Search Results (64)

This paper explores the implicit thought of the “body-network” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, drawing from both his earlier and later works. It demonstrates that, for Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenal body is inherently interconnected with the world through motor intentionality. Meanwhile, in his later concept of “flesh,” this interconnectedness deepens into a relationship of mutual reflection and chiasmic intertwining, where bodies and the world continuously mirror and permeate each other. The paper then introduces the Huayan Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net, along with Fazang’s interpretation of it. A detailed comparative analysis is conducted between Merleau-Pontian body-network and Fazang’s understanding of Indra’s Net. The paper argues for a profound resonance between the primordial characteristics of the Merleau-Pontian body-network—namely, relationality and reflectivity—and Fazang’s key concepts, such as “mutual identity” (相即), “mutual inclusion” (相入), and the contemplative idea that “the images of many bodies are reflected in one mirror” (多身入一鏡像觀). Despite their distinct cultural and philosophical vocabularies, both thinkers construct a relational ontology aimed at deconstructing entrenched dualisms. Through this in-depth comparative study using the Internet of Bodies (IoB) as a case study, this paper demonstrates that the IoB technology exhibits only superficial resemblances to the Merleau-Pontian body-network and Fazang’s interpretation of Indra’s Net. To address the ethical challenges posed by the IoB, it is imperative to integrate the shared philosophical insights of Merleau-Ponty and Fazang in constructing a critical techno-ethics capable of interrogating the ontological reduction and power asymmetries inherent in contemporary technological networks. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of reversible flesh inspires an ethics of contextual sensitivity and user agency, resisting the reduction of lived experience to data points. Meanwhile, Fazang’s Huayan Buddhism, with its principles of mutual identity and mutual inclusion, reveals the relational nature of data, challenging its treatment as neutral or absolute. Together, these philosophies advocate for a decentralized, reciprocal techno-ethics that prioritizes embodied meaning over surveillance and control. Full article

The literary career of Lettice Galbraith (1859–1932) coincided with a transformative period in British intellectual history, when the boundaries between scientific rationalism and occult epistemologies were being vigorously contested. This paper argues that Galbraith’s supernatural fiction represents a sharp challenge to Victorian medical science, using Gothic tropes to expose its deeply gendered structures of power. Situating her work within what Alex Owen has termed “modern enchantment”, it contends that Galbraith does not merely use the supernatural as a metaphor for social critique, but treats spiritualist practice as a legitimate methodology, a way of knowing that privileges embodied experience, and the testifying power of the material world over the cold, isolating rationality of institutional orthodoxy. Through a close reading of “In the Séance Room” and “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”, and by employing a theoretical framework that combines feminist theory with new materialist perspectives, this analysis demonstrates how Galbraith’s stories reconfigure the séance as a ‘feminist counter-laboratory’. In this space, women—both as mediums and as spectral presences—reclaim agency from male dominated medicine and psychiatry. Matter itself becomes an agential force: objects, sounds, and even atmospheres intra-act with human participants to produce truths that medical authority cannot access or suppress. Ultimately, Galbraith’s stories deliver a powerful and enduring claim, that systems of power designed to silence and erase will be undone by the vibrant presence of the material world itself. Full article

The ecological self is a core competence in social work education. This study aims to deepen the understanding of sustainability for social work students through rural fieldwork in China. Based on home visits with grassland families in Inner Mongolia, the research employed immersive engagement with nature and communities to foster ecological humility and responsibility among social work students. Findings show that students developed a multidimensional view of sustainability, integrating health practices shaped by the environment, women’s roles in maintaining family’ ecological resilience, and kinship metaphors derived from human–animal relations. The study concludes that the ecological self enables a deeper, relational interpretation of sustainability, moving beyond technocratic approaches toward embodied, context-sensitive, and intergenerationally conscious practice. It underscores the need to embed ecological consciousness in social work fieldwork training to strengthen both professional identity and transformative engagement with sustainable development. Full article

This article explores the voices of sailors across time, focusing on how song and prayer animate the nautical cult of St. Nicholas of Myra from the Middle Ages to the present. Drawing on hagiography, poetry, and music, it examines how medieval sources portray sailors’ cries to St. Nicholas during storms at sea, often depicting univocal, affective pleas that provoke divine response. These representations—especially in Latin sequences such as Congaudentes exultemus—highlight the cultural weight of the literal and metaphorical voice within miracle narratives. The article then bridges medieval and modern devotional soundscapes through nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic collections from Apulia, Italy, particularly through the work of folklorists Saverio La Sorsa and Alfredo Giovine. Their records of Barese sailors’ songs and prayers to St. Nicholas—still sung today—provide embodied counterpoints to the mediated voices of medieval texts. Through this transhistorical lens, I argue that voice operates as connective tissue in the devotional lives of seafarers: an expression of fear, faith, and communal identity. By amplifying sailors’ voices in text, song, and performance, both medieval and modern traditions construct a vivid aural archive that affirms the enduring relationship between St. Nicholas and those who navigate the dangers of the sea. Full article

The increasing intersection of psychotherapy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and systems engineering beckons us to rethink what it means to talk the language of the human mind in the clinical setting. This position paper proposes the idea of entangled autopoiesis, a metatheoretical paradigm that addresses the mind and therapy not as linear processes but as self-organizing, adaptive processes enfolded across neural, cognitive, relational, and cultural domains. Psychotherapy, from this viewpoint, is less a corrective technique and more a zone of systemic integration, wherein resilience and meaning are co-created in the interaction of embodied brains, lived stories, and relational fields. Neuroscience informs us about plasticity and regulation; cognitive science emphasizes the embodied and extended nature of cognition; and systems engineering sheds light on feedback, emergence, and adaptive dynamics. Artificial intelligence appears as a double presence: as a metaphor for complexity and as a practical tool able to chart patterns below human sensibility. By adopting a complexity-aware epistemology, we advocate a relocation in clinical thinking—one recognizing the psyche as an autopoietic network, entangled with culture and technology and able to renew itself in therapeutic encounters. The implications for clinical methodology, therapist training, and future interdisciplinary research are discussed. Full article

This study examines al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt anthology as a foundational corpus wherein pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabic poetry emerged not only as a cultural artifact but as a generative locus for theological reflection. Through a close reading of selected poems and nuanced engagement with the figurative language specifically metaphor, personification, and symbolic narrative, the research situates poetry as a mode of epistemic inquiry that articulates religious meaning alongside Qurʾānic revelation. Drawing on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s theory of semantic structure and metaphor, in dialogue with Paul Ricoeur’s conception of metaphor as imaginative cognition, the study proposes that poetic discourse operates as a site of “imaginative theology”, i.e., a space wherein the abstract is rendered sensorially legible and metaphysical concepts are dramatized in affective and embodied terms. The analysis reveals how key Qurʾānic themes including divine will, mortality, ethical restraint are anticipated, echoed, and reconfigured through poetic imagery. Thus, al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt is not merely a literary corpus vis-à-vis Islamic scripture but also functions as an active interlocutor in the formation of early Islamic moral and theological imagination. This interdisciplinary inquiry contributes to broader discussions on the interpenetration of poetics and theology as well as on the cognitive capacities of literature to shape religious consciousness. Full article

Desktop Virtual Worlds (DVWs) offer unique spatial affordances for education, yet understanding of how these environments support meaningful learning experiences remains limited. This study introduces the Socio-Spatial Embodiment Model, a novel framework conceptualizing learning in DVWs as shaped by the interconnection of embodied presence, place-making, and community formation. Through semi-structured interviews conducted with 14 experienced educators from the Virtual Worlds Education Consortium, we investigated how these dimensions intersect and what design strategies facilitate this integration. Thematic analysis revealed that strategic design employs cognitive offloading techniques and biophilic metaphors to enhance embodied presence, balance familiar elements with spatial innovations to create meaningful places, and leverage synchronous engagement with institutional identity markers to facilitate learning communities. Our findings identified design strategies that facilitate stronger perceived student connections to the learning environment and community, when DVW designs address spatial, emotional, social, and cultural factors while reinforcing both cognitive and perceptual processes. This research advances understanding of embodied learning in virtual environments by identifying the dynamic interdependence among presence, place, and community, providing practical strategies for educators in creating more meaningful virtual learning experiences. Full article

In the recent K-12 educational literature, arts-based data visualization has been positioned as a compelling means of rendering data science and statistical learning accessible, motivating, and empowering for youth, as data users and producers. However, the only research to attend carefully to youth’s data-based, artistic storytelling practices has been limited in scope to specific storytelling mechanisms, like youth’s metaphor usage. Engaging in design-based research, we sought to understand the art and design decisions that youth make and the data-based arguments and stories that youth tell through their arts-based data visualizations. We drew upon embodied theory to acknowledge the holistic, synergistic, and situated nature of student learning and making. Corresponding with emerging accounts of youth arts-based data visualization practices, we saw regular evidence of art, storytelling, and personal subjectivities intertwining. Contributing to this literature, we found that these intersections surfaced in a number of domains, including youth’s pictorial symbolism, visual encoding strategies, and data decisions like manifold pictorial symbols arranged to support complex, multilayered, ambiguous narratives; qualitative data melding community and personal lived experience; and singular statements making persuasive appeals. This integration of art, story, agency, and embodiment often manifested in ways that seemed to jostle against traditional notions of and norms surrounding data science. Full article

This quasi-experimental study investigates the impact of an embodied intervention on the semantics of transitive verbs in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), grounded in the “TIME IS SPACE” conceptual metaphor—where the future is mapped as forward and the past as backward. The intervention involved a pretest and a posttest design, using the induced plasticity technique to saturate motor areas through repetitive arm movements (either forward or backward). Then, we determined the influence of this saturation on the auditory comprehension of past- and future-tense sentences. Fifty-seven children (ages 5 years and 6 months to 6 years and 9 months) participated in the experiment. Participants were divided into four groups: two groups of children with DLD—14 Chilean students from speech therapy institutions who received the intervention and 15 who did not—and two groups of chronologically matched typically developing (TD) peers, with 14 children in each intervention condition. The hypothesis proposed that a psychoeducational intervention would enhance the comprehension of time–space conceptual metaphors in children with DLD, reflected by greater interference effects (higher RTs and lower ARs in matching vs. mismatching conditions). A 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 mixed ANOVA was used to identify significant differences in reaction times and accuracy rates. Results showed significant differences in the posttest for the DLD group with intervention versus the same group without intervention, particularly in the semantics of future tense with forward motion. Furthermore, the study found that the impact of the intervention depended on the level of narrative discourse comprehension. These findings suggest that embodied interventions leveraging metaphorical mappings of time and space can enhance verb tense comprehension, particularly in preschoolers with narrative comprehension challenges. Full article

Over the last few decades, digital technology has played an important role in innovating the pipeline, techniques, and approaches for creating animation. Sensors for motion capture not only enabled the incorporation of physical human movement in all its precision and expressivity but also created a field of collaboration between the digital and performing arts. Moreover, it has challenged the boundaries of cinematography, animation, and live action. In addition, wearable technology can capture biosignals such as heart rate and galvanic skin response that act as indicators of the emotional state of the performer. Such metrics can be used as metaphors to visualise (or sonify) the internal reactions and bodily sensations of the designed animated character. In this work, we propose a framework for incorporating the role of the performer in digital character animation as a real-time designer of the character’s affect, expression, and personality. Within this embodied perspective, sensors that capture the performer’s movement and biosignals are viewed as the means to build the nonverbal personality traits, cues, and signals of the animated character and their narrative. To do so, following a review of the state of the art and relevant literature, we provide a detailed description of what constitute nonverbal personality traits and expression in animation, social psychology, and the performing arts, and we propose a workflow of methodological and technological toolstowardsan embodied perspective for digital animation. Full article

Emerging from the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in the riverine environments of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, the Miya Poetry movement is a unique environmentalism of the marginalized in contemporary Assam, India. Writing as a native scholar of Assam, I look at how the poetry movement displays the ethos of an ecopolitical spirituality that embodies the riverine ecology, environmental politics, and sacrality and how it challenges the majoritarian state’s narrative of the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers being denigrated as the “environmental waste producers”. My concept of “ecopolitical spirituality” is in tandem with Carol White’s ‘African American religious naturalism’, which elucidates the remembrance and evocation of traditional environmental relationships of and by the marginalized communities with the purpose of healing and rehumanizing themselves. I begin with a short history of the Miya Poetry movement among the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in Assam. It narrates how the leading Miya poets adopt the local “Miya” dialect to express the traditional and continued relationships of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers who find themselves entangled with and nurtured by the land, rivers, plants, and animals. I then examine how Bengali Muslims have been framed by the majoritarian state and Assamese society as “environmental waste producers”. With climate change-induced destructive floods, along with post-colonial state’s rampant building of embankments leading to violent floods and erosion, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are forced to migrate to nearby government grazing reserves or national parks. There, the majoritarian state projects them to be damaging the environment and issues violent evictions. In state reports too, the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers have been equated with “rats”, “crows”, and “vultures”. I use the concept of “environmental racism” to show how this state-led denigration justifies the allegation of the Muslim char-dwellers as “environmental waste producers” and how the Miya Poetry movement counters the racist allegation with new metaphors by highlighting the traditional relationships of the marginalized community with the riverine environment. In the final section, I look in detail at the characteristics and reasons that make the poetry movement ecopolitically spiritual in nature. I thus lay out an argument that the ecopolitical spirituality of the Miya Poetry movement resists the statist dehumanization and devaluation of Miya Muslims by not mocking, violating, or degrading the majoritarian Assamese but by rehumanizing themselves and their relationship with the environment. Full article

Self-awareness and the ability to translate body sensing into knowledge are vital skills for social workers. This study examined the impact of a course module for master’s students in social work in Israel, incorporating Thinking at the Edge (TAE), a method for fostering self-awareness and reflection. The goal was to explore how students applied TAE to their personal development and professional practice. Twenty students participated in a modified TAE module, engaging in exercises focused on body sensing and reflection. They documented their experiences in reflection diaries, which were thematically analyzed to identify key insights about their learning process and its professional relevance. Analysis revealed the following three categories: (1) clearing the space, where students recognized and processed both negative and positive body sensations; (2) forming metaphors and patterns from the felt sense, enabling an awareness of self-patterns and behaviors; and (3) applying TAE in social work practice. Students reported increased self-awareness and acknowledged TAE’s utility in engaging with clients. The findings underscore the potential of TAE to enhance self-awareness and professional skills in social work students, offering a practical framework for integrating reflective practices into personal and client-based contexts. Full article

Background: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a complex eating disorder that often requires inpatient care, where treatment experiences are influenced by both the illness and the surrounding environment. Sensory issues in AN are increasingly acknowledged for their impact on treatment engagement and outcomes. Despite this, the ways in which the sensory landscape of inpatient settings shapes patients’ lived experiences and meaning-making processes remain underexplored. Methods: This study employed collaborative sensory ethnography to explore how the sensory environment of an inpatient eating disorder ward shapes patients’ lived experiences. Drawing on multimodal and embodied approaches, a novel proof-of-concept method was developed, combining sensory-attuned guided reflection with AI-assisted visualization. This framework supported patients in exploring and articulating their embodied sensory experiences, linking their emotional and physical states to the ward’s sensory environment through metaphorical reasoning. Results: The findings reveal two central themes: a sense of entrapment within the illness and its treatment, and ambivalence toward both. The study highlights how the sensory environment and spatial layout of the ward amplify these experiences, demonstrating the tension between strict safety protocols and patients’ needs for agency and autonomy. Conclusions: This study illustrates the role of the sensory landscape in shaping treatment experiences and contributing to the broader lived experiences of individuals with AN. The experience of sensory cues in inpatient settings is closely intertwined with contextual and embodied meanings, often evoking complex feelings of entrapment and ambivalence toward both the illness and its treatment. These findings highlight the potential for holistic sensory and spatial adaptations in therapeutic interventions to alleviate such feelings and, consequently, improve patient engagement and well-being. Full article

This paper is a theoretical exploration that works through a global Indigenous consciousness. As a critically reflexive story work and auto-ethnographic contemplation it begins by confronting a presumed genealogy in a post-apocalyptic world of coloniality through a global Indigenous lens. Extending beyond racially legalised genealogical ancestry, the metaphysics of indigeneity in the context of Western modernity can be re-positioned as a metaphor of past future human-being-ness or person/people-hood. Global Indigeneity and Indigenous metaphysics are framed as a portal and entry beyond coloniality through fugitive sociality and subversive relationality. Confronting the tensions of colonially purist and racially essentialist categories of indigenous identity, lineages of the post-post-apocalyptic world are forming in the enduring social connections embodied in an Indigenous genealogical consciousness of the present. Full article

Spontaneous, unwilled subjective imagery and symbols (including dreams) often emerge in psychotherapy that can appear baffling and confound interpretation. Early psychoanalytic theories seemed to diverge as often as they agreed on the meaning of such content. Nevertheless, after reviewing key findings in the empirical science of spontaneous thought as well as insights gleaned from neuroscience and especially embodied cognition, it is now possible to construct a more coherent theory of interpretation that is clinically useful. Given that thought is so thoroughly embodied, it is possible to demonstrate that universalities in human physiology yield universalities in thought. Such universalities can then be demonstrated to form a kind of biologically directed universal “code” for understanding spontaneous symbolic expressions that emerge in psychotherapy. An example is given that illustrates how this can be applied to clinical encounters. Full article