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This special issue offers a substantial contribution to the field, outlining how materiality and embodiment offer insights into science learning with respect to argumentation, use of diagrams and gestures to understand abstract concepts, the role of materiality in digital learning and the importance of material and embodied interactions in investigations, plurilingual settings and in the positioning and identities of learners of science. This paper responds to the special issue by outlining a distinctive theoretical framework for understanding materiality and embodiment in science education: a conceptualisation of material-dialogic space. Contrasting this framework with the multimodal, social semiotic and narrative ethnographic frames used in the studies in this special issue, this paper argues that by examining materiality as voices within a material-dialogic space, new insights into dialogic learning and 'becoming' in science are possible. In this paper, I discuss the papers in this special issue using the conceptualisation of material-dialogic space, grouped according to three areas of interest in science education: methods of analysing materiality, meaning-making in science through 'doing' and 'thinking' science, and science identities. A means by which material-dialogic space might be examined empirically is proposed, and how this enables an approach to think about thinking and doing science that focuses on the relationality of materials, bodies and language in science meaning-making is explored. The notion of becoming, changing and being changed through participation in a material-dialogic relational space is proposed as an approach to thinking about 'being' in science and science identities. The role of material-dialogic space with respect to spaces of science learning is raised as a key question. This paper highlights the lively open questions in the field of materiality and embodiment in science education, whilst offering the concept of material-dialogic space as an important avenue for studying these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning around artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technologies that attends to power is an urgent and widely felt priority among the learning sciences and CS ed broadly. Popular approaches to AI education focus on technical skills, with far less theoretical and practical work around critical and justice-centered AI learning. Adding to this literature, we discuss tool design and observed interactions in Drag vs AI workshops, where participants use hands-on makeup art as a medium for fooling, subverting, and refusing facial recognition. Our broader analysis asks how participants make sense of the technical and political aspects of AI, as they interact with AI through the Drag vs AI workshops' modes of aesthetic transformation, tinkering, and resistance. In this paper, we focus on participants' embodied algorithmic tinkering with AI and affordances for justice-centered computing education. Our analysis highlights how tinkering and play modes of interaction with AI materials can promote critical and agentive learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will discuss whether the sport of netball has the potential to interpellate a feminine style of body comportment through its rules. Feminine body comportment is a term popularised by Young's essay 'Throwing Like a Girl' (2005) to indicate how women typically present their bodies when participating in sports. Research into the sport of netball remains relatively low in output, and a philosophical examination is a potentially novel approach. Firstly, this paper will give a brief historical overview of netball. Secondly, it will present a critical application of Young's theory of feminine body comportment and its application to netball. Thirdly, it will critically discuss Chisholm's (2008) refutation of and amendments to Young's feminine modalities, as well as their wider implications. Finally, it will conclude that netball has the possibility to interpellate femininity through 'negative' modalities, but that it also has the potential to provide a pathway for female transcendence. [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]

Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses epistemic violence in social science research, drawing on a multiyear study with marginalized teenagers in Old Havana, Cuba to articulate an onto-epistemological approach to knowledge production that can contribute to the decoloniality of knowledge production. Building on decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, and poststructuralist theories, the heuristic presented here contributes an alternative to conventional positivist understandings of knowledge, by defining knowledge as social, created, performed and resistant, and illustrates how these theoretical tenets can be made material in research practice, in this case through the use of arts-based methods. Responding to calls to decolonize knowledge within the field of children’s geographies and adjacent disciplines, this paper addresses the attendant need to reconceptualize what counts as knowledge and identify methodological innovations to support the achievement of these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data from creative and visual group interviews undertaken in 2018 with five LGBTQ+ young people aged 15–18 years old in the South Wales valleys, this paper explores the gendered experiences of the body online. In line with wider research, participants illustrated that commodified gendered and sexualized norms were intensified online through the everyday forceful intrusion of idealized bodies and abusive body-shaming comments. However, they also pointed to the role of food and pet content in experiences of embodied pleasure and feeling good online. Inspired by feminist posthuman and new materialist scholarship, this paper examines how food and pet photography plugs into masculinizing and feminizing bodily assemblages. In so doing, it not only makes an empirical contribution to the field of gender studies, but also offers a contribution to the methodological literature by developing a theoretically informed approach, which expands the boundaries of what a gendered body may be, do and become online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats of phenomenal consciousness and its relation to an organism's capacity to be hedonically perturbed by its environment. This paper offers an empirically informed, phenomenologically descriptive conceptual analysis of subjective character in terms of an organism's ability to feel with its body. The subjective character of phenomenal consciousness is at least partially constituted by embodied affect, that is, by our ability to feel what is happening on and inside our living bodies. It is in virtue of our being able to feel with our bodies that our experiences disclose the world as seeming a certain way for us. I call this the "affectively embodied perspectival view" of subjective character (AEP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Eric Santner's theory of political flesh is appreciated in its relation to philosophy of religion and Christian theology. In the first part of the paper, Santner's speculative concept is brought into conversation with the debate on embodiment, incarnation, and a hermeneutics of the flesh. Santner's conception of the flesh is shown to follow a logic of excarnation, or rather disincorporation, and thus to be at odds with contemporary harmonistic theories of embodiment that attempt to think body and spirit together without rupture. In contrast, the relevance of Santner's theory lies precisely in its antagonistic reading of the dynamics that constitute human embodied being – a dimension overlooked by most recent theories of embodiment. The second part of the article develops a reading of Protestantism as a "religion of the flesh" in line with Santner's argument. In doing so, it is shown that the Protestant narrative of self-modernization and progress (Hegel's "religion of freedom") can be subverted by the conception of the flesh brought into play by Santner, revealing a much more ambivalent history of Protestantism. In a re-reading of the theologies of Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and John Calvin, it is shown that the Protestant understanding of the church can be made transparent to a figure of the undead that is virulent in it, namely the undead flesh of Jesus Christ. In the end, the question is raised whether this figure of an "undead" Christ might not be interpreted as a paradoxological intervention in the sense of Eric Santner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the role of an emerging job role within the virtual reality (VR) film production crew. This role we call the Embodiment Director, involves assisting the VR Film Director in the accomplishment of true immersive film experiences through the use of game engines and VR peripherals. The Embodiment Director will manage the inception of haptics and stimuli technologies that allow for the embodiment of humans within a virtual environment, and they must guarantee precise synchronicity between physical and virtual counterparts, while overseeing the safety use of software and hardware during the entire production process of the VR film experiences. This paper offers a contemporary review of the key creative roles within traditional and virtual film production, in order to generate a concise and valid argument for the role of the Embodiment Director supported by autoethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the 1990s, the marketing literature has seen the emergence of research dedicated to consumers with disabilities (CWD). This work is mostly based on the social model of disability, which encourages practitioners to eradicate the physical and architectural barriers faced by individuals. However, in the field of disability studies, the social model is increasingly criticised both for being too radical and for neglecting the subjective experience of disability. In this paper, we attempt to illuminate existing views, while advocating new perspectives, for conceptualising and representing disability in consumer research. With this in mind, we first briefly present the major conceptual foundations and models of disability research. Then, we systematically review marketing literature on CWD to examine the perspectives used when studying this phenomenon. Finally, we propose a research agenda aimed at advancing the understanding of consumption and disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on insights gained from incorporating dance improvisation into a broader early years environmental education ethnographic research project. Findings are reported from a two-day workshop where a dancer was invited to work with young children to attune to the weather through their bodies. In these workshops, the practice of dance improvisation was used as a deliberate interference to disrupt the disconnected and disembodied ways in which weather is often taught to young children. The paper argues that when children attune with weather through the embodied and relational practice of dance improvisation, this challenges the common practice of learning about weather as a separate phenomenon happening outside the classroom. Dance, as an intervention, helps to de-stabilise binary human-nature relations and reveals how children might come to understand their (human) selves as also weather bodies. New ways to understand humans' entanglements with current weather events are also articulated, offering educators and researchers strategies for considering how the practice of dance improvisation might be integrated into early years education as an innovative approach to environmental learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On-demand digital platforms are shaping processes of urbanisation by transforming governance processes, worker subjectivities and consumption practices. However, claims about such transformations risk ignoring the diverse and often underspecified ways that evaluations about platform urbanism are being made. This paper grapples with our incapacities to know platform urbanism, not as pragmatic barriers that can be overcome, but as limits to be reckoned with. Reflecting on fieldwork encounters with people speaking about on-demand platforms from diverse governance, production and consumption perspectives, the paper foregrounds experiences of unknowability, illegibility and ambivalence in platform urbanism. These concepts invite a rethink of the subjectivities involved in evaluating platform urbanism and they provoke questions about the operation of power. The paper argues that attending to these 'negatives' provides an alternative counter-political perspective that apprehends both the instability of politics and our practices of judgement. Ultimately, admitting a more aporetic understanding of platform urbanism is not about hobbling our capacities to intervene as urban theorists, but about questioning what intervention might look like and what might be possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how emotion rules are socially constructed and how and why they are enacted and challenged through specific modes of embodiment in face-to-face interactions. The paper broadens the understanding of emotion rules by connecting them to aesthetics to explore face-to-face interactions. This paper is based on ethnographic data gathered from a two-year study of a micro-sized service company. It explores the structure, function, and meaning of three emotion rules: (1) the emotionality rule, (2) the enthusiasm rule, and (3) the nice way rule as enacted by the company's chief executive officer (CEO) and employees. This paper enhances the understanding of the role of emotion rules in establishing an innovative and democratic organisation. It offers insight into how emotion rules were enacted, challenged, and broken in an unexpected situation when the CEO announces her non-consultative decision that affected the company's employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reflection on the ways extractive industries manifest within and across place. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico over 8 months in 2019–2020, this paper focuses on the experiences of residents living in a town adjacent to an underground silver mine in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca, Mexico. I argue that a focus on lived, sensory and long-term engagement between people and mining opens new avenues for geographers to consider 'what mining does'. Looking beyond the language of 'impacts', I build upon work on cultural geographies of presence and absence to put forward the notion of 'mining presence': mining's present and absent affects and materialities that interweave with residents' everyday lives, homes, bodies, and landscapes. In other words, I explore the qualities of mining that bring the San José mine into a neighbouring town and mediate spaces of daily life. In doing so, this paper contributes to the geographies of the extractive industries by showing that attention to life with mining requires a re-thinking of the spatiotemporal relations of extraction itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The algorithm has become an increasingly important concept in understanding human behavior in recent years. In the case of sport, human bodies are seen as superficial to the driving force of the algorithm, whether it be genetic, behavioral or surveillance-technological algorithms (Harari 2015, 2020; Zuboff 2019). However, the French mathematician and philosopher Michel Serres (1930–2019) structurally relate algorithms to sports and bodily experience at multiple places in his oeuvre. According to Serres, sport actually enables us to reprogram and rewrite our behavior, moods and thoughts, and therefore modifies our algorithmic status (Serres 1999, 2019). Against deterministic conceptions of the body, Serres argues that human bodies possess a 'metamorphic' nature that is similar to the procedural character of computer programs. This paper investigates the relationship between the algorithm and bodily existence through a reading of both Harari and Serres on sport. It will be argued that, against deterministic conceptions of the algorithm, the algorithm can actually broaden an understanding of the role of sports and physical activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cuerpo-territorio (the body-territory) is a concept used by Indigenous feminist activists from Iximulew (Guatemala) to frame their struggles for justice, an end to gendered violence and against extraction in their territories. This paper draws on this concept to explore the legacy of colonial and conflict-related woundings in Guatemala, particularly sexualised and racialised violence. I focus on the primarily Ladinx, urban, largely middle-class population who work and study at the Centre for Training, Healing and Transpersonal Transformation – Q'anil, Guatemala. By centring my enquiry on the reflections of staff and participants from Guatemala and Latin America, through observations and interviews completed as part of my PhD, research this paper explores how attending to the racialised and sexualised wounds of the cuerpo supports individual and collective healing. I argue that Q'anil's processes, which focus on interrogating desire, reconnecting with the body and recovering the erotic as creative life force, can contribute to healing our broken relationship with the territorio. I -situate this work within the turn towards a vitalist politics and ask how we might expand our understanding of justice in territories wounded by conflict and (neo)colonialism beyond legal frameworks to envision justice from the cuerpo-territorio? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article seeks to redeem the idea that virtual reality (VR) might serve to foster empathy by rethinking both the notion of empathy and the ways contemporary VR films have attempted to generate it. Specifically, this paper considers two forms of embodiment—being and being with—in order to highlight some of the shortcomings of the 'empathy machine' discourse. In doing so, I also offer an alternative analogy: a tool for empathy, rather than a machine. Finally, an analysis of two key VR productions that invite users to be with characters—rather than putting users 'in the shoes' of a character—allows me to demonstrate how a more productive path towards empathy in VR might instead lay in experiences that create space—or 'make room'—for the work of empathy to be undertaken by individuals who know and want to use VR as a tool, rather than as an end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the body remains dominated by Western scholars examining Western bodies and using Western conceptualisations of the body. Though mainstream sociology of the body research is founded within dualisms, often privileging one side of a binary opposition at the expense of another, a thread within Chinese philosophies cut across such dualistic categories. This paper aims to reinvigorate this thread by the 'turn to' a postmonolingual approach, using New Confucianism to consider the challenges and implications for bodily education and research in three ways. First, this paper draws on a postmonolingual lens to extend current debates and limitations of embodiment literatures. Specifically, it provides examples of how thinking with New Confucianism in educating the body could help shift the academic landscape. Second, it offers an account of navigating through the 'turns' in order to reach for the ground of New Confucianism thinking in bodily education. Thinking through a postmonolingual lens with a focus on New Confucianism indicates a departure from Western approaches that have informed a Euro-American centric tradition of research. Such a shift reorientates thinking around postpositivist research that continues to perpetuate dualism and fails to capture the complexity, ambivalence and entangled relations of our embodied lives. Last, it highlights the revelations in how Chinese philosophical concepts can bring to challenge dominant Western notions of performance culture predicated upon binary oppositions and more broadly the privilege of the body over mind and emotions. Thinking about bodily education with New Confucianism this paper points to the potential to decenter normative assumptions and reshape the usual contours of the binary bodily praxis. It concludes by considering the potential and future directions when drawing on New Confucianism as a theoretical framework to rethink bodily education and research in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a concept of interfacing as a heterogeneous zone of interaction, a relational space created by users as they bring together interact with and draw on a range of digital and analogue materials, sources and technologies. It examines the ways tourists and travellers access, engage, use, transfer and blend multiple media sources drawing across both analogue and digital sources as they plan, execute and reflect on the trips and visits they make. It derives from a series of in depth ‘show and tell’ style interviews with 18 participants recruited in the UK. It contributes to the growing literature on digital geographies by exploring the relational spatiality by which individuals build interfacing activities around specific tasks and experiences as heterogeneous and contingent socio-material spaces. It develops a conception of interfacing around two interrelated and iterative sets of embodied practices. These are firstly, assembling and mobilising and secondly intermediating and sense making. Using this twin conception of interfacing as an active making, the paper discusses how and where a conception of interfacing as embodied practice might contribute to understandings of human digital relationships within complex poly media situations and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Christian practices of prayer are being reconfigured through digital media in Singapore. Although digital technologies are an area of burgeoning interest amongst social and cultural geographers, the ways in which these technologies reconfigure the space-times of religious praxis and engender new affective relations or subjectivities of religion have not yet been embraced. This paper fills the lacuna by bringing existing studies on religion, technology and affect into constructive conversation with each other. By elaborating on digital prayer as an affective assemblage of religious practice, we show how digital technologies blur institutional boundaries and create new affordances for lived religious subjectivities beyond the 'officially sacred'. Then, we consider how digital media may produce new atmospheres that shape the affective formation of religious subjects. We outline four dimensions of affect that constitute the digitally-mediated affective atmospheres, which structure how prayer is felt and performed. Altogether, this article contributes an understanding of 'digital prayer' as a form of religious practice that enables an integrative, if at times ambiguous and politically-charged, experience for connecting religious belief with the rhythms of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic underachievement of students from disadvantaged backgrounds is an ongoing and unresolved problem. Schools serving vulnerable communities often fail to meaningfully engage their students who are often exposed to significant family and environmental adversities. However, where the educational landscape is overwhelmed with neoliberal processes of accountability and testing, education generally comes to be understood as a cognitive process with little attention to the bodily or affective dimensions of learning. This paper draws on new theoretical ideas in affect and embodiment to build a case for an embodied, affective and creative pedagogy for students who live with poverty and adversity. Specifically, I report on research that investigates how two teachers utilised Creative and Body-based (CBL) provocations to redesign curriculum for disadvantaged students in their sites. In utilising the analysis of two narrative portraits, I highlight examples of bodily affectivity as well as affective pedagogical practices that impact on students' capacity to learn and teachers' capacity to teach. Analysis suggests that embodied and creative approaches enable new forms of communication and learner identities through bodies, senses and imaginings. Such approaches provide much needed affective conditions that 'hook' students in, encourage dialogue and help them to realise their potential as learners. Outcomes of this work signal an epistemological and pedagogical shift toward understanding bodies and creativity as agents of learning and knowledge production. By engaging with notions of a 'learning body' potential exists to challenge neoliberal practices in complex classrooms and support young people to foster stronger connections, hope and a re-inspired aspiration to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a systematic data base search this paper provides a comprehensive survey of empirical research on garden visitor experiences, arguing that prevalent studies in garden tourism, psychology and education shed little light on the esthetic experience of gardens as cultural artifacts. Gibson's transdisciplinary concept of 'affordance' is therefore used to reinterpret findings from the social sciences in light of landscape design and cultural analysis. The paper addresses how horticultural designs afford visitors to move through landscapes, to perceive and sense plant displays and to create meaning through bodily engagement. It furthermore shows, how media technologies such as mobile guides afford visitors to engage the garden through their specific material and operational design. As a result, the paper introduces a transdisciplinary model of the garden visitor experience that integrates bodily perception and conceptual understanding. Accordingly, the deliberate design of interpretative media is identified as a key agenda for visitor engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with two overarching questions: why is engaging with queer theologies potentially valuable for sex education, and how can we carry out this kind of work without rendering sex education an expression of queer theological commitment? In responding to the first of these questions, I argue that working with queer theologies can offer sex education researchers another way of thinking about, and with, theology – one that resists positioning theology as inevitably heteronormative through its attention to the body, embraces the multiple possibilities of queer subjecthood, and attends to the importance of context in understanding how heteronormativity is both reproduced and resisted. Following this, I turn to the second question animating this paper, suggesting that if we are to avoid sex education sliding into an inevitable expression of queer theological commitment, what is needed is a methodology for the translation for sex education research, in which queer theologies can 'meet' with sex education without at the same time 'merging' with it. I demonstrate how this might be enacted through the symbol of the 'Abrahamic threesome', a queer symbolic device of my own design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how the human corpse can function as an aesthetic-therapeutic for the deceased, the bereaved and for death care professionals. It understands the human corpse as a liminal entity that is characterised by a specific materiality, biography and self-referentiality. Because of these attributes the corpse can be employed as an aesthetic-therapeutic by the bereaved and by death care professionals in response to a death. On the basis of participant observation in the death care industry and qualitative interviews with bereaved people and funeral professionals in the Netherlands, the paper discusses four engagements with the dead body in the period prior to the funeral: i) caring, ii) sustaining, iii) restoring, and iv) disregarding the dead body. Crucially, it shows how such engagements can contribute to the well-being of those involved, including the deceased, who is often understood to be sentient. Furthermore, by focusing on cases where the corpse is disregarded, the paper argues that an aesthetic-therapeutic understanding of the human corpse is hegemonic in the death care industry. The analysis and conclusion offer insights to scholars in the interdisciplinary field of death studies, as well as reflections for practitioners in end-of-life and death care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions are increasingly redesigning academic learning spaces with the aim of enhancing learning outcomes. Existing research into this phenomenon has shown promise regarding how these new spaces are being designed and used; however, there has been much less effort towards developing a language for analysing the emergent learning activity within these spaces. In other words, it has been under-theorised. This paper responds to this gap by proposing three analytical framings and grounding each in vignettes illustrative of how they might be applied: (1) space-time-feedback as an assemblage for emergent interest-driven student activity; (2) embodiment-material as an assemblage for emergent public sensemaking; and (3) proximity-material-time as an assemblage for emergent collaborative benchmarking through group awareness and ambient feedback. Although not an exhaustive list, the three analytical framings serve as a starting point for investigations of emergent activity within future learning spaces from a sociomaterial perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is the greatest global crisis since WW11, infecting millions of people. Those amongst the worst affected have been in the older age range and largely have underlying health issues. The importance of maintaining wellbeing, being fit and healthy, and resisting neoliberal and normalizing discourses as we age becomes more crucial. This paper considers the entanglement of embodied, emplaced ageing, nature-based recreation and green and blue spaces in exploring the experiences and sensibilities of agers. It argues that interpretative research can provide for a better and more nuanced appreciation of older folks' changing embodied subjectivities and their relations with the outdoors. Autoethnography is examined as an insightful, credible methodology in (re)-presenting being old outdoors and being active outdoors. The perceived vulnerability of 70+ folk is considered in light of government policy discourses emanating as a consequence of the pandemic. The paper folds with realist tales of Lockdown in New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the tension between the need to create spaces for unsettling feelings as part of a decolonisation of the curriculum in Higher Education, and the need to create a sense of safety in the classroom. Decolonising the curriculum, here, means exploring how histories of coloniality structure educational institutions, established canons, and socio-natural relations, and cultivating collective practices that move beyond oppressive patternings. As part of this process, as we find ourselves imbricated in the struggles of others and as our emotional grip on the world is unsettled, we – students and teachers alike – may find ourselves experiencing discomfort. This raises an important question, for it is clearly part of the responsibility of an educator to create spaces that feel "safe" for students, and do not induce or trigger trauma. Drawing on experiences in the university classroom and lecture halls, this paper develops the concept of "scaffolding" as the basis for an ethos for embracing discomfort pedagogically. The affordances of physical theatre, film, and visual culture are considered alongside particular tactics as ways to foster the transformation of "settled" fabrics of feeling in care-full ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom and antiquated stage development theories have had a negative effect on children’s spirituality. This paper looks at an innovative spiritual practice (embodied prayer) that instead promotes children’s agency and embodied engagement in multi-layered meaning making. It traces both the ways in which children respond to higher levels of trust in their ability to reflect on spiritual ideas and experiences, as well as challenges and changes in understanding and practice that adult facilitators experience as they learn new ways of supporting children’s spiritual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have examined how sacred spaces are made spiritually meaningful through embodied practice. This paper brings together scholarship on post-secular feminism and geographies of religion to develop a theory of non-subversive power in the sacred space literature. This paper demonstrates how Kurdish women create sacred space through embodied Islamic mystical practices in Kurdish Turkey and how these practices carve out a space for creative existence within and alongside state and masculinist systems of power, not against. Using a post-secular feminist framing and building on conversations of power in the sacred space literature, we show how the formation of sacred space forms the feminine subject and constitutes an act of feminine agency. Specifically, we focus on two material and sacred sites: private communal prayer houses and public tomb sites used for communal petitions. In these spaces, women organize and lead collective and embodied meditations and petitions that centre their desires, concerns, and wishes in a common register to create, following Saba Mahmood, a 'politics in unusual places'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns physicality and the tendency to operate within bounds of familiar repertoires of embodiment. It questions the degree to which habitual ways in which we pose, repose, and action our bodies are authentic as opposed to constructed artifacts of our enculturation. With reference to notions of 'neutrality' as raised in Lecoq training and the Feldenkrais Method, this paper aims – though suggested autoethnographic exploratory practice – to bring awareness to habitual ways in which each of us embody gender. It highlights means by which educators can direct the focus of those with whom we work toward recognizing and deconstructing aspects of embodied gender behaviors that may be inherently, but not obviously, inequitable. Attending to these issues within spheres of education has the scope to safeguard the social and emotional well-being of those not inclined to embody in accordance with hegemonic gender norms and to broaden attitudes toward embodied expressive possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate regarding the adoption/rejection of technologies by focusing on the selective use of therapeutic devices among people with type 1 diabetes. I show that patients often refuse to use a device (either insulin pumps or sensors for glycaemic control), despite suggestions from diabetologists. The study was conducted in Italy in 2019. Theoretically, the paper relied on a perspective that amalgamates actor-network theory and postphenomenology around the key concept of multistability. I then detected the three main features of stabilities that explain device use/non-use: relation to embodied users, contextual embedment (within larger social assemblages), concrete tailoring. Findings helped to stress the relevance of not only focusing on the type of device and its technical functioning, but also unveiling the underlying ongoing and situated socio-technical processes. Selective adoption of devices should be investigated at the level of the whole patient-device assemblage in order to assess the diverse stabilities that may arise from such networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue on 'Arts-based approaches, migration and violence: intersectional and creative perspectives' highlights the complexities and paradoxes in relation to existing debates in the field. Drawing on the emerging body of rich work that has recognised the importance of arts-based approaches within research on migration and violence, the introduction provides a critical assessment of the nature of the connections between the two in methodological, empirical and conceptual ways. It explores these intersections across multiple geographical scales, temporalities and imaginations through innovative creative research. In contributing to these debates, the introduction and the papers included in this special issue examine the potential for new insights, understanding and transformations to emerge through engaging with visual, performative, visceral, embodied and collaborative arts-based research. Yet, it also addresses some epistemological and ethical concerns including tensions around participation, positionality, co-production and the decolonisation of research. The introduction also aims to move beyond evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of arts-based approaches and provides a conceptual frame delineated as 'migration-violence creative pathways' that emphasise feminist and embodied perspectives. The frame does not prescribe how to engage with the creative arts, but rather encapsulates the variety of ways to do so. Finally, we set out an agenda for future creative research on migration-violence connections that highlights some practical, epistemological and conceptual suggestions for critically and productively engaging with arts-based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there have been numerous calls for Geographers working in higher education to put into practice anti-racist pedagogies. Less well-developed is scholarship on the approaches which expand students' understanding of race and the socio-spatial and material processes of their own racialization. Within the context of food geographies, visceral pedagogies have been useful for advancing student knowledge on the multi-scalar, dynamic and complex systems of power that influence what we eat. Bringing together insight from critical pedagogy, food geographies, and corporeal feminist understandings of race, in this paper I point to the effectiveness of experimental and embodied pedagogies which expand students' emotional and cognitive learning about the relationship between race and everyday food practices. Drawing from narrative and interview data with primarily white undergraduate students in Colorado, USA, I argue that embodied, critical pedagogies contribute to anti-racist goals by destabilizing whiteness, linking students' theoretical understandings of race to everyday practice, and building empathy for/with others. Furthermore, I point to the effectiveness of a variety of student reflection formats, from narrative writing, to sharing a meal, to empathetic listening, to argue for greater attention to not only what we teach in anti-racist pedagogy, but how we teach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions aim at survival and the satisfaction of the body’s needs, rather than truth or the good of the mind. Each of these faculties makes a distinctive and, indeed, an indispensable contribution to the preservation of life. Commentators have largely focused on how the senses keep us alive. By comparison, the imagination and passions have been neglected. In this paper, I reconstruct Malebranche’s account of how the imagination contributes to the preservation of the body by compensating for the limitations of the senses. First, the imagination represents non-actual states of affairs, such as probable or possible future states. Second, the imagination forges new and often helpful associations based on past experiences. Third, the imagination (mis)represents that objects will cause pleasure and pain, thereby imbuing them with emotional significance they would otherwise lack. Together, these features flesh out Malebranche’s view that the imagination is necessary for the preservation of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has chronicled the experiences of Black students transitioning into college and best practices for supporting Black students as they move through the collegiate context. The collegiate context is nested in white supremacy, and a microcosm of white culture. Thus, this study is rooted in the assumption that racism experienced within college is a reflection of its permanence, and sets the stage for the importance of examining Black students’ sense of self-love. In this paper, we utilize critical frameworks to examine how seven Black students conceptualize self-love within anti-Black environments. An analysis of testimonies and interviews generated by participants produced several considerations on the praxis of self-love in and beyond the educational context. Specifically, findings point to the ways Black students conceptualize self-love as affirmations of the Black being, manifesting as presence, knowing, feeling, seeing, doing, and regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to contribute to digitally mediated mobilities literature by studying ordinary people's differential mobilities within a contact tracing system called the 'Electronic Entry Register' formulated by the South Korean government during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing the posthumanist perspective, this empirical study examines differential mobilities produced by the smartphone-holding citizens on the move, focusing on the agential capacities differentiated through their performances for digital mediations. Consequently, a sequence of field research comprising a walking interview, observation, and sit-in interview was conducted in Seoul during the pandemic. While most research participants acknowledged that they were profoundly affected by the mode of control imposed by the tracing system, many actively strove to strengthen their body-smartphone prosthetic-ness to technically enhance their mobilities, particularly by internalising some procedures into the smartphone. Their differential capacities in turn mutated their embodied speeds and the overall progression within the tracing system, which some others found difficult to catch up with. Subsequently, the researcher discusses the political significance of differentiated agential capacities at the sites of technological mediations and proposes the posthuman body as a useful unit of analysis for critical studies on digitally mediated mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people form the primary target demographic of new 'buy now pay later' (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to wellbeing through a qualitative study using interviews alongside arts-based participatory methods of bodymapping and sandboxing with 24 young people in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These methods enabled particular attention to the embodied and affective elements related to the experience of indebtedness to understand debt's significance for wellbeing for young people. The embodied and affective registers of indebtedness are integral for understanding the conditions informing how wellbeing is negotiated and felt in this context. This study considers the role of BNPL services in young people's economic lives as part of broader processes of financialisation, and the significance of extended and ubiquitous forms of credit for young people's wellbeing. [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]

In Australia, some non-Aboriginal social workers and academics have difficulty working in partnership with Aboriginal children, families, and communities because they do not know how to build authentic relationships and are fearful of doing so. This is particularly the case in Child Protection where children continue to be removed from Aboriginal families. Reciprocal and genuine relationships involve holding Aboriginal worldviews as equally valid as Euro-western ones. For non-Aboriginal social workers and academics, this means moving beyond a "helping" stance, and towards genuine openness to learn and understand the world, and their place in it, in new ways. This paper shows how two social work academics undertook building relationships with Traditional Custodians in our local area to establish a resource for students that foregrounds Aboriginal ways of knowing and learning by using the Tree of Life concept to embody Aboriginal experiences. The Aboriginal author focused on coming together respectfully to create a better-shared understanding on connecting to Country. For the non-Aboriginal author, a transformation occurred, gaining embodied understanding of her own belonging and connection to Country. The paper concludes with reflections useful to others embarking on this journey. IMPLICATIONS Cultivating an academic environment that prioritises forming authentic relationships with Traditional Custodians on Country is essential in order to be culturally responsive. A decolonising embodied concept, Tree of Life, invites social workers to take a journey of personal self-discovery, of belongingness, and cultural heritage. A simulation resource developed with Traditional Custodians can disrupt daily instances of colonisation and work toward social workers reflecting on practice to minimise further harm in working with Aboriginal communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Located at the intersection of feminist geographies of development and embodiment, this paper explores the everyday gendered experiences of international women staff working for an education-related NGO in Afghanistan. Drawing from a larger study, this paper is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight international women who have spent extended periods of time working in Afghanistan. It reveals the various ways international staff experienced and managed their western female bodies within and across public, non-work related spaces. Our analysis focuses on the participants' ethical and cultural considerations of covering, navigation of gendered eye contact, and experiences of sexual harassment in the streets of Kabul. It reveals how women's embodied experiences within and across non-working spaces of development led to (partial) knowledge, heightened reflexivity, critique of the development industry, and deep questioning about identity politics. Ultimately, this paper offers valuable insights into the corporeality of international women in public spaces in Afghanistan. It highlights the importance of non-work related spaces for cultivating women's understandings of difference, relationality, and ethical relationships with the Afghan women they work for and with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Where one sibling has a disability, research has examined the role of disability in sibling relationships; however, the majority has reflected a normative understanding of sibling relationships and a deficit understanding of disability. Reacting to this history, this paper draws on the concepts of embodiment (absorption of bodily experience into self/identity) and enactment (performance of self/identity) to provide a new way of understanding the role of disability in sibling relationships. Using data from an Australian study of young adult siblings with and without disabilities, the paper discusses how disability is embodied and enacted in: how siblings engage in supportive and conflictual talk and everyday chat with each other; how they enact recreation and seek connection with each other; and how they strive to understand and experience their emotions about each other. The paper ends by discussing how embodiment and enactment allow a clearer understanding of disability in sibling relationships, which may be empowering for siblings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of object categories which underlie the human lexicon is a prerequisite for domestic robots to communicate with users in a human-like manner. The theory of J. J. Gibson inspires the approach to obtain shared categories through interaction with the shared environment, where explorative behaviors of infants play the role of obtaining distinctive features of objects to shape their categories. Although several existing studies have reproduced the exploratory behaviors of infants by robots to investigate their roles in acquiring such categories, those active categorization methods utilized static touches and the recognition tended to fail by changes of contact conditions. This paper introduces another possible approach to object categorization — object category acquisition by dynamic touch. Dynamic touch (e.g., shaking) provides the agent with the information of the whole object to enable quick and robust recognition. The amplitude spectrum of auditory data which humans obtain during shaking is found to be an effective feature for identifying the object categories of differing dynamics, e.g., rigid objects, paper materials and bottles of water, even though the objects within each category vary in size, shape, amount and contact conditions. Experimental results are given to show the validity of the proposed method and future issues are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexuality and the body in broader society have traditionally been demonised and mistrusted, and in historical clinical contexts, often reduced to a series of pathologies, diagnoses, perversions or medical functions. Today, sexological medical literature primarily focuses on function over pleasure and men over women, while the psychosexual and psychosocial literature focuses on cognitive, relational and emotional interventions for women, non-binary/gender non-conforming people and couples. Valuable contributions from these fields form the foundation of what is collectively referred to today as 'sex therapy', while the adjacent discipline of somatics is making waves in 'trauma therapy', it has yet to make its way into clinical sex therapies. Curiously, pleasure-informed sex therapies and trauma-informed somatic therapies theoretically share a common foundation in the body as a source of well-being, but to date the disciplines rarely intersect. In this paper I will look briefly at the history of the somatics movement including its rising popularity in present day trauma applications. I'll examine the conditions resulting in why sex and sex therapy may have been overlooked within this movement, and provide discussion and suggestion regarding how the fields of sex therapy, sexual health medicine, psychotherapy and somatics would benefit from a shared vision and collaboration, not just among alternative discourses, but also mainstream discourses, to promote optimal, holistic sexual health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent critical studies in International Political Economy (IPE) have engaged with the 'temporal turn' in International Relations. However, outside of postcolonial critiques, this temporal turn in IPE has not considered how subjects share time or how coevalness is produced. This paper explores the problem of coevalness by asking how music produces shared time and plural temporalities. It analyses a collection of experimental electronic music, 4 Women No Cry, arguing that mobilising vulnerabilities through the co-presence of bodies in 'musicking' points towards possibilities for subjectivity beyond the individuated, sovereign, autonomous individual subject and for an intercorporeal subjectivity emerging from the intertwining of material and social relations. This article thus does not offer an 'IPE of music' but rather asserts, via music, a deepening of the critique of temporality and of subjectivity, opening further possibilities for political critique in IPE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspiring to India's COP26 pledge of attaining 500 gigawatts of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030 will entail nothing short of a colossal transformation of rural spaces. Solar park development has already disrupted the lives and livelihoods of marginalized peasants through land dispossession, uneven provisioning of electricity and water resources, dislocation of fuelwood and grazing access, and the diminution of labor opportunities. However, it remains unclear how affected peasants internalize the burdens of decarbonization. The aim of the paper is to address the following questions: How are the geographies of solar energy transitions embodied? How do dispossessed peasants respond affectively? Drawing on feminist political ecology literature and fieldwork that included household surveys and semi-structured interviews, the author finds that the dispossessed embody a range of affective responses, including emotional geographies and embodied resistance, that enable or constrain the place-making of equitable alternative sites of solar energy generation. The author concludes that as India rapidly erects large-scale solar infrastructures—indisputably imperative efforts to confront the climate crisis—the embodiment of injustices suffered by the dispossessed will haunt low-carbon futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-care is receiving increased emphasis in the NASW Code of Ethics, and while social work programs may teach about self-care, it has yet to be embedded in the curriculum. This paper examines the idea of self-care being taught using an embodied framework and integrated throughout social work education programs. Research examining social work educators' thoughts about self-care within the curriculum and how they educate students about self-care practices is explored and analyzed within the context of the framework, suggesting there is a foundation to build upon but work that still needs to be done to address some misconceptions before embodied self-care is fully recognized and embedded in social work education. To build upon that foundation, the authors introduce an embodied self-care framework and suggest ways for self-care to be infused throughout the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]