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Patient narratives are a very valuable literary and medical resource. They transcribe the experience of illness into the life stories of the subject and the author. A serious case of cancer triggers the very individual experience of vulnerability, suffering, dependence, and even contingency in the no longer ‘open’ future. Even after overcoming cancer, life is never the same again. Writing about one’s own experience of cancer is a hermeneutic feat of strength with ethical and aesthetic implications. In the age of personalized and evidence-based medicine, patient narratives offer a particular and necessary supplement to the objectifying medical perspective, since they constitute expressions of subjective evidence. This article is based on the direct experience of cancer by the co-author of the narrative. The long history of her illness is presented chronologically in her own words and has been translated from Italian to English. This is followed by an essay, published here for the first time, on “the life beyond cancer”, on the patient’s time without tumors and the consequences of therapies and mutilating operations. Our methodological approach is based on Havi Carel’s Phenomenology of Illness. The close reading of this pathography focuses on three aspects: (1) the effect and power of words; (2) the passage from wariness to awareness; and (3) the maintenance of personal quality of life during and after cancer.

PUDCAD (Practicing Universal Design Principles In Design Education Through A Cad-Based Game) is a project founded by the European Erasmus + program for innovation and sharing of good practices in education. It provides, at systemic level, the modernization and activation of educational paths through cooperation with partners from different countries through participatory approaches based on ICT. The aim of PUDCAD is the creation of a playful computer assisted drawing application that allows interior architecture and design students to learn and use Universal design principles. This paper explains the different stages of research implementation. The first step was a workshop focused on a survey method developed to verify the compliance of educational environments with the principles of Universal Design (Checklist). Together with simulated direct experience (Empathy trial), it led the students involved to the creation of scenarios for school integration. In the second workshop the application of ad hoc parameter of universal design for spaces of learning led to the definition of Game Maps, where environments and characters of the game were identified. In the third, building on the second step material, table games able of sensitizing the user and supporting her/him in the design of inclusive environments were developed. In the fourth workshop the students developed and tested the videogame’s Alpha version providing feedback and ideas for the ultimate version presented in the fifth workshop. Reviewing the process applied to build the application, the article explores educational experimentation and pedagogical aspects, emphasizing how the videogame, beyond entertainment, can support and promote new learning paths complementary to canonical teaching methods.

Examining food in Katherine Mansfield’s work, this chapter conceives of her short fiction as a type of literary snack offering the reader the kinds of direct experience that are explored thematically in her stories. The literary snack is accessible, intense and freely consumed, working against restrictive traditions such as those exemplified by the three-course meal or triple-decker novel. Viewing Mansfield’s foodie sensuality in the light of her aesthetic progression and her own complex relationship with the short story as a literary form, this chapter shows how she came to terms with the story by successfully assimilating content with form in her work and creating a literature which encouraged small-scale revolutions in thinking and being.

This contribution presents an experimental methodology for sensing and communicating the city for urban design purposes. More in detail, the goal of the experiential-walk method developed by the author is mainly directed at improving the designer’s attitude and ability in considering the multisensory and dynamic environmental conditions from the very beginning of the design process thanks to a personal immersion in motion and in place. The methodology consists of three main phases: (i) direct experience and observation, (ii) self-reflection and interpretation, (iii) data collection, representation and communication. The aim of the first phase is to feel what the place is and what the place might be or what the place is in nuce. The second phase is about mulling over the experience and interpreting the nature of the place. The last phase is directed at representing and communicating the experience and the place criticalities and potentialities. The entire (recursive) process can be intended as a sequence of interconnected actions to increase sensory awareness. It eventually aims at discovering and sharing the said and the unsaid of places. Besides the methodology description, some case studies applications and results are presented together with the lessons learned.

Contains fulltext : 230831.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) This chapter, describes more in depth the three interrelated motifs that were drawn from Bergson’s oeuvre to inform the further discussions in this study: immediate concreteness, vital impulse and duration. They all relate to a dynamic and fluid worldview, as opposed to a static and analytic one. The concepts are interwoven and reoccur throughout the writings of Bergson. The three motifs all treat the following question: how is ‘discrete individuality’ possible whilst direct experience is always in flux, indiscrete, and holistic? The main point of this reflective and reflexive exercise is to use them as notions for a concretisation of Bergson’s philosophy for contemporary science, first through science and subsequently through a discussion of technology, in relation to the self-creative, or autopoietic, nature of human evolution and its impact on global ecosystems.

Generative PAD teaching mode breaks through the restriction of traditional “presupposition-execution” teaching mode, emphasizes the generative feature of curriculum standard, teaching resources and teaching process on the basis of limited presupposition, and effectively changes the traditional passive teaching. It is widely applied in higher vocational colleges. In view of the common phenomenon of learning burnout and learning procrastination among the vocational college students, this research, based on the academic self-efficacy theory, constructs a model of generative PAD teaching to promote students’ academic self-efficacy, by influencing three factors, like students’ successful direct experience, high level of learning motivation and positive verbal evaluation. Through collecting the data of normal and experimental groups’ post-test of questionnaire, by analyzing the two independent T test sample with SPSS software, the results showed that students’ learning interest, learning confidence and learning attitude were significantly improved after the experimental teaching. The generative PAD teaching mode provides valuable references for the vocational teachers to practice teaching reform, by analyzing learners’ needs, setting teaching goals, building teaching resources, creating learning environment and improving teaching evaluation, which is helpful to improve classroom teaching quality in higher vocational colleges.

The technological growth follows an exponential trend, and we will hit the knee in the curve in 2029. From that time, challenges will rapidly change, and the job demand will ask for profiles that we can only partially predict. Therefore, there is the need to adapt educational programs to exponential growth as soon as possible to provide children of today (alias future citizens) with the necessary basic skills and the ability to easily combine them to face any challenge the future will pose. We consider computational thinking and robotics as fundamental skills since students should be provided with transversal critical thinking and be technologically-aware to meet job demands. Thus, i) we designed Roobopoli, a project focused on the direct experience of robotics, and ii) we propose an educational procedure to teach robotics by exploiting Roobopoli through a constructionism-based approach. We tested our approach both in formal and informal educational settings by involving students heterogeneous in age, skills, and personal attitudes. The engagement and the interest manifested by participants prove that the constructionism-based approach, in general, and Roobopoli, in particular, are positively accepted by students to learn robotics and to develop computational thinking. In this article, we will present both Roobopoli and the performed experiments by pointing out lessons learned.

The final chapter focuses upon the issues and concerns highlighted by the private madhouse’s many vocal critics. Smith assembles evidence to demonstrate that internal standards and conditions in both London and provincial madhouses ranged across a wide spectrum, from the almost exemplary to the utterly scandalous. He examines the phenomenon of ‘wrongful confinement’, regarded in some quarters as the greatest of the evils associated with private madhouses. Other forms of malpractice and abuse are shown to have been conducted by some madhouse proprietors. Smith concludes by giving due prominence to the articulations of dissent and protest by people with direct experience of the madhouse, as patients or former patients.

This chapter aims to position the sense of touch within the consumption context. The authors first define the sense of touch from cultural, sociological, psychological, and marketing perspectives. The authors provide an overview of the academic research of “what is touching” and explain its characteristics—i.e. “how do we touch”. Then the authors show the explicit and implicit influence the sense of touch has on our perceptual system and mind—i.e. information processing. At the end of the chapter, the authors expose how it influences consumers’ direct experience of product in store environments.

This chapter discusses key methodological issues involved in researching potential Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PEV) uptake among mainstream consumers: all those who are not Innovators in terms of Rogers’ (Diffusion of innovations. Free Press, New York, 2003) diffusion model. In the U.K. in 2019 mainstream consumers do not have their own PEVs and have little or no direct experience of using them. Issues considered in this chapter include the problems of psychological distance, the Hawthorne effect, the “Bed of Procrustes”, and the role of symbolic meaning and self-congruity in influencing uptake. Two studies that have worked with mainstream consumer samples, one qualitative and one quantitative, are described in depth to illustrate how these issues can be addressed.

This essay argues that phenomenologically, Schopenhauer had an “existentialist” orientation towards the spatio-temporal world that informs his pessimism and that renders it more convincing. This existentialist orientation can be seen in the appreciation of perceptual detail that he prescribes in his aesthetics, his emphasis upon direct experience in his theory of concept formation, his highlighting of the here-and-now in his conception of time, and his conception of enlightenment as the removal of the illusions that desire generates. This kind of existentialist orientation helps explain why he believed that unsatisfied desires generate frustration and why he asserted consequently that “life is suffering”—a claim that appears to be exaggerated at first sight, and open to easy criticism. Overlooking this existentialist orientation explains why some of the criticisms of Schopenhauer’s pessimism appear to be so plausible. In conjunction with Schopenhauer’s well-known position that the essence of the world is a non-rational impulse that he calls “will,” his existentialist attitude towards the spatio-temporal world locates him historically as a more significant predecessor to twentieth-century existentialist thought than has been appreciated.

3D digital imaging for the study of archaeology and the global dissemination of knowledge is of growing relevance and has proven to be extremely beneficial in particular on cases study characterized by a poor digital accessibility. With seven Unesco World Heritage sites, Sicily has an extraordinary heritage perfectly representing the cultural achievements of many Mediterranean civilizations, but yet the digital presence of such heritage is rather limited. The aim of this paper is to present the some methodological insights to tackle issues of 3D digitization of mosaic floor via digital photogrammetry on the basis of direct experience with the case study of the Roman Villa del Casale at Piazza Armerina (Enna, Sicily, Italy). The virtualization of over 2500 m2 of mosaic floord was carried out in the frame of an international collaborative project undertaken by University of South Florida’s Institute for Digital Exploration – IDEx (former CVAST), in partnership partnership with the Regional Department for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity and specifically with the Regional Hub of Piazza Armerina, Aidone and Enna and the University of Catania’s Departments of Civil Engineering and Architecture (DICAR), Mathematics and Computer Sciences (DMI), and Humanistic Studies (DISUM).

The integrated disciplinary approach STEM education offers may be useful in preparing students to understand and ultimately address environmental challenges. For this to occur, however, teachers need the content and pedagogical knowledge to foster E-STEM literacy. Unfortunately, most teachers have had little direct experience with STEM education and there is a dearth of research into pre-service teachers E-STEM learning experiences. This chapter describes an action research study designed to explore our efforts in regard to E-STEM education, and subsequently use the understandings to improve those efforts. The process was guided by two questions: 1) How does our E-STEM intervention influence pre-service teachers’ understanding of STEM? And, 2) what extent does our E-STEM intervention impact pre-service teachers’ notion of environmental issues? The intervention consisted of exploring and designing new energy-efficient sources/technologies. In this chapter, we provide a description of the intervention/action, the findings associated with implementation, and subsequent revisions.

The challenge to comprehend time, place and memory has been taken up by scientists and artists alike throughout history including Eratosthenes (born 276 BC) the first geographer, Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein and Stephen Hawkins; Freud and Bruno Bettelheim; Homer, James Joyce and Marcel Proust to name but a few. Destruction of Rheims Cathedral during WWI lies in contrast to the accidental burning of Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral in 2019. Memory, consciousness and direct experience are intertwined, and hence the importance of phenomenology, the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. This is pertinent as to how each generation experiences sites of memory and commemorations.

Since the first human being set foot on the continent of Antarctica in the early nineteenth century, explorers, scientists and artists have responded to its vast, sublime expanse through the written word, visual expression, music and song. Over the last few decades, artists have begun to explore bodily-kinaesthetic engagement with the landscape itself—expressed through movement, dance and performance. “Figures in a Landscape” examines the varied approaches, sensibilities and work of choreographer Christina Evans, performance artists Shakti Avattar Leon, Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage)––four artists who have direct experience of working in Antarctica. The chapter is a closely keyed description and discussion of a selection of Antarctic works based mostly on their voices, writings, interviews, conversations, correspondence, documentary video and still imagery.

How is knowledge about care produced? The ‘epistemological dimension’ of care is recognised in the concept of ‘responsiveness’ in which attention to the care-receiver’s experience informs the care process at the micro level. What counts as ‘knowledge’ about care in political processes is also highly significant yet a further dimension of exclusion from participation operates here. Most knowledge about care is produced without the inclusion of care-receivers and without regard to their lived experiences of care. This chapter explores this using empirical research that was co-produced with older people about lived experiences of care within the English social care system. Within the current neoliberal context, measurement-based knowledge is more highly valued and recognised. The lived experiences of care under neoliberalism directly challenge the assumptions underpinning the consumer choice rationale of the marketisation of care. The authors argue that building knowledge based on the lived experiences of care with those who have direct experience is necessary for ‘caring democracy’. The chapter is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Seeking the relief of significant social issues is a theme that runs across the chapters in this volume, and in this chapter Dr Deirdre Healy emphasises how her own interest in Criminology was led by a desire to see the application of academic knowledge to prison and probation issues. Seeking a solution led approach, influenced by both forensic psychology and criminology, Dr Healy prioritises the voices of individuals with direct experience of the criminal justice system. Theoretical concepts that inform Dr Healy’s work such as recidivism, dehumanisation, othering and social identity are also discussed in this chapter. She traces her academic journey from its psychological origins and documents the influence of key authors on her work. In this chapter she also speaks about new methods in researching criminology and how innovative qualitative methods serve the discipline.

In his contribution, the author explores the importance of the work of the French historian-philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962) for a criminology of war that is prepared to think through the more visceral dimensions of the human condition. Beginning with a closer reading of Bataille’s writings on the earliest depictions of war and violence in paleolithic cave art, this contribution outlines the dimension in the human condition whereby the potential for deadly violence, and the desire for its direct experience and indirect consumption, seem to be an unavoidable given. The historical depiction of the experience of war and atrocity has, ever since this bloody dawn of humanity, been employed as a powerful tool by which to chronicle those tragically configured by those events.

Returning to the introductory comparison between Spenser and Sidney, the concluding chapter seeks to explain their sharply contrasting representations of Elizabeth. It examines major personal and situational differences, including the decades when they were writing, the audiences they were addressing, their rank and standing at court, their differing levels of direct experience with the queen, their conceptions of romantic epic, and the spans of history encompassed by their fictions. Above all, the two writers differed in their religious views of Elizabeth, Sidney regarding her as an obstacle to desperately needed military action against England’s Catholic enemies abroad and Spenser celebrating her as an imperfect but resplendent mirror reflecting the light of God to her people at a turning point in the providential history of the world.

Architecture education has prioritized vision over the other senses and has been detached from the direct experience of space. To extend our sensory understanding of space, this paper proposes the use of computational tools for body-centered situated learning of space, and discusses precedents in sensory pedagogies and embodied learning. The paper demonstrates the pedagogical implications of the use of such tools by describing the method, procedure, and results of a narrative-based study that utilizes wearable devices in the role of “sensing creatures” limited to a particular sense. In the study, participants were asked to explore a physical space while being the host of a sensing creature. It was hypothesized that the sensing creatures can act as perceptual filters, allowing us to focus on each of our senses individually in order to expand our understanding of space. It was demonstrated that the sensing creatures augmented participants’ sensory awareness of space by engaging them in a sensory exploration, which, while stemming from the specific sense under study extended to the rest of the senses. The study suggests a new direction towards a sensory pedagogy of space based on the perceptual and psychological impact of wearable computational tools when used in the exploration of physical spaces.

• Have a separate section for references at the bottom of your CV, or if you have no space mention them in your cover letter. • A reference letter increases your credibility as a suitable candidate as it is written by a (presumably) objective third party who has had direct experience of working with you and who can substantiate both your technical and soft skills. • Collect reference letters for every job or project that you work on. • Get permission from your referee to put their contact details on your CV. • Consider writing the letters yourself and then submit them to the referee for approval / modification. • The letter must be perfectly written both in terms of content, organization and English. • Typical structure: 1) heading 2) positive opening sentence 3) referee’s job 4) referee’s relation to you 5) details of your qualifications 6) description of your personality 7) positive conclusion. • The letter can include negative information about you, but the emphasis should always be on the positive. • Use a simple layout with everything aligned to the left. • Print on good quality paper.

This case describes a campaign run by the Rotary Club in Chandigarh, India, to introduce the habit of handwashing among poor children living in slum areas in a city in India. Several studies have pointed to the fact that inculcating the simple habit of handwashing among children can reduce disease and improve mortality rates. However, due to various constraints and beliefs, it is difficult to develop long-term habits. Through this project, an effective attempt was made to apply marketing principles to this social cause and to build excitement around the activity to affect long-term behavior change. The authors were part of this project. This case is the result of direct experience in the project together with a theoretical background.

Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of a highly uncreative individual consists of a collection of items accumulated through direct experience and enculturation, the mind of a creative individual is self-organizing and self-mending; thus, experiences and items of cultural knowledge are thought through from different perspectives such that they cohere together into a loosely integrated whole. The reweaving of items in memory is elicited by perturbations: experiences that increase psychological entropy because they are inconsistent with one's web of understandings. The process of responding to one perturbation often leads to other perturbations, i.e., other inconsistencies in one's web of understandings. Creative thinking often requires the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to the ever-changing demands of the creative task. Since uncreative individuals can reap the benefits of creativity by imitating creators, using their inventions, or purchasing their artworks, it is not necessary that everyone be creative. Agent based computer models of cultural evolution suggest that society functions best with a mixture of creative and uncreative individuals. The ideal ratio of creativity to imitation increases in times of change, such as we are experiencing now. Therefore it is important to educate the next generation in ways that foster creativity. The chapter concludes with suggestions for how educational systems can cultivate creativity., Comment: 18 pages

Science practices play a central role in meaningful learning. We transformed a college introductory biology course to more practice-based learning environment, in which students constructed knowledge about evolution through explanation and argumentation. These practices, also known as mechanistic reasoning, are a form of scientific inquiry characterized in part by a shift toward reasoning about causal mechanisms. We posit that engaging in these practices may promote a cognitive and social approach to evolution, thereby engaging affective and logic-driven pathways to students’ evolution acceptance. In the intervention, we integrated multiple activities and technological tools to foster students’ explanatory, mechanistic reasoning. This approach was inspired in part by Robbins and Roy’s (2007) inquiry-based teaching unit that yielded improvements in college students’ explanations and acceptance of evolution. In particular, our investigation promoted sense making, evaluating, argumentation, and consensus building while providing rich, meaningful learning about natural selection. This data-driven strategy engaged students in evolutionary phenomena directly, another avenue to promoting conceptual change. This chapter presents results across a spectrum of evolution literacy components, including (1) conceptual change around natural selection, (2) mechanistic reasoning related to natural selection, and (3) engagement in argumentation around data.

“I will pin your ears back, Johnny, unless you eat your soup”, the angry nanny kept saying. This humorous threat in the nursery might be the relic of some very unpleasant form of torture. A relic of barbarous ages our civilized world has no direct experience of—we hope. Because torturing meant the disfiguring of the body by disturbing its natural order, compelling it into some shape which was very different from the one it usually takes at rest or in unmolested motion. The aim, however, was neither killing nor maiming. The disfigured body was kept intact, and when torturing was over, it could regain its original shape, at least to a certain extent. Let the technical details be skipped now; the interested reader can find ample material together with the most modern achievements of the field.

Nishida Kitarō, an original philosopher in modern Japan, understood the direct experience that precedes the subject-object distinction as the foundation of all knowledge. Outgoing from this, Nishida worked to clarify the structure of our self-awareness as it functions within experience. While Nishida may have had some amount of sympathy for Husserl’s and Heidegger’s accounts of the structure of an ecstatic conception of the self, he was also critical of their work. Nishida criticized both of them because, for him, Husserl and Heidegger could not overcome conceptions of subjectivity as that which constitutes objects, nor could they avoid substantializing the self-relation. For Nishida, this meant that Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophies both stopped at a clarification of subjective-meaning and thus remained unable to ground objective-facts. In order to overcome the issue shared by the two phenomenologists, Nishida developed his “logic of place”. With this logic, Nishida aimed to critically elucidate the status of various knowledges based on “self-aware determinations of place”. Shortly thereafter, Nishida would move on to his position of “acting-intuition”, which took the self becoming nothing as the true form of self-awareness. He also attempted to find the genuine instantiations of knowledge needed to know a fact as a fact and critically see through mere semblances of knowledge within the self-awareness of the “noetic determinations of the acting-self”. Thus, while phenomenology was never a word that Nishida used to describe his own philosophy, when looking back on his work from a modern viewpoint, I believe we can see unique ideas that could point us toward a more profound phenomenological reduction. Hence, in this contribution, we will look at an important aspect of the middle-period of Nishida’s philosophy: the structure of negative determination in his concept of the “self-awareness of the acting-self”. Specifically, we will look at this theme from the perspective of his theory of time and, by doing so, show Nishida’s potential contribution to modern phenomenological investigations.

Linear perspective is regarded as the approximate mathematical-geometrical translation of human visual perception on a two-dimensional surface. However, blind people cannot take advantage of the sense of sight and they consequently have no direct experience of perspectival illusions typical of vision. Ever since the Renaissance, a significant proportion of Western painting has been characterized by the meticulous implementation of perspective but its two-dimensional nature makes it impossible for a blind person to truly and genuinely appreciate such an invaluable heritage. Is it possible to recognize the value of a painting by Paolo Uccello or Piero Della Francesca without acknowledging the role played by perspective in them? In a world that is becoming increasingly inclusive, it is unacceptable to deny an entire—though small—category of users the fruition of artworks in which the comprehension of how the rules of perspective define space and composition is inextricably bound to the understanding of their profound meaning, especially when we relate to a universal language like art. This paper tries to reflect on the possibility to fill—at least partly—the existing fruition gap between sighted and blind people that currently characterizes most part of communication strategies for pictorial artworks, especially in museums. The traditional techniques of Descriptive Geometry, like photogrammetry and geometric restitution of perspective applied to painted spaces, combined with the use of new technologies (ICT), like 3D printing, can be crucial in the scientific translation of painting’s two-dimensional spaces in three-dimensional models which can be experienced through touch and other senses. Moreover, the multisensory approach becomes an opportunity to enrich knowledge also for sighted users: such an alternative way of experiencing art is able to transmit new significances and allows forms identification by avoiding the extremely crowded sense of vision.

The features of the built environment that pose obstacles to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Asperger Syndrome have been evaluated in recent times to a certain degree, however, the awareness of these problems are still not common among architects. An effective way that could change the social awareness seems to be the dissemination of direct personal experience of contact with people that have a different perception and response to the built environment. Such contact can evoke the emotional reaction of sympathy and desire to understand their specific problems, which should entail a permanent change in the awareness of those involved. In view of the above a participatory action research experiment has been launched to enable students of architecture to investigate selected problems of the design of the environment with teenagers with ASD/AS, and, at the same time, assist them in their direct experience of space.

This chapter identifies political comedians as highly effective in forming coherent responses to political challenges. While this was arguably also true of Alternative Comedy in the 1970s and 1980s, there is now a younger generation of comedians who have no direct experience of those earlier political contexts. Continuity and change in left-leaning radical approaches to politics are explored through comedians’ responses to three key issues: Brexit, evolving debates around political correctness, and opposition to neoliberalism. It is argued that political comedians are particularly effective in imagining radical political alternatives.

Product (and service) designers have long been concerned with the user’s direct experience of their offerings, with ease-of-use often the primary design goal. However, we believe that the indirect experiences evoked by a product are at least as important to many users. For example, a comfortable bicycle seat is valued by most cyclists but the fun of speeding through the open country with good friends is more likely to motivate the purchase of a bicycle in the first place.

This chapter demonstrates that what was truly decisive for V. E. Meyerhold after having seen (instead of reading or imagining) a Kabuki performance had, after all, nothing to do with the authenticity of the “Kabuki” performance he saw, or with the veracity of his understanding of Kabuki theatre, but had everything to do with his perception of such a performance as a confirmation of the ideas that had been fermenting in his mind. Thus, the “new light” shed by his direct experience of the “Kabuki” theatre he witnessed was not predicated on the actual authenticity of the gazed, but rather, on the preconditioned desire of the gaze. Meyerhold’s perception of Kabuki theatre and Japanese theatre in general must be understood in the context of his theory and practice. His ahistorical and practical approach to theatrical traditions—“welding the unweldable”—necessitates the refraction, and thereby, the displacement and re-placement, of the essence of those traditions out of their historical-social contexts, as exemplified in his use of Japanese and Chinese theatre.

This chapter argues that while Francis maintains consistency with core Catholic social teachings, his principal ideas for Western Europe represent a change from previous popes. The words, actions, and priorities of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis reflect the Europe they find themselves in as well as their direct experiences with political oppression, economic exclusion, and the human consequences of sociopolitical economic ideologies. The Cold War is over, and the initial optimism from global economic and political integration has dissipated. Today we find a Europe struggling to cope with unprecedented migration flows and a populist far-right backlash. Pope Francis’s direct economic and political experiences of poverty under a liberal capitalist order in Argentina contrast against the Central and Eastern European experience of poverty in Marxist socialism—an ideological experiment witnessed firsthand by Karol Wojtyla (later known as Pope John Paul II). Pope Francis’s explicit emphasis on the poor, the excluded, and the marginalized indicates a change in tenor from past popes and results from both Europe’s current crises and Francis’s direct experience living and working with the poor and marginalized in Buenos Aires.

Prior to Jacob Schiff’s involvement in the Japanese loans, a syndicate of banks had coalesced in England with the as yet unfulfilled intent of financing Japan. Each of these banks had prior direct experience of working with the Japanese government. All were known to Schiff because he had worked with them before both directly and through personal contacts. Schiff knew them all to be highly reputable institutions within the London financial markets, and they all had extensive international banking experience. The importance of this network of relationships, how it worked, and its role in the financing of Japan, has previously either been understated or at least not very well explained.

This chapter discusses the origins and process of an ethnographic study in a single prison site. It reflects on the importance of dedicating time to the process, in part as a means of getting to know the prison as a human social system. It discusses the importance of granting participants moral complexity. Focussing on the matter of friendship, it outlines the way in which I developed my understanding of this aspect of prison life, both through the gradual accumulation of analytic insight and through direct experience. It comments on some of the customary anxieties expressed by prison ethnographers about the potentially exploitative nature of their relationships and concludes by highlighting the long-term benefits of ethnographic commitment.

Comments about Moore’s poetry have often equated it with, at best, a “dance of the intellect among words” (Pound), at worst, uneasy mental contortions. This essay aims at qualifying the critical emphasis on Moore’s “cerebral” poetry, through dancing. Although her fascination with animals’ physical features and her fetishist fragmentation of the human body have been recognized, more direct corporeal manifestations have received little attention. Yet dancing offered her writing a fertile challenge, as her later works particularly suggest. The performances she transcribed into text not only crystallize the subtle negotiations between tradition and modernity but also the poetic tensions between direct experience and mediated forms, the transient and the durable, the dynamic and the static, gesturing towards new manners of reading her verse.

This essay reassesses the role language plays in Zen-Buddhist teaching. I begin by exploring what has come to be a standard interpretation of language in Zen, in relation to the actual reality and direct experience of enlightenment. This reflects an ‘instrumental’ view of language, and I discuss the implications of this in Zen thought. It is then suggested that this interpretation is no longer credible given the insights provided by a more contemporary understanding of language. This different approach reflects a ‘constitutive’ view of language, which I explore largely through the ontological linguistics of Martin Heidegger. Finally, I examine how this view of language has in fact always been a significant element of Zen teaching in terms of attaining enlightenment.

Seemingly, everyone has something to say about bullying and most have had some direct experience with it. People tell stories of when they were bullied or their child was bullied. For many, it is an emotional topic because it is personally experienced, often in violent, cruel, and sustained ways. People have lost friends and family members because of suicide that is sometimes seen as the only escape from the torment. In the US, Donald Trump, widely described as a “bully” on a world scale because of his many misogynist and racist comments, was elected President of the United States in November 2016. The problem, or what has been largely depicted as the problem, is that bullying is largely viewed as a form of behaviour. As the author outlines in other works (Walton in Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics 3(2):1–17, 2015; Walton in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32(1):131–144, 2011), bullying is a social problem, not just bad behaviour enacted by individual young people, that is learned, validated, and replicated. Recognizing bullying as a social problem should leave little wonder why it seems to go on and on without any sign of abating. The reason for its tenacity is that it operates not only in society, but as society. This chapter highlights data from a 2012 study (Walton and Niblett in Journal of Youth Studies 16(5):646–662, 2012) with 37 children in which we employed photo elicitation strategies to acquire adolescent perspectives on bullying. In 2012, interviews were conducted in which photo elicitation strategies were employed to acquire children’s perspectives on bullying. The research was guided by Gauntlett and Awan’s (The handbook of visual culture. Berg, London, UK, pp. 589–606, 2012) claim that photo-elicitation is an avenue to “a different route into discussion of a topic” (p. 591). The specter of finding a different route provided insights on how to research an already over-researched topic and led the author to problematize the broad enterprise of research and assess his contributions to it.

As is often the case with ancient thinkers, we are not well informed on Plato’s thoughts about the direct experience of god, the gods, or of the divine in general. This is mainly due to the fact that ancient pagan religion did not focus too much on the interior experience of the divine, but placed an almost exclusive emphasis on the outer deeds of worship and cult. This does not amount to saying that there was no inner experience involved – as indeed there were personal contacts between humans and gods (through dreams, tokens, oracles etc.). Moreover, some cults, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, did require a certain spiritual engagement on the part of the religious person.

knowledge acquisition inevitably challenges contemporary embodiment theories of knowledge. Beneath this challenge subsists the bigger question of humanity’s place in a real natural world. This latter tension is the actual driver that defines and ignites all discussions throughout this book. In this chapter 1 introduce the notion of interactional expertise-like knowledge (linguistic knowledge that is not based on direct experiences) to accentuate the controversies every biologically inspired theory of linguistic knowledge is bound to stir up. If conceptual knowledge consists of perceptual and motor-sensory activities as suggested by contemporary neuroscience results, the idea that knowledge is graspable by language and may bypass direct experiences seems quite bold. In this chapter I focus on how and especially why we should reconcile the biological bottom-up activity with the social top-down activity. My approach is to unravel essential properties of language acquisition, the character of the knowledge involved, and especially the mechanisms that render interactional expertise-like knowledge possible. The challenge is to unfold how abstract knowledge is possible in the light of the natural origin of man.

Mindfulness is generally considered a characteristic or quality of individual persons. Its focus is primarily inward, directed toward one’s thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, as well as toward one’s immediate environment. Yet the accelerating pace of globalization compels us to consider mindfulness in a broader context. Using global health as an example, I explore the essential role of mindfulness in fostering ethical decision-making and in nurturing compassionate, effective action at the global level. I also explore how mindfulness and compassion might contribute to the emerging field of global health ethics. Global health is a rapidly growing field, dedicated to alleviating suffering, improving health, and achieving health equity. It is rooted in the value of compassion. It operates in ethically challenging environments characterized by extreme disparities in wealth and power, vast geographic distances, partisan hegemony, divided loyalties, and crushing poverty. Mindfulness can enhance ethical decision-making in global health through clarifying personal and collective values, enhancing empathy, regulating emotion, facilitating perception, fostering insight, and opening practitioners to a direct experience of interconnectedness and interdependence, which lie at the heart of global health’s universal values. In addition to mindfulness, a mature global health ethics must be rooted in compassion and draw on a variety of influences, such as bioethics, public health ethics, Ubuntu, and the ethics of care. Practitioners must be able to simultaneously perceive the “one and the many,” the global and local, populations and individuals, “numbers” and “faces.” In this respect and many others, mindfulness and compassion have much to offer the nascent field of global health ethics.

The contribution presents the author design methodology experience based on the process of handmade modeling. Starting from the definition of what a model is and which role it plays in human learning, the author explores the meaning it has for design thinking and development. Referring to the collaboration with Renato Rizzi, and according to his design approach, the model making is here conceived as a design process. In fact, transcending the pure architectural dimensions, the model demonstrates its essence of knowledge method by being the medium for molding the real environment. By means of the author’s professional and research experiences presented in the text, it is possible to figure out how the theoretical approach becomes professional practice, and then reality. The entire work is permeated by a process of direct experience and continuous dialog with models, that represent the territory and the architectural artifact; modeling becomes a process of learning and discovery that naturally lead to the final design solution.

According to Michel de Certeau, mystic experience is manifested in paradoxes. These paradoxes are connected either to the content or the form of experience. While mystic experience is always an extraordinary event that disrupts the framework of normality, the subject of the experience takes it to be a manifestation of the universal. The object of the experience is a mystic phenomenon that reveals itself but remains hidden at the same time. Descriptions of mystic experience use the rhetoric of the abnormal or the radically alien while they communicate a content which the reporter believes cannot be communicated (Certeau 1990). Whether or how Pascal’s texts belong to the tradition of mystic literature has long been debated in the reception of his writings. The discussion is based on the one-page text later named, in which he records his direct experience of God. This event, called a second conversion, took place on November 23, 1654 and brought about a turn in Pascal’s life. He interrupted his research in mathematics and physics for a while and joined the Jansenists. Some years later, he began to write the apology of Christianity today known as Pensees. It is undeniable that Pascal’s theological and religious writings reflect the experience recorded in Memorial, and in this sense Memorial is thought to be centrally important in the exegesis of his texts after 1654. However, it is perhaps worth asking whether Memorial can be considered a mystic text. Basically, this is a question of definition to which the answer depends on how the concept of the “mystic text” is defined. As we have seen, according to Certeau’s definition the experience of God is expressed in the form of paradoxes in mystic texts.

A few years back, I received my master’s degree in clinical psychology and decided somewhere along the way that my ultimate career goal was to become a professor and conduct my own research in the field. I thought the best way to build my resume for such a position would be to acquire direct experience and more formal education, but the formal education piece would have to wait until later. For now, I wanted to focus on understanding what it meant to actually be a professor. As such, I sought out an adjunct professor of psychology position at my university to increase my repertoire. I accepted the title gracefully after interviewing. Initially, I thought that holding this position would be quite easy. All I had to do was talk about topics I already understood, make activities, discuss current events, and grade papers, right? Soon after, I found this was not the case and teaching others held quite a responsibility.

Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce, online users are still cautious and skeptical about online shopping. The uncertainty inherent in online shopping impedes customers’ online transactions. Previous research emphasized the significance of customer experience management and its influence on e-tailers’ success, mainly focusing on customers’ direct experience with e-tailers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of customers’ indirect experience as well as direct experience on their perception of e-tailers’ trustworthiness and their behavioral outcomes drawing on the equity theory. Specifically, this study posits that customers’ direct experience (perceived quality of site design and flow) and indirect experience (reputation) with e-tailers contribute to their perception of e-tailers’ trustworthiness, which in turn influences their intention to repurchase from and spread positive word-of-mouth about the e-tailers. The results support the proposed relationships of customers’ direct and indirect experience, except for the relationship between flow and e-trust. Customers’ perceived quality of site design (direct experience) and e-tailers’ reputation (indirect experience) positively influence customers’ e-trust, whch in turn significantly contributes to their intention to repurchase and spread positive word of mouth. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.