Browsing by Subject "Embodiment"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    The body of International Relations
    (2011-11) Wilcox, Lauren Beth
    International Relations, in both theory and practice, has been increasingly concerned with a proliferation of modes of violence that use, target, and construct bodies in complex ways that challenge notions of security. The body has become the focal point to practices of security and international relations, contrary to the conventional IR/security understanding of bodies as apolitical objects. One of the deep ironies of security studies is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, the violence and vulnerability experienced by those bodies is largely ignored. Rather, bodies are implicitly understood as physical, apolitical entities among both traditional security studies scholars and feminists. This is surprising given that IR has been centrally concerned with the politics of harming bodies through warfare and other forms of political violence, as well as how to protect and secure bodies and promote life. This lacuna has limited the scope of thinking about the purposes and effects of violence. I argue that a focal shift to bodies in the practices of torture, suicide bombing, and precision warfare requires an alternative mode of knowing the human as an embodied subject of international violence and security drawing on currents of contemporary feminist theory. My project contributes to an understanding of violence that cannot be reduced to the strategic actions of rational actors or a destructive violation of community laws and norms. I argue that violence can also be understood as a creative force for shaping the limits of how we understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the boundaries of our bodies and political communities. Building on the resources of IR and feminist theory, I use concrete international events to explore the embodiment of the human subject in practices of security and violence in order to interrogate concepts of sovereignty, violence, and vulnerability. I show how practices of international relations can (and should) be rethought in the discipline in terms of the production of bodies in their agency and historicity. By theorizing violence as a productive force in constituting the embodied subject, my work also contributes to feminist work on bodies in relation to international practices of violence and security. This project therefore has the potential to provide the ground for a fundamental re-thinking of core concepts associated with security and ethics in the field of IR.
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    Breaking out of the Ghetto: The Theory and Practice of Using Critical Embodied Writing to Build Inclusive Spaces of Identification and Alternative Notions of Progress in Writing Studies
    (2016-12) Wolf, Anne
    The fields of Rhetoric and Writing Studies have neglected to pay attention to the writing and theory of women of color feminist (WOCF) writers. Writing and Rhetorical scholarship has inadvertently promoted a progress narrative that connects progress in the field with capitalist progress and marginalizes non-white, non-capitalist, non-normative ways of knowing. Many WOCF writers have built theory about central concepts within Rhetoric and Writing Studies, and these disciplines stand to benefit greatly, in terms of theory, practice, and pedagogy, from paying attention to the work that has been done by WOCF writers on the following issues: embodiment, affect, memory, identification, and geography. This project builds on the theory of many of these writers by identifying a kind of writing practice I have termed "critical embodied writing".
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    Designing VR for Understanding Physiological Effects of Embodiment and Multi-sensory Modalities
    (2020-08) Kothapalli, Sai
    Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming more and more recognized in various fields as a way to train and educate people. VR has become popular for its spatial audio-visual perception of alternate virtual environments. One other reason it is becoming more accessible is because of larger companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple investing a lot of money to do VR research to roll out VR gear that is much more affordable than they used to be five years ago. In this thesis, we developed software that can be used to conduct VR studies and measure physiological responses related to immersion and presence experienced in VR. The sense of presence in virtual environments may be a key factor in how we perceive and act in VR. Recent studies in VR have also shown that embodiment can improve immersion and engagement. Embodiment is a sense of having a virtual body that a user can relate to as being their own. But giving a virtual avatar for the user is not easy as it requires hardware synchronization with the VR application. Moreover, collecting physiological signal data to understand the effects of embodiment involves sensors that need to be used alongside this other equipment. The main component of this thesis is a software system for research studies that explore the effect of embodiment and multi-sensory modalities on the physiology of a participant. There has been much growth in how virtual reality technology is being used in various areas like planning and architecture, medical surgeries, education, and research. VR offers a real-time immersive experience, interactive simulation. Our thesis is a building block that encourages future researchers to do large scale expansive studies to understand the psychophysiological effects of body ownership and to also increase the number of studies that can be done by a larger array of researchers. By understanding these effects, we can further explore the possibilities of VR in the areas mentioned above. We also discuss how embodiment will affect the sense of presence of a person in a virtual environment. Moreover, we will show how our software can be used to present various stimuli easily and record physiological responses using a wearable sensor. We built a virtual environment for this purpose which integrates hardware together to enable embodiment, multiple-sensory modalities, and collect physiological evidence.
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    Fleshing out conservation: performative ecologies and embodied practice in Chilean temperate rainforest management
    (2012-08) Pratt, Kathryn C.
    This dissertation brings recent theories of embodiment, practice, and performance to bear on community-based conservation in the temperate rainforest region of Southern Chile. The goal of the project is to respond to a problem that conservation scientists often call the “implementation crisis.” Essentially, we have abundant knowledge of conservation models, strategies, and best practices, but yet we still struggle to implement effective community-based projects on the ground. Political ecologists have tried to address this issue by unpacking the cultural politics of conservation, explaining the fate of projects in relation to, for example, competing understandings of community, conflicts around gender and social difference, or clashes between different knowledge systems. Problems occur, it is argued, when conditions on the ground do not conform to pre-given categories, such as when the lines between “local” and “expert” become blurred, or when complex and unbounded social relations contradict our notions of bounded, homogeneous communities. This dissertation works to challenge and extend these critical perspectives by “fleshing out” environmental practices in Chile. I argue that in emphasizing contentious cultural categories, practitioners and scholars alike have tended to neglect the everyday lived experiences of making conservation happen. The dissertation draws on fieldwork conducted with two projects based near the town of Valdivia, Chile: a newly formed private reserve that was partnering with local communities on conservation and development projects and a firewood certification program working with small landholders on sustainable forest management. The focus of my research is on the actual performance of conservation. I start not with cultural categories but with the material interactions that make projects tick. For example, I trace the movements of actors as they negotiate project work, study skills as they are learned and practiced in the field, examine collaborations as they take form, and explore how everyday misadventures can turn into creative solutions. To support my claims, I draw on a growing interdisciplinary body of research that addresses the creative, corporeal, and emergent nature of practice, including non-representational theories in geography, practice theories from sociology and anthropology, theories of embodied cognition from the cognitive sciences, and materialist feminisms. These literatures all contend that social processes are not just the outcome of competing ideas and representations, but also emerge from the actions of people physically engaged in their environment. Each chapter explores a different way in which practice plays a significant role in conservation projects. Chapter 2 presents a re-examination of the environmental politics of vision and representation by showing that vision is much more tied to bodily movement than has previously been assumed. Chapter 3 considers another central area of political ecology critique: the politics of environmental knowledge, especially clashes between “expert” scientific and “local” indigenous knowledge. Political ecologists claim that one of the problems of community-based conservation is that too often it involves imposing scientific modes of understanding on local groups whose indigenous forms of knowledge are not equally valued. I argue that what often gets ignored in these discussions is the role of embodied skill in constituting environmental know-how. Chapter 4 examines how collaboration works in conservation projects. Although there has been considerable discussion of the problematic use of the term community within grassroots conservation initiatives, I argue that these conversations too have tended to neglect the embodied, relational aspects of practice. As an alternative to the logic and counter-logic of community, I suggest developing a performative understanding of togetherness which I call “associating.” While chapters 2-4 all emphasize the novel and serendipitous qualities of conservation practice, Chapter 5 addresses repetition. I show that mundane, routine, and habitual aspects of conservation work are important for instilling the sensitivity and awareness to unspoken aspects of environmental projects. Moreover, I show how such tedium actually contributes to the creative process, rather than, as we might assume, introducing complacency in conservation. I conclude by reflecting on what is gained by developing a more “fleshy” understanding of conservation and environmental management.
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    Here be dragons: performing virtual embodiment, social conduct, and racial imaginaries in World of Warcraft
    (2014-12) Johnson, Kimi Diana
    This dissertation examines the performance of racial identity in the long-running, fantastical multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) and its role in shaping digital embodiment, guiding player conduct, and maintaining white racial hegemony in the virtual play space. As a space where players devise, build, and perform digital characters to play fictional scenarios, WoW is the world's largest form of participatory theatre. While this space provides a form of immersive escapism, it also asks players to emotionally invest in a narrative that reactivates the problematic racial imaginary of 19th century imperial modernity. Through the methodologies of cultural criticism and autoethnography, this dissertation investigates three components of WoW's gaming environment: the narrative devices that shape a player's avatarial identity, the process of embodying a gendered and racialized virtual character, and the structural design of a gaming system that encourages players to perform white, heteronormative, hypermasculine, and neoliberal capitalist behaviors online or acquiesce to operating within a space that defines itself along such lines. The project focuses on the development of racially coded and narratively complex virtual bodies and analyzes how avatarial embodiment shapes player perceptions of self, race, and gender online. It relies on the concept of the interaction continuum, a term that describes the overlap between the social, virtual-active, and real worlds that form the game space, and stresses the importance of online sociality as the locus of the game's value. This study also utilizes the concept of governmentality to describe how the game designers structure knowledge of and about WoW's citizenry such that small player populations govern themselves, but within the strictures of the game's digital code and the context of its fantastical yet whitewashed narrative. My analysis demonstrates that ludic online culture not only shapes player behavior in the role-playing space of a game, but also alters how players interact with one another in less narrative virtual social spaces.
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    Making Marijuana Medical: Governing Bodies in Minnesota's Medical Cannabis Program
    (2022-06) Steel, Ryan
    For over a century, the defining, distribution, regulation, and punitive control of so-called ‘dangerous drugs’ has been a central feature of State policies and institutional practices in the US (and across the globe). The War on Drugs—which refers to the various punitive drug control-related policies and practices enacted over the last century—has assembled together a vast array of institutions, resources, and practices to authoritatively govern the use of ‘drugs’ (as defined by the State) and drug using bodies. Virtually no social institutions have been untouched by the Drug War, including medicine, criminal justice, the State, corporate manufacturing, the family, labor/employment, and culture, among others. Not only have they all been affected by the Drug War, but I argue they have been deeply shaped by it—that these institutions’ development has emerged in historically specific ways by their constitutive relationships to the Drug War. In that sense, the Drug War can be thought of as a machine made up of a variety of institutions (and the bodies that comprise them) that fit together and are configured in specific ways and, thereby, reconfigure and constitute each of these parts in the process. From this machinery, specific forms of governance are produced, affecting all that comes into contact with it and its apparatuses. This dissertation examines the ways in which the Drug War continues to operate in an era of medicalized drug reform through an in-depth case study of Minnesota’s medical cannabis program, which is one of the most restrictive in the US. By examining legislative hearings, professional position statements, in-depth interviews with medical cannabis patients, institutional and policy analysis, survey data from healthcare professionals, analysis of state-collected program data, and four years of ethnographic observation, this study provides insights into the institutional configurations of the program, the forms of governance it produces, and the consequences for patient bodies in their everyday lives.
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    Spectacles in transit: reading cinematic productions of biopower and transgender embodiment.
    (2011-01) Franklin, Michael David
    Spectacles in Transit: Reading Cinematic Productions of Biopower and Transgender Embodiment looks at transgender cultural production on film and video in order to theorize biopower at the intersection of medicine and mass visual culture. In the decades following World War II, the development of medical technologies like reconstructive surgery increasingly allowed for the human body’s modification and enhancement, while the commercialization of communication technologies like film cameras gave middle-class consumers greater expressive autonomy. Medicine and mass visual culture have notably influenced the U.S. popular imagination about the body, social difference, aesthetics, and identity. And the role of biopower—the power to induce or administrate all aspects of human life by state and corporate entities—has intensified in everyday life in part due to these developments. This dissertation analyzes four cases from the past sixty years in which transgender individuals articulated their social, political, and economic self-determination through their self-representation onscreen. These cases are selected from four different cinematic genres: the transatlantic travel films of Christine Jorgensen from 1953; mondo films from the 1970s that graphically document genital reconstruction surgery; transsexual pornography from the early 1980s that probes the politics of heteronormative fantasy; and experimental video art from a post-9/11 feminist DIY media conference. This dissertation illuminates how biopower shapes and inflects self-representation of transgender embodiment in each instance and argues that every cultural producer responds with a cinematic assertion of social belonging. Thus, it explains how each cinematic production engages affect, values, aesthetics, and fantasy in relation to embodied intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. Spectacles in Transit shifts conversations about biopower away from the biopolitics of medical research, warfare, and population management and toward the cultural work of a social group defined by a medicalized mode of difference, a group that historically has signaled the sensational and the spectacular in the U.S. popular imagination.
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    Style Unbounded: Somatic Figuration, Play, and Sublimity in the Stylistic (Re)Turn and in Kenneth Burke's Writings about Style
    (2018-06) Slater, Jarron
    Within the recent style turn in rhetoric and composition, many scholars reference Kenneth Burke, who is likely the most often-cited rhetorical theorist of the twentieth century. However, Burke is often oversimplified or misunderstood. Burke is also a notoriously difficult writer and cannot be understood in fragments. Finally, the enormous body of scholarship explicating Burke’s work focuses on concepts such as identification and dramatism, but rarely relates these concepts to matters of style. This dissertation does three things: First, it presents a fuller account and analysis of Burke’s ideas on style by constructing a more expansive theory of style from well-known and little-known concepts, opposing the tendency to focus on a small set of passages, and compiling and synthesizing remarks on style that are widely scattered across Burke’s expansive corpus. Second, since Burke, having lived to be 93 years old, left a staggering amount of writings, much of which is still being sifted through, the dissertation also tells the story of three snapshots of style in Burke, each of which speak to recent interests in rhetoric generally: embodiment, playfulness, and sublimity. Finally, the dissertation argues for a view of Burke that is expansive and that reads together many different Burkes across Burke’s extensive corpus. In doing so, the dissertation shows that Burke is most cryptic when separated from considerations of style. The dissertation thus provides scholars of rhetorical style with a much-needed primer on Burke and style. In addition, it offers scholars an expanded way of thinking about style and rhetoric. This dissertation also includes an intellectual-historical element by looking forward to Burke’s appropriation of classical rhetoricians, particularly five mentioned in a private letter to Frederick Champion Ward, Dean at the University of Chicago: Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Longinus, and Augustine, who Burke uses to build a theory of style—and of rhetoric—one that brings down the unnecessary wall separating rhetoric from the aesthetic, the formation of which wall has been one culprit of style’s demise. After a review of the current literature on style, the first snapshot begins with an analysis of a critical passage in A Rhetoric of Motives, the notorious Page 58, which is often cited and referenced by rhetorical stylistics scholars. I analyze Burke’s uses of the rhetorical figures antithesis and gradatio to illustrate a concept of formal identification which looks towards an embodied notion of rhetorical figuration, what I call somatic figuration. A specific use of a rhetorical figure is the somatic, or embodied, instantiation of a “universal,” or potential, formal pattern—a choice or a way of acting. Formal patterns are potentially felt to a greater or lesser degree because their topoi are found in the human body. The next snapshot begins with Richard Lanham’s notion of the pun, or paronomasia, as a bi-stable illusion, as a lens for considering playful seriousness. The snapshot discusses the lesser-known, neglected, and even purposely avoided concept of joycing, which I argue is a method of pun analysis and discovery. I explore this concept and discuss why it is neglected. To provide background, I show how Plato and Gorgias, who are traditionally understood as being antithetical, actually have common ground in their stylistic playfulness and pleasurable uses of irony and punning. The concept of joycing shows how natural, and even easy, it can be to go from the profound Sublime to the completely Ridiculous. The final snapshot looks at the opposite end of the Ridiculous: the Sublime. It focuses on Burke’s appropriation of Longinus’s mysterious text, On the Sublime, a text which scholars of style understand as being crucial, and a text which has gained much attention among scholars in recent years. For Burke, On the Sublime is the ideal text for illustrating the interconnectedness of rhetoric and aesthetic because it references texts from all types of genres, it expands our understanding of imagination, and it acts as a connecting link between Quintilian and Augustine. A sublime style not only bridges rhetoric and aesthetic—it also shows how style crosses disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the dissertation shows how style helps people overcome what Burke, borrowing from John Dewey, called trained incapacity and the related notion of occupational psychosis. Since style provides many ways of seeing, this chapter looks at the many different Burkes and argues for a more expansive look at the variety of Burkes who appear in the Stylistic (Re)Turn. The concepts discussed in earlier chapters of the dissertation help writers and scholars to circumvent tendencies towards mechanistic forms of communication. In sum, the dissertation looks forward to a theory of style which is organic, holistic, and trans-disciplinary.
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    “This dog means Life”: making interspecies relations at an assistance dog agency.
    (2011-05) Edminster, Avigdor
    My ethnographic informants at an assistance dog agency say that dogs and humans can read each others' minds, have saved each others' lives, hear for one another, and are family and business partners. These clients, assistance dogs, staff, and volunteers have uniquely intimate, interdependent interspecies relationships despite the power of absolutist distinctions between humans and other animals. I explore how my informants understand and create shared and unshared dimensions between them as they also navigate and change ideas about the family, workplace, and larger society. Explored in tandem these relationships and cultural domains illuminate the anxieties, ambiguities, and securities experienced in both. Central to this project are the ways that shared embodied relational meaning emerges as my informants make meaningful lives together.
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    Walking Corporate Suburbia: A Photographic and Sonic Record
    (2021-04-19) Bauch, Nicholas; nbbauch@protonmail.ch; Bauch, Nicholas
    [Written by Nicholas Bauch, 2021] This is a collection of digital photographs, audio recordings, maps, and creative writing. They were all made by artist Nicholas Bauch during multi-day walks that he did in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area between 2018 and 2020. The nodes of the walks are Fortune-500 corporate headquarters based in the Twin Cities (as listed in 2019). Bauch navigated from one headquarter to the next using only a compass while walking. His main camera was a GoPro 4, which he wore for most of the walks attached to either his head or chest. This camera was programmed to take one JPG picture every two seconds for the duration of the walks, which ranged between 4 and 7 miles each. Without the use of other wayfinding technologies, the resultant routes are not always the most direct, creating documentation of an embodied trek among some of the world’s most influential repositories and wranglers of capital, and—more importantly—the urban and suburban space in which these centers are situated. Any large scale economic system—capitalism, in this case—has a built form that emerges to accommodate the (dys)functions of that economy. The photographs produced on these walks seek to expose that built form, implicitly positing that the organization of suburban spaces is intimately tied to the needs, as it were, of the global corporations. These include things like high-speed roads, protected residential areas, and recreational opportunities like water bodies and parks. One can also read in this built form spaces of oppression and poverty, such as unmaintained housing and sidewalks, shuttered storefronts, and many instances of economic liminality, that is, places for people who are involved in the economic system without much choice, but are not its beneficiaries. One of the great consequences of capitalism is its tendency to direct wealth and resources into smaller and smaller numbers of people as time progresses. This can be read in the urban form, and this collection provides visual evidence for this movement towards unequal wealth distribution as it existed in these years. The photos, therefore, record the urban form of a mid-sized, Midwestern, United States metropolis in the late 20-teens. Urbanists, geographers, and planners, among others in the future may benefit in particular from seeing how the myriad details of suburban and urban spaces were conceived, constructed, and inhabited. Bauch’s 70,000-plus scenes document the everyday spaces of life and work, spanning the four seasons of Minnesota’s extremely variable continental climate. The headquarters between which Bauch walks are the main decision, management, finance, and research centers for large-revenue companies that impact the lives of millions of people across the local region, the nation, and the world. While many lives—bodies, even, as in the case of health insurance and food manufacturing—are materially shaped by these entities, most people could not say where they are located within the city and its surrounds. Examples of these companies, along with their annual revenues in 2019, are UnitedHealth Group ($242 billion), 3M ($32 billion), Ecolab ($15 billion), CHS ($32 billion), C.H. Robinson ($15 billion), Cargill (privately held, $115 billion), Best Buy ($43 billion), United Natural Foods Inc ($21 billion), Target ($75 billion), and General Mills ($18 billion). This is not a celebration of corporate life or of the normalization of wealth accumulation, nor does it condone the historically (and currently) racist social systems that make continuously accelerating commercial growth possible at a global scale. On the contrary, it is an attempt to point attention--much as Pop Art might have--toward the realities of economic geography, in an attempt to know them and sow the seeds of rebuilding them in ways that benefit all people. From the artist: My identity as a middle-aged, white, English-speaking, employed, housed, U.S.-passport-holding male positions me to blend-in, as it were, when I walk through areas that do not experience high volumes of foot traffic from “outsiders.” That is, even with a strapped-on camera, I look enough like a local to not arouse visits from the police, or suspicion from other entities that enforce social and economic boundaries. Being ignored is a privilege that only proves the existence of the racist structure in the first place; I suspect that someone pushing a grocery cart, or someone with a camera strapped to a turban, would not move as unencumbered as I have. When I walk, I often find myself trying to imagine the landscape as it might have looked before European contact with the Americas. Without assuming details about the Dakota experience, I think about lives that might have been lived in these places. With each picture, I see what now appear to be banal landscapes as deep containers that have amassed generational layers of meaning. That is, stories about real people who held all the complexities, fears, joys, and wonders of a life fully lived have happened in the places where my feet hit the ground, where motorists fling out cigarette butts and where plows heap oil- and salt-soaked snow.