Our research proves that virtual reality (VR) technology can be used to encourage users to adopt an alternative point of view through a virtual embodiment. Our results extend previous studies showing ...that emotional responses are evoked in virtual environments (Meuleman and Rudrauf, 2018) and arouse the sense of empathy (Ventura et al., 2020).
To this end, we built a virtual museum, where different avatars can interact with experimental subjects to discuss emotional and value-driven interpretations related to artworks, aiming at bootstrapping user's interpretation-reflection loops (IRL) (Daga et al., 2022). IRL consists in encouraging the user to (a) provide a point of view, (b) to know about another point of view, and (c) to possibly take a different perspective.
In line with recent literature, our results are based on the analysis of dialogue, and on the psychophysiological response of the users, showing that a VR-driven methodology can both develop a sense of embodiment, and maximize the human capacity to take another's point of view. Results also confirm that the use of immersive VR can be a valid tool to promote empathy through an embodied experience.
•VR methodology can promote the social cohesion through virtual embodiment.•Empaths experience greater emotional involvement during the perspective taking.•Language inference systems accurately detect emotions and moral values in speech.
This work shows the preliminary results of a pioneering project aimed at comparing the aesthetic experience of a musical concert experienced in different contexts for which the audience's perceived ...presence is modulated in a continuum ranging from a live concert to a music video, passing through immersive artificial environments.
In contrast to previous qualitative investigations of various immersive contexts, our study is unique in both the use of validated scales and the structured comparison of four experimental conditions: 1.live concert (LC), 2.the same concert through a traditional non-immersive music video (MV, analogous to fruition on YouTube), and finally in a virtual reality environment (VR), provided by two different devices, 3. a google cardboard (CVR) and 4. an HTC vive (HVR), allowing respectively for a basic and easily accessible experience, or for a less affordable but more immersive one.
Through these manipulations we presumably affected not just the subjective aesthetic experience, but also the perceived presence of the Other/s. Consistently we measured both through the administration of the Aesthetic Emotions Scale (Aesthemos) and the Networked Minds Measure of Social Presence (NMMSP).
The NMMSP showed no notable differences between conditions, which instead emerged from the analyses on the Aesthemos. The most liked experience was the Live one. Results also showed that LC experience had a stronger emotional impact only when compared to MV and CVR, but not to HTC since this last manipulation was the one eliciting the greatest interest.
Theoretical implications are critically discussed, suggesting novel applications of the proposed approach.
•Novelty of the interdisciplinary approach integrating psychological, philosophical, and digital skills.•Collaborative efforts of researchers and artists in rethinking art venues as places of contact, interaction, and inclusion.•Integration of the analysis on the aesthetic qualities of the experience with the analysis on its social aspects.•Comparison between VR devices different in terms of both cost and immersiveness.•Pioneering testing of art places (e.g., theater) as possible experimental laboratories for ecological experiments.
Psalms write and express revelation, relationship and response on and through the body; corporeal vocabulary, awareness of embodiment and somatic metaphors abound. This rhetoric draws people in ...through reference to common experience and uses somatic language to express thoughts and emotions which often escape conceptualiszation, such as confusion, fear, and protection. Psalm 139 uses sensory language to stress how the Psalmist cannot escape God’s knowledge and power, and states that understanding God’s power is beyond humans. Movement, pressure and touch highlight presence and protection, and sensory awareness establishes a relationship between the protector and protected. I consider translations of tesukeni and yeshupeni and sensory metaphors, closing with a treatment of sensory awareness and cognitive understanding within the Psalm.
Art practices occupy a space of liminality within academia, being valid, appropriate to illustrate questions and discourses in social sciences and humanities, and not sufficient in mainstream ...academia to assert what art foregrounds as ‘knowledge’. So, what happens when art has something to claim through non-academic methods of inquiry? Even more complicated, what happens when art allows putting forward theoretical hypothesis involving the immateriality of affect? Departing from a practice-led research focusing on the endurance of white, cisgender, and heteropatriarchic impositions, as well as the ways these impositions materialise themselves on the body, this paper explores the possibilities of Fucking with grammar, a writing method developed throughout the writing of my PhD research. Linguistics has been stretched for centuries by QUILTBAG individuals — queer and questioning, unsure, intersex, lesbian, transgender and two-spirit, bisexual, asexual and aromantic, gay and genderqueer; swardspeak, lavender, and code-switching all entail ways of reshaping and creating language as response to socio-political necessities, camouflage, or simply to access a jargon that can be more faithful to practices and embodiments of the group creating it. However, there is a different kind of reclaiming emerging, when performance artist, actress, and activist Linn da Quebrada utters “I am a cisgender woman with one breast and a penis,” she is committing the kind of epistemic disobedience that undoes epistemology. Here, I focus on disobediences that bring western epistemologies to collapse. These challenges that contribute to what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “the end of the world as we know it” (2014). To end what ‘we’ know requires a different ‘how’, it entails methodological deployments that help bringing into crisis academic hierarchies regarding research corroborability. Questioning after Audre Lorde: how does one make tangible the immeasurable and unpredictable without being averted and undercut by the tools still sustaining the master’s house? The approach I propose here is Fucking with grammar. Fucking with is associated with messing with someone; fuck you or fuck me is negatively perceived; in sex, ‘fuck you’ or ‘fuck me’ is one-sided — the act of fucking should be fucking with, because even when saying ‘I want to fuck you’ it is still necessary more than one person for this ‘fucking’ to actually happen. Similarly, in English, the correct preposition following the verb ‘to dream’ is ‘of’ or ‘about’, which makes absolutely no sense: because when one is dreaming, one is embedded in a withness that ‘of’ or ‘about’ cannot account for. This piece shares how I fuck with grammar within a practice-led PhD research: applying Portuguese and Turkish grammar structures to English, generating verbs or nouns out of adjectives and vice versas. Fucking with grammar is a mode of surpassing some of language’s limitations when speaking of that which is immaterial; it is a semantic slap in the face calling for decolonisation of one’s immediacy of logic when assuming typos and linguistic ignorance within writings not following English normativities. I t is a method that contributes to a broader challenge to formats sustaining hierarchies around what is considered ‘academic’ research.
How do early-career academic mothers balance the demands of contemporary motherhood and academia? More generally, how do working mothers develop their embodied selves in today’s highly competitive ...working life? This article responds to a recent call to voice maternal experiences in the field of organization studies. Inspired by matricentric feminism and building on our intimate autoethnographic diary notes, we provide a fine-grained understanding of the changing demands that constitute the ongoing negotiation of ‘new’ motherhood within the ‘new’ academia. By highlighting the complexity of embodied experience, we show how motherhood is not an entirely negative experience in the workplace. Despite academia’s neoliberal tendencies, the social privilege of whiteness, heterosexuality and the middle class enables – at times – simultaneous satisfaction with both motherhood and an academic career.
Abstract
This article explores the design pedagogies developed through the alliance between disability activists at the Center for Independent Living (CIL) and a number of faculty led by Raymond ...Lifchez at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970s and 80s. Founded by Bay Area activists including disabled students at U.C. Berkeley, the CIL provided a critical platform for advocacy and services within the disability community. In a number of seminars and studios, Lifchez and others followed the initiatives of the CIL, documented the transformation of the built environment by disabled individuals in Berkeley, and incorporated their experiences in the design process. Rather than approaching disabled individuals as bearers of special needs, a number of specific pedagogical strategies explored their expertise and resourcefulness and incorporated them as informants, consultants, and designers. Supported by archival sources, oral histories, and publications of the period, this article contributes to ongoing discussions concerning the relationship between design and the environmental and social construction of disabilities as well as to the definition of design and architecture expertise. These pedagogies critically mobilized models to advance partial and flexible design interventions and simultaneously transformed the classroom into a model that challenged the naturalization of able-bodiedness in the built environment.
This paper analyses the process of co-producing an animated film about the migration journeys of Colombian women resident in Antofagasta, Chile. It first establishes the relationship between feminist ...epistemologies and arts-based methodologies, which hinges on embodiment. It then turns to a detailed discussion of using film co-production as a research method for accessing and expressing embodied experiences of migration. This discussion highlights how moments of discomfort (Gokariksel, Hawkins, Neubert, and Smith, 2021) experienced by the researcher motivated the search for a more collaborative methodological approach that was better attuned to lived experience. This included striving towards more inclusive practices with respect to recruitment, anonymity, and confidentiality. Moments of discomfort also revealed how care and caring responsibilities are entangled with research, and how they gender possibilities of participation and production for community co-producers and artists, as well as for researchers. Finally, through discomfort, lessons were learned about the politics of representing experiences of migration, violence, and endurance, as well as joy. The paper concludes that, whilst by no means a panacea, collaborative arts-based research methods can offer an innovative toolset for exploring embodied experience and for navigating the relational and representational complexities attendant to research.
This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest ...that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.
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