Search Results (17)

This study analyses how early childhood teachers experience their local curricula-updating process provoked by the national policy changes. This is a relevant problem related to teachers’ agency, which is critical in supporting and developing curriculum policies or opposing them. The hermeneutic phenomenological approach (van Manen) was used to uncover the pre-reflective lived experiences of teachers through phenomenological interviews with 16 teachers. The lived experiences of local curriculum updates triggered by the national preschool curriculum guideline were a dualistic phenomenon manifesting as open and hidden voices of teachers. The open voices metaphor revealed the pre-reflective experiences increasing the openness of teachers to changes, while the hidden voices represented a pre-reflective experience of threat to established concepts and practices resulting in defensive reactions. These dualistic experiences appeared in five emergent categories: resonating body: vitality vs. freezing (Corporeality); teamwork during a critical moment: safe sustainability vs. uncertainty (Relationality); competing spatial perspectives: new possibilities vs. conflicting visions (Spatiality); altered perception of time: third wave vs. lost time (Temporality); and awakened existential questions: intentional self-reflection vs. conflict of roles (Existentiality). This paper highlights tensions between the national policies and the professional authenticity of teachers and the importance of teachers’ agency in the change context. Full article

Methods. Through the lens of childhood trauma theory, a qualitative phenomenological study was conducted using purposive and snowball sampling methods to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of former students with corporal punishment and how those experiences have shaped their academic and psychological outcomes. Interviews were conducted via Zoom with 19 men and women of different ages and races who attended schools in Mississippi. Results/Conclusions. The study revealed that parents and school personnel collaborated to punish the student corporally both on campus and at home. Related, beaten students did not share their punishment with their parents/caregivers, and if their families did find out, they received another beating at home. There was a general lack of consistency in how and who administered corporal punishment. In addition to the well-documented ways that corporal punishment is administered in school, we also found that students were made to hold painful positions or perform painful tasks. There were also peer effects of trauma, with students experiencing fear or anger following a friend or classmate being beaten in front of them. Race was an influence if the abused students felt that their punishment was racist, with Black American participants feeling there were racial undertones regardless of the perpetrator’s race. The study’s findings align with those of previously conducted research, but also extend them and can be used to create policy to allow schools to address trauma and create instructional practices that eliminate the fear and racial disparities that have been proven to exist in schools with corporal punishment. Full article

This case study aims to problematise concepts of equine and human co-relational agency in the context of ‘mis-re-presentations’ in the Australian media of harms experienced by the Anglo Arab stallion, Cambridge, following his development of laminitis and his consequent confinement at a leading national Equestrian centre. Autoethnographic narrative is used to retrospectively and selectively narrate the evolving relationship between Cambridge and his owners, farrier, and treating veterinarians within the dominant housing and veterinary practices and welfare paradigms in equestrian culture of 1990’s Australia. Structured author/owner autoethnographic vignettes are framed by newspaper and internet reportage to highlight a productive tension between the public mediation of the case, and what it means to be fully embodied in relationship with an equine companion agent within a particular, racialised, gendered, and biopoliticised location. Adopting a phenomenologically informed intersectional feminist ethics of care perspective, a counternarrative to the gendered, racialised and essentialising rights-based judgements about Cambridge’s illness and eventual death that dominated the popular media is provided. Crucially, the autoethnographic vignettes are chosen to capture the corporeal reciprocity and rapport of forces that produced a co-created agentivity that characterised the horse’s birth, training, and treatment. The embodied interspecies knowledge that informs the training and care of equines (and all animal species) is always historically situated within permeable, dynamic worlds of self and other that are fluid, contextual, and always in relation. It is suggested that the case of Cambridge illustrates how competing stakeholder investments in animal welfare can play out in the public mediation of particular cases in ways that exclude their historical and interspecies situatedness and serve to reinforce dominant ideologies governing human and animal relationships. Full article

Traditionally, metaphors have been used as a pedagogical tool to facilitate the processes of educational mediation. From a medial perspective, there are various ways to implement educational mediation, and currently, we are witnessing an increase in the use of videos. Given the historical pedagogical role of metaphor and the widespread use of videos, we expected to find a significant amount of the scientific literature exploring metaphors in educational videos. However, studies establishing a direct connection are rare. Motivated by this gap, we decided to present users with a metaphorical educational video, intending to observe and analyze, through a phenomenological approach, how the metaphor is perceived by users. To gather data on users’ experience, we applied the think-aloud protocol during video consumption and then we conducted semi-structured interviews. Subsequently, we analyzed the collected data using phenomenological procedures. Our results highlighted that the use of metaphor can stimulate engagement and facilitate the educational mediation, as long as the metaphor is shared and perceived as coherent by users. Finally, we have highlighted some distinctive aspects of using metaphor in educational videos, such as the ability to visually represent metaphors, create metaphorical contexts, and reinforce the processes of embodied simulation that occur during video viewing. Full article

This article presents a constructive dialogue between contemporary theological phenomenology and systematic theology. It considers the writings of the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Falque by offering a precis of his unique approach to “crossing” the boundaries of theology and philosophy. This methodological innovation serves as an intervention into contemporary theological phenomenology, which allows him to propose an overlooked dimension of human corporeality, what he calls the spread-body (corps épandu). Within the latter is embedded a conception of bodily existence that escapes ratiocination and is comprised of chaotic forces, drives, desires, and animality. The article challenges not so much this philosophical description but rather suggests that Falque’s theological resolution to this subterranean dimension of corporeal life consists in a deus ex machina that re-orders these corporeal forces without remainder through participation in the eucharist. It argues that Falque’s notion of the spread body can be supplemented theologically by an account of ‘affectivity’ that is distinguished from auto-affection, as in the case of Michel Henry, and which also gleans from the field of affect theory. This supplementation is derived from current research in systematic theology, which looks at the doctrines of pneumatology and sanctification to offer a more plausible account of corporeality in light of the Christian experience of the affective body. Full article

It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has become a certitude in Islamic studies at large. Yet, it is only a half-truth, for it overlooks the emphatic involvement, in the definition of this tradition of Islam, of the non-linguistic phenomenality of experience that implicates the pre-logical non-cognitive double agency of affect and sensation in the pursuit of divine knowledge. This article expounds this phenomenology of the Qur’an in using an innovative combination of philosophical and literary conceptualities, and in addressing some hermeneutical problems posed by the established Quranic studies. Full article

Liminality is a sufficiently comprehensive concept to allow the description and interpretation of how we experience change as existing in a “betwixt and between time”. A situation of liminality implies an intrusion, always difficult to manage, of chaos, of the erratic, into the harmony of everyday life. The activation of ecological sensitivities can lead to spontaneous liminal experiences, triggered by the awareness that the world around us is a changing environment. We intend to show that notions from phenomenology, such as home-world and alien-world, allow the interpretation of climate change as a situation of liminality that we experience due to the de-familiarization of the environment. The way we understand and interpret the world we live in is based on its normality, understood as constantly experienced in our daily bodily behavior. The notion of the home-world expresses the inter-subjective way in which we experience the natural world, as a world that is already given to us. Because its environmental meanings are actively imprinted in our lived corporeality, the home-world becomes a foundational standard against which changes in the natural environment are always cognitively compared within intuitive, already-constituted terms. The same world may appear alien to us when we become aware of sufficiently significant changes in the normality of our everyday experience, associated with discontinuities or disturbances. Because it places the familiar and known in tension with the unfamiliar and unknown, a liminal experience is always, at a subjective level, epistemologically transformative. To the extent that the surrounding natural world loses its already-given character, we will perceive it as an alien-world, more or less different from the one in which we lived our daily lives. Full article

This study approaches the question of the unity between the existence of God and the knowledge of God. Henry’s phenomenology of life, as a phenomenological ontology, offers a phenomenological way to rethink the existence of God and our cognition of God by seeking the essence in life’s self-donation. As a phenomenological heritage of Husserl’s intentional phenomenology, Henry’s phenomenology of self-affection (auto-affection) clarifies the essence of God in the dimension of subjective body or in the flesh. This truth, which presents our absolute immanence, is, in its depth, a divine revelation between God and human. When we experience our own existence in the tonality of corporal life, we receive the existence of God and the knowledge of God. Full article

I argue in this article, grounding on a phenomenological analysis of the experience of qi in Chinese martial arts, that the experience of qi in this framework can share the features of a secular spiritual experience, in other words of a spiritual experience that is not religious, at least not necessarily. I put in evidence five features that can characterize the experience of qi in Chinese martial arts and that arguably pertain to spirituality: (1) the importance of individual experience; (2) self-transcendence and the quest for authenticity; (3) the connection with a transcendent dimension; (4) the importance of corporeity and at the same time the apprehension of a dimension which cannot be reduced to corporeity; (5) the use of imagination in order to grasp a transcendent dimension that presupposes the use of metaphors. Consequently, the experience of qi in Chinese martial arts suggests the possibility of a form of spirituality that is not necessarily bound to religion and that at the same time is not a mere rejection of traditional religions. At the same time, I argue that the experience of qi in Chinese martial and energetic arts reveals radical possibilities of human experience at the core of which are fundamental transcendental structures of human experience, i.e., the experience of our body and the experience of the world through our body. This suggests the idea that phenomenology has an important potential for the investigation of spirituality and opens towards a research field that can be deeper explored. Full article

Background: Climate change influences patterns of human mobility and health outcomes. While much of the climate change and migration discourse is invested in quantitative predictions and debates about whether migration is adaptive or maladaptive, less attention has been paid to the voices of the people moving in the context of climate change with a focus on their health and wellbeing. This qualitative research aims to amplify the voices of migrants themselves to add nuance to dominant migration narratives and to shed light on the real-life challenges migrants face in meeting their health needs in the context of climate change. Methods: We conducted 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrants purposefully selected for having moved from rural Bhola, southern Bangladesh to an urban slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis under the philosophical underpinnings of phenomenology. Coding was conducted using NVivo Pro 12. Findings: We identified two overarching themes in the thematic analysis: Firstly, we identified the theme “A risk exchange: Exchanging climate change and health risks at origin and destination”. Rather than describing a “net positive” or “net negative” outcome in terms of migration in the context of climate change, migrants described an exchange of hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities at origin with those at destination, which challenged their capacity to adapt. This theme included several sub-themes—income and employment factors, changing food environment, shelter and water sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) conditions, and social capital. The second overarching theme was “A changing health and healthcare environment”. This theme also included several sub-themes—changing physical and mental health status and a changing healthcare environment encompassing quality of care and barriers to accessing healthcare. Migrants described physical and mental health concerns and connected these experiences with their new environment. These two overarching themes were prevalent across the dataset, although each participant experienced and expressed them uniquely. Conclusion: Migrants who move in the context of climate change face a range of diverse health risks at the origin, en route, and at the destination. Migrating individuals, households, and communities undertake a risk exchange when they decide to move, which has diverse positive and negative consequences for their health and wellbeing. Along with changing health determinants is a changing healthcare environment where migrants face different choices, barriers, and quality of care. A more migrant-centric perspective as described in this paper could strengthen migration, climate, and health governance. Policymakers, urban planners, city corporations, and health practitioners should integrate the risk exchange into practice and policies. Full article

The aim of this article is to analyze how dignity and vulnerability, as declared principles of bioethics, both can be seen in a new light when they are thought of together, in their intertwining, in order to outline a proposal for an analytical framework for end-of-life care. It is thus shown, on the one hand, that the demand for respect for the equal dignity of every person, linked by the different anthropological and ethical theories to their autonomy as a rational agent, also refers to their fragile, vulnerable, and interdependent character, as an embodied subjectivity, sustained by a complex web of care. On the other hand, the vulnerability of these selves as others, constituted by the radical appeal of everything that affects them socially, emotionally, sensitively, and by their need for recognition and attention, would be pathological if it did not include the impulse towards autonomy, which, although precarious and connotative, requires dignified and equitable treatment. This intertwining of both principles points to a phenomenological conception of the person as a corporeal social existence, from which a number of studies on the attention to dignity and vulnerability at the end of life are analyzed. Full article

Age hardening aluminium alloys obtain their strength by forming precipitates. This precipitation-hardened state is often the initial condition for short-term heat treatments, like welding processes or local laser heat treatment to produce tailored heat-treated profiles (THTP). During these heat treatments, the strength-increasing precipitates are dissolved depending on the maximum temperature and the material is softened in these areas. Depending on the temperature path, the mechanical properties differ between heating and cooling at the same temperature. To model this behavior, a phenomenological material model was developed based on the dissolution characteristics and experimental flow curves were developed depending on the current temperature and the maximum temperature. The dissolution characteristics were analyzed by calorimetry. The mechanical properties at different temperatures and peak temperatures were recorded by thermomechanical analysis. The usual phase transformation equations in the Finite Element Method (FEM) code, which were developed for phase transformation in steels, were used to develop a phenomenological model for the mechanical properties as a function of the relevant heat treatment parameters. This material model was implemented for aluminium alloy 6060 T4 in the finite element software LS-DYNA (Livermore Software Technology Corporation). Full article

Within this paper, I explore the look and feel of the subjective point-of-view (POV) shot in narrative cinema and how it presents an awkward and uncomfortable space for the viewer to inhabit. It considers what David Bordwell has called the surrogate body: the concept in which viewers step into the role of an offscreen protagonist. In numerous films, this style invites the spectator to see and feel through the eyes and movement of a particular type of surrogate character, which as I argue, predominantly consists of killers, victims or socially inept characters. The term I give for this particular trait in cinema is hap-tech narration, which is inspired by Laura Marks’ concept of haptic cinema. Unlike Marks’ understanding of haptic which focuses upon sensual beauty, hap-tech narration considers phenomenological uncomfortableness which is considered through Don Ihde’s philosophy of technology. This paper incorporates Ihde’s framework of postphenomenology, which considers how experientiality is changed and filtered through technological devices (which in this analysis will be the technology of the camera and the frame of the screen). Using Ihde’s postphenomenological understanding of human–technology relationships (which this work explores in detail), I consider a range of narrative films that utilise POV camerawork, including: Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage (1947), Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Julian Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and Butterfly, 2007). Each of these titles present events through the subjective gaze of a killer, victim or socially damaged character. This paper offers a rationale as to why this is the case by addressing POV through the philosophy of Ihde, enabling an understanding of hap-tech narration to be unpacked, in which viewers are placed into corrupted and damaged corporeality through the technological power of the camera. Full article

This article explores three contemporary phenomenological analyses of the Eucharist by the French phenomenologists Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Emmanuel Falque, arguing that their descriptions are too excessive and individual, failing to take into account the broader liturgical context for eucharistic experience. The second part of the discussion seeks to develop an alternate phenomenological account of eucharistic experience that takes Eucharist seriously as a corporeal and communal phenomenon that is encountered within a liturgical horizon and which requires a liturgical intentionality to be prepared for and directed toward it. Full article

This article argues that Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy and the impartial spectator in his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759] connects the individual to society. In this work, Smith’s economics are far more complex than mere self-interest as a driver of commerce. Self-interest functions within a socio-ethical framework that limits excess and narcissism. However, morality was not based on normative assumptions for Smith and Hume. Morality was directly linked to social and cognitive processes in which the approbation of others was important. In other words, behaviour was based on the perceptions of others; therefore, action was to be adjusted to obtain sympathy. The impartial spectator refers to the cognitive process in which moral assessments are made. Therefore, the empiricism of Smith differs from determinism as related to physical causation because it operates through habituation and/or socialisation that can accommodate change and variation. Clearly, the socio-cultural presupposition of society directly influences the moral judgment of the individual. However, this deterministic tendency may result in an uncritical assessment of moral behaviour. To address this potential limitation of determinism, the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is explored as an alternative theory which attempts to move beyond a dualism rooted in materialism/idealism. This perspective may expand on Smith’s economics by adding a more inclusive assessment of behaviour. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeality provides a theory of behaviour that goes beyond a particular society’s perceptions of acceptable behaviour. This framework may provide the impartial spectator with a more encompassing perspective on moral assessment that may also be beneficial for sustainable commerce. It will be proposed that Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology and the hyper-dialectic of the flesh highlights the role of accountability and dialogue in moral assessment that may contribute to responsible economics in the South African context. Full article