Young people form the primary target demographic of new 'buy now pay later' (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to ...unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to wellbeing through a qualitative study using interviews alongside arts-based participatory methods of bodymapping and sandboxing with 24 young people in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These methods enabled particular attention to the embodied and affective elements related to the experience of indebtedness to understand debt's significance for wellbeing for young people. The embodied and affective registers of indebtedness are integral for understanding the conditions informing how wellbeing is negotiated and felt in this context. This study considers the role of BNPL services in young people's economic lives as part of broader processes of financialisation, and the significance of extended and ubiquitous forms of credit for young people's wellbeing.
Semiotic timescapes Lazar, Michelle M.
Language in society,
11/2022, Volume:
51, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
In linguistic/semiotic landscape (LSL) studies, overall, time and temporalities have occupied a curious space between visibility and invisibility, resulting in time and temporalities being ...treated as an optional, additive, subordinate, or separate dimension in the linguistic and semiotic study of place-making. The term semiotic timescape serves as a heuristic concept which endeavours to centre time and its imbrication with space/place, with an explicit focus on the semiosis of ‘temporalized place-making’. The five articles in this special issue highlight the ‘complex and multiplex’ dimensions of time (Adam 2008) interconnected with spaces/places, as important aspects in understanding social realities and practices, via entanglements with multimodal meaning-making, materialities, embodiment, and politics of social actors and communities. (Semiotic timescapes, interconnectedness of time and space, complexities and multiplexities, multimodality, materialities)*
This article explores how abortion laws and regulations are experienced by women and others who may become pregnant at the level of the affected body. It theorises that laws, policies, and ...regulations which criminalise or obstruct access to abortion shape the embodied subjectivities of gestating individuals in contextually specific ways. This research analyses the experiences of abortion activists in Ireland living under the 8th amendment – the constitutional abortion ban (1983–2018). It proposes the concept of ‘abortion work’ to exemplify the additional forms of reproductive labour imposed on women and people who have historically been forced to anticipate, plan for, and access clandestine abortions inside and outside of Irish borders. It explores how the experience of doing ‘abortion work’ changes the relationship of these individuals to their bodies, which they come to experience ‘out of space-and-time’ and as sites of both intense vulnerability and insurgent agency at the same time.
As social robots are increasingly introduced into health interventions, one potential area where they might prove valuable is in supporting people’s psychological health through conversation. Given ...the importance of self-disclosure for psychological health, this study assessed the viability of using social robots for eliciting rich disclosures that identify needs and emotional states in human interaction partners. Three within-subject experiments were conducted with participants interacting with another person, a humanoid social robot, and a disembodied conversational agent (voice assistant). We performed a number of objective evaluations of disclosures to these three agents via speech content and voice analyses and also probed participants’ subjective evaluations of their disclosures to three agents. Our findings suggest that participants overall disclose more to humans than artificial agents, that agents’ embodiment influences disclosure quantity and quality, and that people are generally aware of differences in their personal disclosures to three agents studied here. Together, the findings set the stage for further investigation into the psychological underpinnings of self-disclosures to artificial agents and their potential role in eliciting disclosures as part of mental and physical health interventions.
A large literature debates whether emotions are universal and innate. Here, we ask whether reasoning about such matters is shaped by intuitive Essentialist biases that link innateness to the material ...body. To gauge the perception of innateness, we asked laypeople to evaluate whether emotion categories will be recognized spontaneously by hunter-gatherers who have had no contact with Westerners. Experiment 1 shows that participants believe that emotions are innate and embodied (facially and internally) and these two properties correlate reliably. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the link is causal. When told that emotions are localized in specific brain areas (i.e., embodied), participants concluded that emotions are innate. Experiment 3 shows that this naïve view persists even when participants are explicitly informed that these emotions are acquired. Our results are the first to suggest that laypeople incorrectly believe that, if emotions are embodied, then they must be innate. We suggest that people's failure to grasp the workings of their psyche arises from the human psyche itself.
Jean Spencer (1942-1998) was an artist working in the late constructivist period in the UK, making painting and relief works characterised by geometric precision, sequential change, and, later, ...detailed colour theory. She was also my great aunt: her death when I was five years old meant that I grew up surrounded by her artwork, by snatches of memory, but without Jean herself. This article maps the methodology of 'anarchiving' used in my practice research to encounter Jean and her archives, to uncover her artistic practice and feminist politics, and transmit these archival insights forward through performance. Underpinned by feminist new materialist notions of assemblage, temporality, and agential realism, I propose that engaging with archives through movement and speculation allows a multiplicity of locally enacted meanings to emerge, and for individual truths to be found through embodied engagement with archival materials. An anarchiving methodology, then, allows for the construction of new narratives from archival material, for accessing women's histories in new ways, and for uncovering lost legacies of creative practice. In this sense, performance can be a means to feminist solidarity, where archival insights are fed forward, familiar temporalities are disrupted, and a multiplicity of meanings emerge from its traces.
Since the publication of Meltzoff and Moore’s seminal paper, neonatal imitation has been discussed, debated, and scrutinised at considerable length. Despite this, the temporal structure within which ...the interaction sits, has received limited attention. We hypothesise that underlying successful examples of neonatal imitation exists a narrative temporal structure, expressed and perceived not only through vocalisations but also (if not primarily) through movement. We contextualise neonatal imitation through a communicative lens, viewing the phenomenon as an early dialogue between adult and infant, underpinned by the same narrative structure as other “proto-conversations” in infancy. From this perspective, several of the leading and traditional theories that have been proposed to explain neonatal imitation are considered. Ultimately, we argue neonatal imitation is an innately dialogical phenomenon that forms one of the first examples of primary intersubjectivity, exemplifying the importance of the neonatal period in human psychological and social development. On this basis we propose further study is required into the temporal structure underlying neonatal imitation.
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