they align or challenge the death industry is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a comparative reading of the female protagonists in two Sri Lankan films, focusing on how the female body becomes a contentious site of gendered violence, subject to state and male surveillance and containment. Through a close analysis of Prasanna Jayakody's 28 (2014) and Asoka Handagama's Asandhimitta (2019), this paper attempts to reveal how Sri Lankan cinema violently reconfigures the female body as a site of negotiation for articulation of victimhood and desire and becomes a potential space for the inscription of feminist issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1966 the photographer Martine Franck was commissioned by Life International to document the experiences of children in a new library in Paris. The visual essay she produced illuminated the materiality, the design and the children's use of the space. In Birmingham, a recent unconnected research project, 'Libraries in Women's Lives', captured women's childhood memories of libraries. The women's 'spatial stories' (de Certeau, 1984) offer reflections on libraries in different times and places. Strikingly though, their accounts resonate with Franck's images of the library in Paris. This paper brings image and narrative into conversation with spatial theory to make sense of these similarities, and to explore responses to library space. This paper is a comment on the materiality of the library. It reveals the haptic and visual pleasures of these sites. Through this attention to memory, the research suggests a different starting point for debates around the future of libraries. It argues that looking to the past might be a good way of thinking about the libraries of the future. Further, and by virtue of attending to the visual alongside writing on spatial theory, this research comments on the relationship between representations of space in image and in text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when the natural death and home deathcare movements are gaining traction both in the UK and elsewhere, this article details an exploratory project on the barriers to and potential for caring for deceased people at home in England. A two-phase study, the paper uses data from a discourse analysis and interviews with deathcare professionals to show that there is limited information online on keeping the deceased person at home, and that participants felt that a lack of awareness was a significant barrier to families being able to make an informed choices about home deathcare. Including poor information provision, the paper identifies five reasons as to why there is a low uptake of home deathcare in England and makes recommendations for how each of these barriers may be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the connection between politics and public space at a time when photography and the new media have put the classical distinction between the public and the private into question. My focus is on the body which, according to Hannah Arendt and the classical philosophers, is the most private thing there is. Drawing on the work of Weimar photojournalist Erich Salomon -- who was among the first to infiltrate the spaces where political talks were held and decisions taken -- I argue for an understanding of the body as an aesthetic object and a site where public and private criss-cross and intersect. The body in photography leads me to the final part of the paper where I trace the figuring of the body in the texts of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and argue that far from being a recent phenomenon, the aestheticisation of politics is already at work in the tradition that celebrates deliberation and the public use of reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses about technological transformation tend to focus on technology, as if its introduction was neutral regarding local variabilities, and the men and women that make it effective. This paper focuses on the technical act. The body is where the technical acts are inscribed and it is through the body that they are exteriorised. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the operative modes associated with the technical acts, from a gender perspective, in the context of the technological transformation in cork industry. The analysis of the work activity performed by men (punching operators) and women (choosers) was supported by observations, collective interviews, and group sessions to validate the results. The findings show male- and female-specific body techniques; how the efficacy of the technical acts contributes to the debate about the limits of technology; and how body techniques and effects on health tend to remain in silence due to automation. Practitioner summary: The reconfiguration of the human-machine relationships hardly leaves room for the analysis of how the body techniques evolve. This paper shows how the efficacy of men and women body techniques contributes to the debate about the limits of technology, even if these uses of one's body entail health costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the proliferation of high-quality recorded live pop concerts in today's digitalized world, the demand for live pop performances remains strong. Through a case study of Mayday, a popular Chinese- Taiwanese band, this paper conducted qualitative research and collected multiple sources of data through netnography, participant-observation, semi-structured interviews and secondary data to reveal the embodied experience of young participants travelling across China to attend live pop concerts to be 'right here, right now'. From the perspective of embodied experiences, this study finds that the allure of live pop lies in providing space for participants to be immersed in the body that lets go, to be present, be in unison, and forget. In this way, participants can gain aesthetic pleasure, sense of authenticity, tacit understanding and immersion, which are embodied experiences that cannot be replicated by other musical experiences and digitalization. The paper also provides theoretical and practical considerations for tourism practitioners to improve the experience for both live concert audiences and armchair audiences watching the recorded live concerts at home or in cinemas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWhy are the objects we place on our bodies not considered art? In this paper, I argue that distance between an object and the body is a criterion for a craft object to become an art object. Art objects are kept at a distance from most bodies. The distance is tightly maintained by the art world and used within the art world to control art and access to it. In the process, this distance defines an object as art. I present the case of jewelry – objects that do not transition from craft to art and are generally not accepted as art by the art world. I argue that this is because jewelry necessarily requires closeness between the body and the object, a violation of the rules of art. The argument I present here is relevant to questions of fashion and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents the issue of the development of internal space, as a function of the relationship of intimacy and synchrony with the caregiver, with the purpose of rendering more tolerable the experience of space outside the body. This paper argues that if this relationship does not stabilise by the end of the first year of life, an absence of representation of an internal space in the unidimensional realm might ensue. The psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children offers windows to certain developmental challenges associated with the representation of both internal and external spaces, the consequent development of dimensionality and its deviations. The case of a young autistic child in the first year of her four-session-a-week analysis is described as an illustration of the child's struggle to overcome precipitation anxiety around the experience of falling by using her movements in the external space. The child's autistic defences and deficits at first functioned to keep her in a liquid state, and later denied gravity by means of repetitive movements of her body while exploring the space of the analyst's room. Her mouth was experienced as a hole to be completely blocked with either food or a pacifier, preventing exchanges with the analyst. Her subsequent compulsive use of strings in activities revealed at the same time the search for links, and her difficulty connecting and establishing communication. At the end, the analyst realised an archaic equivalence between their room and body, as a 'concrete transference', revealing the child's attachment and motivation to explore it, which could be interpreted as an affective link between the analyst and patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on 15 months of fieldwork and archival research carried out in 2018/2019 for my PhD in Social Anthropology, takes as its object the everyday coexistence with the Second World War military dead scattered across the rural landscape of Brandenburg, formerly part of the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). Focusing on the practices through which the living relate to the war dead 'out of place', I argue that the construction of the war dead as valued members of the social collectivity does not necessarily depend upon their ritual 'separation'. Indeed, the physical proximity of the misplaced and unrelated war dead in my fieldsite results in their adoption and conceptualization as local dead. I contextualize attachments to the fallen in the local history of chaotic 'total war', which collapsed the boundary between the military and civilian experience of war, and transformed the spaces of everyday life into battlefields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2022, the dynamic zero-COVID control policy came to an end, marking the conclusion of a three-year pandemic that affected 1.4 billion Chinese people. The pandemic and related policies created a unique, temporary, and historic social ecosystem where walking became more crucial than ever before. The pandemic not only severely restricted people's movement in public spaces but also exposed the longstanding contradictions between human bodies, modern mobility, and urban space. Over the three years of the pandemic, walking became an aesthetic survival attempt by Chinese people to cope with their limited freedoms under the pandemic. As the pandemic stagnated and worsened over time, walking-dominant activities gradually became a widespread social phenomenon that encouraged urban residents to participate in rebuilding society across various fields such as politics, art, nature, etc. The development of walking as an artistic form during this period represents a new aesthetic strategy and political awakening while reflecting humans' need to reconnect with land, social space, and their own bodies. This paper reviews how walking art has evolved historically through three periods – before, during, and after the pandemic – aiming to highlight both the public value of walking art and challenges within China's social ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper forms an intervention into debates about the corporeality of impairment and 'bodies that matter' in critical disability studies. Toward informing the epistemology of embodiment present in critical disability studies, it proposes new directions for progression within four set parameters. Firstly, insights from disability might be better re-purposed toward understanding the nature of all human embodiment. Secondly, one must sufficiently address, but not necessarily polarise, materiality and abstraction. Thirdly, within its parent academy, the epistemological approach might adhere to critical disability studies' conventions, whilst still avoiding present perils and impasses. Fourthly, it is important not to be so exhaustive and conclusive as to eliminate innovation and creative new trajectories. Overall, the sustaining proposition is, that the productive capacity of disability is immense, toward disrupting and re-configuring ableist understandings of the body in the material world. Writers from a critical disability studies perspective have a particular way of understanding the role of the body in disability. This article considers this way of understanding the body, and then describes four directions for how this understanding could be further developed. The way that critical disability studies understands the role of the body in disability is called 'epistemology of embodiment' in this article. This article concludes by saying that disability is a great starting point for understanding the meaning of the body for all human beings. In this context, the article uses the term 'dis/ability' instead of 'disability' to highlight how people are disabled by interrelations between ability and disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Antonio Altarriba's presentation of his deceased mother's life-story in the graphic novel El ala rota (2016) claiming that the author's personal trauma of mourning reveals the collective trauma of non-politically-engaged Spanish women throughout Spain's 20th century. El ala rota contributes to the recovery of a new kind of memory by paying homage to a woman who was relegated to the private sphere and who herself believed her stories were not worth telling – a woman who was in the back room of history and lacked the means and mechanism to chronicle her life. The paper demonstrates that, not only does the content of El ala rota give voice to those who did not have one, thus philosophically paralleling the aims of the Recovery of Historical Memory and the exhumations of mass graves in Spain, but also, that its specific form of comics calls attention to the way society engages with the recovery of historical and collective memory specifically with regard to gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children’s museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children’s presence in museums. We hope that this special issue will act as an impetus for further working, thinking and collaborating, firstly by disrupting the conflation of children in museums with narrowing notions such as learning and talk, and secondly by highlighting the rich potential of museums as a space of interest for the field of children’s geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the part mobile phone use plays in the capitalist assemblages present in school classrooms. Capitalism is approached through the continuous movement of de- and re-territorialisation. The empirical grounding is a wide study on mobile phone use conducted at an upper secondary school in Finland. The focus of this paper is one psychology lesson on puberty and the ways in which territories such as puberty are challenged in the school life of young people through their mobile phone use in class. Analysing a student's Tumblr photo stream, we show how smartphones challenge the existing territorialities in a classroom. We locate three central deterritorialising movements: in relation to the physical space of the classroom; to the affective space of the classroom; and to the notion of body in puberty. We conclude that mobile phone use matters to students intimately and channels flows of capitalism at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper celebrates Gender, Place and Culture's 25th Anniversary by staging a dialogue of sorts between feminist, queer and trans knowledge projects and the interdisciplinary field of practice based GeoHumanities, in other words creative research practices such as film-making, theatre, creative writing or live art. In embracing the vibrancy of these fields together the paper addresses two much wider issues; firstly, the continued challenges that these knowledge projects face, especially in an era of post-truth and the undermining of expertise, which together risks a reactive retrenchment of academic practices. Secondly, within the GeoHumanities, feminist scholar-practitioners have been leading the way in evolving the critical-political dimensions of these interdisciplinary practices, but as they acknowledge, much more remains to be done to ensure that the critical potential of these doings is realised. In short, this paper asks, what can/have GeoHumanities 'doings' contributed to the challenges of gender based knowledge projects, and further, how can/are the critical questions framed by these knowledge projects evolving GeoHumanities practices? Three large concerns frame discussion of possibilities for mutual learning and advancement; what forms of knowledge count; who can make and legitimate knowledge, and how we might build critical perspectives for the transformations claimed in the name of these practices? As such, the paper honours GPC's quarter century through a forward looking celebration of exciting scholarly practices that remain committed to the foundational tenants of feminist, trans and queer knowledge projects: namely their ongoing critique and remaking of knowledge hierarchies, academic practices, and the political economies of the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

José Bleger’s paper on the setting (encuadre) is integral to his 1967 book Symbiosis and Ambiguity. Relevant concepts from the book are summarised before examining his view of the setting as a “non-process” consisting of “constants”, complementing the “variables” of the analytic process. Process and setting are related as figure and ground in Gestalt psychology. The ideally maintained setting is studied as a thought experiment, uniting the categories of institution, personality, body schema, and body. Deposited in the setting, the psychotic part of the personality, or “agglutinated nucleus”, is a remnant of early symbiosis with the mother. Bleger distinguishes two settings: the analyst’s and the patient’s. The latter can only be analysed by strictly maintaining the former. Ritualisation of the setting denies temporal reality. De-symbiotisation is not always possible. A concept of “internal” setting is suggested, but Bleger nowhere mentions this and the concept is problematic, leaving open the question of how to listen to the silence of the setting. Bleger’s concept of encuadre can be applied to constants (invariants) in the wider world, the psychotic part of the personality being deposited in everything that is familiar and felt to be constant, including technology, which creates a “platform” for human activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Editorial presents the papers of the Special Issue "Intersecting the Body", providing a dialogue between them and previous literature on the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From early Greek philosophers to Descartes' machinic metaphors of humans-as-machines, to the emergence of physical machine-like humans, the intersections of the human body with machines circle back through hundreds of years of debates on human-technology relationships. We live in an age when robots are becoming increasingly human-like with artificial intelligence that mimics and sometimes exceeds our own. At the same time, we humans are adopting cyborg-like modifications to improve ourselves through biological, mechanical, and computer technologies. This conceptual paper presents a historical overview of the human-machine merger as both a metaphor and material reality. We show that the body has no intrinsic meaning for its distinct social constructions in technophilic and bioconservativist perspectives. This leads to a critical need for discussions about the issues related to dehumanization and personhood. These two topics must inform future research efforts to explore a future when current concepts of humanness may not hold anymore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of an ethnographic study on motivation in ultra-endurance sports. The study was conducted in Leon, Spain, between 2018 and 2019 on a sample of 36 athletes involved in several ultra-endurance sports, such as the marathon, ultra-distance racing and mountain activities. Regarding the method, it includes participant observation, an open questionnaire was administered, and in-depth interviews were conducted, providing valuable descriptive data. Categories, patterns, and propositions emerged from the coding process of the data and were permanently called into question. The results indicated that these activities constitute a new form of leisure, with mass participation that is felt as an obligation, with different motivations for leisure and sport that are more intimate and personal than sporting in nature, reinterpreting the wishes, hopes or fears of the participants as offerings, self-blame and other redemptive attitudes, towards life, without great variations between men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores activity tracking as a postdigital phenomenon and provides a detailed account of the embodied pedagogy of its practices. Drawing on a case-based, ethnographically inspired, participatory research project with German university students and following a praxeologic approach of transformative Bildung, an empirically grounded heuristic framework is presented that helps to understand how embodied entanglements of person and wearable develop over time and how dynamics of irritation and routinisation that characterise these developments open up processes of learning or Bildung. We discuss how this contributes to researching vital pedagogical questions about self-tracking, and more broadly about yet uncertain futures of postdigital physical culture and society, such as how we constitute ourselves as embodied subjects and continuously develop relations to ourselves and to the world through entangling with digital technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we deploy Foucault's theories of power to interrogate body politics in ballet training in Zimbabwe. To achieve this, we critically examine instances of ballet-related discourse-induced docility occurring in the Afrikera Professional Dance Training (APDT) students' bodies during training. From a Foucauldian perspective, we interrogate how a ballet dancer's body that has been timeously 'subjugated' to a standard of expected behaviour by the society and has acclimated to a normalized African body posture which is conditioned to become 'ideal' through APTD's ballet training. Through the intensive case study examination of the Afrikera Professional Dance Training ballet process, we observe possible shortfalls in Foucault's theories of bio-power in social and community development advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reflection on the play IAm Waiting for You [Wasafuli Al-Sabr] which was written by the author and directed by Lina Abyad. Based on extensive interviews with real-life female cancer patients from the Arab world, the play was the first dramatic staging of Arab women's experience of cancer. To summarise, the paper begins by underlining that the history of women's cancer in the Arab World has hitherto been a history of silence – of shame, taboo, prohibition, and repression – before going on to reflect upon the creative, textual, and dramatic strategies the play deployed to make this silence 'speak.' The essay then focuses on the ways in which this unspoken and unexpressed experience of cancer itself became a (necessary) artistic medium by which the subjectivity of women who had experienced cancer could be articulated. In particular, the essay addresses three layers or forms of silence in the play: (1) the silence of the women the author interviewed; (2) how silence functioned as a structural device or trope within the play and, finally and most importantly, (3) how this silence could be resisted, if not verbally, then at least physically and materially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calling on several disciplines from cultural history to media studies and gender studies, this paper analyses the representation of race, gender and culture in Japanese sports manga Kuroko no Basuke: Extra Game. First, it deconstructs the politics of sports manga and its representation of foreign athletes, as it allows Japanese mangakas to portray Japan as a rising cultural and athletic superpower. Then, it focuses on Kuroko no Basuke: Extra Game, in order to study the visual and textual representation of both American and Japanese athletes through the prism of race, gender and culture. Indeed, it draws a sharp contrast between American and Japanese masculinities. Also, it relays a deeply-stereotyped version of the myth of the Black Athlete. Last, this study focuses on the (soft) power of this cultural artefact, the duel of ethos which is relayed through it, and the signifying representation of bodies and emotions. In a nutshell, this work deconstructs Japanese sports mangas and their political dimension to assess the part played by these global cultural artefacts in shaping collective imaginations from Japan to France, via the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the author's work with three transgender and/or gender expansive patients. The treatments took place at various times over the past twenty years and are presented chronologically. The author, a cisgender analyst, shows how her thinking and her interactions with her patients have changed. In a sense, the analyst is also transitioning as her thoughts and feelings about her gender expansive patients shift. The importance of moving outside of traditional ways of thinking about gender is emphasized, as is the danger of seeking linear, formulaic answers to why a gender-variant patient does not feel at home in their body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The military dictatorship in Chile (1973–1989) promoted an ideology of the individual body, dismantling all social and collective matrices. The various artistic expressions discussed in the following text can be seen as practices of situated memory, that link the violence of that period to the exercise of a necessary intersubjectivity between different spaces of intervention and bodies. In doing this, and by taking as a starting point collective and the notion of alienated space, the aim is to reconstitute a conscious corporeality of memory and collectivity. This paper seeks to revise interpretations of these performative and photographic exercises and to ask how meaning can be produced without subjecting memory to a process of reification or immobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yoga is increasing in popularity. As a holistic practice, it is being applied and researched as a healing modality for physical ailments, assisting with mental health issues, and addressing traumatic symptoms. However, little is known about how social workers understand and include Yoga in their personal lives or professional practice. As part of a larger narrative study, practitioners in an Australian regional centre were asked: "What, if any, impact do embodied practices like Yoga have on your experience and your clients' experience?" This paper explores the stories told by three of the practitioners interviewed both individually and in focus groups. The dominant themes that emerged highlight that: a personal Yoga practice can be varied; the impact it has on professional outcomes is difficult to quantify; there is a lack of theoretical discussion about the body and embodied experience in social work; the challenges associated with introducing Yoga into social work practice are complex. Embodied practices such as Yoga provide social workers opportunities to increase self-awareness, their capacity to engage with clients and self-care. Theoretical understandings of the body and embodiment need to be better articulated in social work if embodied practices like Yoga are to be included in the professional conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reflect on the concept of the setting in psychoanalysis, and how it has been radically reconsidered given the impact of the SARS-CoV-19 pandemic on human interactions and moving from face-to-face to online sessions. The rapidity of going from seeking interaction to a fear of possible contagion led some professionals to adopt a sudden change of setting. Although the concept of setting seems to come from the classical Freudian method, Freud never spoke about it explicitly, although it was subsequently developed from his writings. Only in the 1960s and 70s was the setting perceived as the very object of psychoanalytic exploration. Since the psyche in psychoanalysis is conceived as a spatially extended entity, this paper discusses the concepts of space and time (external setting) and the mental state of both the patient and analyst (internal setting). We investigate how these aspects have changed as a result of the use of technology. What changes have taken place at the perceptual level in the patient and analyst? What differences are there with respect to the presence/absence of the other's body? We use our own reflections of our personal experiences of undergoing face-to-face and online sessions to reveal the differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrow understandings about fatness and health continue to prevail in the West. However, we have witnessed emerging trends and movements against these dominant discourses. Examples of these counter discourses are the fat acceptance and body positivity movements. Social media is a space where confrontation and discrepancies between these different discourses are common, particularly in relation to nonnormative bodies. This paper explores how Instagram users reinforce or challenge underlying assumptions regarding the 'Operación Feria' advertising campaign, which focuses on promoting physical exercise to fight obesity and fatness. A total of 1,930 comments posted on Instagram were analysed using a discourse analysis approach. Two main narratives were constructed from the data. On the one hand, there is a dominant position that challenges societal norms regarding bodies, which confronts fat-phobia and stereotypes. On the other hand, there is a reinforcement of the campaign with a discourse based on humour, victimhood and medical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines between democracy and a utopia of everydayness. The paper refers to the democratic system in Poland through the prism of everyday life and it shows the sources of the rise of populism in the feeling of losing control over our own lives. Therefore, the paper investigates the relationships between everyday life and politics and the complicated connections between everydayness and modernity. The next section is devoted to the emergence of the utopia of everydayness in Herbert Marcuse's psychoanalytic thought and its appropriation in the student movements of sixties. Finally, the categories of microphysics of emancipation and somapower are introduced and it is shown that these notions can be useful in the construction of the utopia of everydayness which would support the democratic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television comedy has rarely been studied from the perspective of class in a post-socialist context. This paper analyses representations of class, body, gender and nationality in the three most popular sitcoms of the last two decades in Slovenia, focusing especially on their role in working-class discourse and its transformation. Ambivalent representations of working-class characters are highlighted and put in the context of the egalitarian ideology which prevails in Slovenian popular culture. Drawing on the difference between workplace and domestic sitcoms, the paper concludes that the appearance and performance of working-class characters may be interpreted as a reworking of class boundaries in the post-socialist context. Sitcoms are thus considered as contributing to a process of re-demarcating class boundaries, yet with a subtle mockery at the level of their bodies rather than by explicit vilification of the lower classes in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how a cohort of pre-service Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers from an Australian university describe and construct their understandings of health and the body. Given that the courses that these undergraduates take in their degree programme present different perspectives on health and the body, a relevant question is to what extent these perspectives adequately equip these future HPE teachers to successfully teach the recently released Australian HPE curriculum. The participants in this study were 14 pre-service teachers, 11 females and 3 males, aged between 18 and 26 at the time of the first interview. The data used for this paper were taken from a larger study and were generated through interviews, the analysis of two undergraduate course profiles and an analysis of the new National HPE curriculum. Results reveal that there are some dominant discourses in health-related courses that may have a significant impact on these students. The purpose of HPE, the role of the HPE teacher and the idea of the HPE teacher as role model are also discussed. The results suggest that pre-service teachers face several challenges and dissonances between what they learn during their undergraduate programme and what the Australian HPE curriculum expects them to teach. How pre-service HPE teachers think about and relate to health and the body is important in terms of how they think about their professional practice and the influence they may have on their future pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This paper explores the extension of the body through the technological architecture of interactive art installations. It incorporates and builds upon Don Ihde's postphenomenological philosophy of technology to argue how tools extend and limit the human body. This work expands upon Ihde's hypothesis to consider how technologically mediated bodies adapt to and cocreate interactive experiences. Through a methodological framework of postphenomenology, this work uses Jeffrey Shaw's The Legible City (1988) and Dennis Del Favero's immersive artwork Scenario (2011) as case studies. Through application of Ihde and an interview I conducted with Del Favero in 2014, this paper examines how the body is mediated, extended and reduced into his artwork through motion-sensing technology. It also considers Ihde's concept of bodyhood as well as his specific ideas on human-technology relationships, which I argue can be broken down as a way to consider the composition of interactive art. Overall this paper considers the human body's negotiation with technology as an interface that co-composes experientiality where users become postphenomenologically extended in interactive environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from fieldwork on frontline health workers in villages in the state of Odisha, India, this paper critically interrogates the complex ways in which frontline health workers negotiate between their intersecting gender and caste identities and their roles as modern professionals at the village level. It argues that the embodied identities of these frontline health workers become crucial in shaping other villagers' views on their labour. Frontline health workers from caste Hindu communities often claim that the spatial demarcation between public and private becomes a way out in resolving the conflicting demands posed by their professional roles and kinship obligations regarding caste practices. However, contrary to this claim, this article argues that such a neat demarcation of space remains unsettled in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary figurations of the 'the Indian Woman' over recent years have been heavily influenced by national and international media coverage focused on high profile, gruesome and brutal cases of rape and sexual assault of women in public. The suffering involved in such cases notwithstanding, we argue that investment in such representations runs the risk of limiting our understanding of the varied experiences of female bodies in public life. Most significantly, the bodies of younger girls and how they relate to public life is mostly assumed rather than studied. Drawing on a sub-sample of ethnographies of younger children aged 6–8 living in the city of Hyderabad, India and employing the phenomenological concept of 'orientation', the article explores young girls' everyday embodied orientation towards public life, with an intersectional framework. The paper considers three case studies from different spatial/cultural contexts and the empirical material is organised around the themes of the male gaze in a public space, orienting bodies in a schooled space, and the lived body in a domestic space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of inheritance law and Chancery cases, my paper specifically takes up fictional plots of birthright and entitlement involving female characters. I wish to argue that for women, proving legitimacy and regaining inheritance implicitly indict the legal system (and its patrilineal foundation). My essay intersects British inheritance law, Chancery court cases that disinherited orphaned women, and cases that reinstated entitlement to female legal wards (or disenfranchized daughters), with fictional examples of female birthright (Smith's Emmeline, Radcliffe's Adeline, Burney's Evelina and others), illustrating how eighteenth-century authors critiqued legal interpretations of birthright, demonstrating the unstable and often provisional basis for female entitlement and birthright. My paper thereby discusses the role gender and documentation plays in the confirmation of entitlement and claims to name and fortune. I argue that both actual and fictional cases of female entitlement often create varied and diverse spaces for legal interpretation, and that successful cases of birthright are often hinged upon emotion and forms of coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irom Sharmila, also known as the 'iron lady' of Manipur (India), has fasted for 16 long years, sustained through forced nasal feeding, making it one of the longest political fasts in the world. She struggled against the rule of emergency law in her land through the mechanism of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. In an attempt to explore the power of an image, the paper traverses the aspects of iconization of Irom Sharmila. The image of a woman, frail in structure and a tube attached to her nose triggers bodily pain in the spectator which comes from the innate violence in her image. The paper examines how the body of Sharmila has been actively transformed into a site of resistance and a ground on which politics is played out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we advance the conversation about management education by outlining a future scenario of management teaching in which art is employed as a method, learning goal, and methodology. The scenario is informed by our personal experiences of teaching management and art expressed in terms of three design principles for management education: the principles of body, mind, and soul; and it is presented as an ethnography from the future. This future is envisioned to be characterized by four assumptions: that students are co-creators of knowledge; that the role of teachers is to facilitate the students' learning processes; that Artificial Intelligence is an integral part of learning processes; and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop their relations to the world and contribute with feasible future solutions to wicked problems and global challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the introduction to the author's PhD thesis titled, Interfashionality: Body-oriented Parametric Design and Parametric Thinkign 2.0 for 3 D-printed Fashion and Textiles. The paper firstly introduces the author's research motivation, which is followed by theoretical discussions around and design examples of fashion and textile digitalization, as well as 3 D-printed fashion and textiles. The author then introduces the important implication of parametric design for creating 3 D-printed fashion and textiles. In this section, through analyzing the self-organized conference, Digital Fashion-3D Printing for Designer, and through intensive discussions of the origin of parametric design and its adoption in fashion, the author then summarizes the scope of the research. This paves the way for a concrete research question, five research aims, research structure (model of the research) and thesis structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]