Browsing by Subject "embodiment"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Distributed Writing: A Study of Tools, Artifacts, and Bodies
    (2016-02) Clayson, Ashley
    This dissertation investigates the question, “How is writing distributed across tools, artifacts, and bodies for writers collaboratively planning a written document?” After setting up the research problem and reviewing relevant literature, I describe the methods I used to collect and analyze data to answer my research question. I used a grounded theory approach; I collected and analyzed video and audio data from a group of workplace writers collaboratively planning an annual report, the Midwest Community College Association (MCCA). I found that these writers distributed their writing practices across tools, artifacts, and bodies in order to create representations of varying durability that served them in the writing process. This finding has several implications for writing theory, for practicing technical and professional writers, and for student writers.
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    In the American Vein: 1945-1975
    (2015-05) Marzoni, Andrew
    This dissertation shows how twentieth-century advances in media technology have contributed to a surge of formal experimentation in postwar American literature and film. Scholars have identified a pervasive influence of mass media on avant-garde art in the postwar era, as can be readily witnessed in the celebrity-obsession of Frank OO'Hara's poems or Andy Warhol's films. But more than providing mere subject matter, the technological instruments of popular culture presented artists with new ways to work, challenging the traditional relationship between the artist and the work of art. Much of twentieth-century literary and critical theory has argued that human perception is endlessly mediated, revealing the concepts of "reality," "the self," and "the author" � to be constructs. I demonstrate that this postmodern conception of what it means to be an author---and even, to be human is a direct result of the ways that electronic media such as radio and television have reframed perception. I consider how postwar American writers and filmmakers contemplated the aesthetic possibilities of newer media by adopting those technologies for their own use, constructing "literary machines" ---technological assemblages that subsume the author's body into the creative process. My project defines "technology"� in Marshall McLuhan's sense of "extenions of man"� in order to show how postwar, pre-digital American literature and film implicated the human body in their understandings of the literary, the cinematic, and the technological. For example, I treat narcotics as a media technology in their own right, provoking users with new ways to see, hear, and experience time. I trace the various roles that drugs have played in twentieth-century theories of literature, media, and human embodiment as well as American literary and film history. Because drugs are a technology literally consumed by the human body, the texts and films that Henry Miller, Terry Southern, John Cassavetes, and William S. Burroughs produced about and under the influence of drugs suggest that the aesthetic and conceptual problems posed by new media technologies are in fact inherent to human experience.
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    “It’s Really Hard to Pump as a Teacher!”: An Inquiry into the Embodied Experiences of Lactating Teachers
    (2022-09) Toedt, Elise
    This qualitative research study is the first in education to explore the daily, visceral experiences of K-12 lactating teachers in the United States. Across disciplines, scant research has been conducted that focuses on the embodied and emotional experiences of lactating people at work (Gatrell, 2019; Ryan, et al, 2011; Stearns, 1999). Bodyfeeding is a marker of “good” citizenship and “good” parenting, yet teachers, charged with reproducing state ideologies of citizenship, don’t have the space or time needed to express milk at work. This research fills a gap in cross-disciplinary literature focused on remedying the ways capitalist, patriarchal institutional structures sidestep the bodily needs of workers for the sake of workplace efficiency. It shows how lactating teachers navigate and make sense of two conflicting imperatives: On the one hand, the engrained ways they have learned to orient their time towards the reproduction of schooling norms, and on the other, their embodied need to produce milk. Informed by feminist approaches to qualitative research, I conducted 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with teachers in the Twin Cities metro who have expressed milk at work since 2010, and another 15 interviews with union leaders, administrators, and public health officials across Minnesota. I frame my study using social reproduction theory (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2014) to show how reproductive labor like expressing milk is framed as “not-work” within a capitalist understanding of production. I use poetic transcription to foreground the firsthand accounts of teachers and to demonstrate the embodied and emotional resonances across participants’ accounts (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018; Faulkner, 2016). For data analysis, I take up cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 2001) to argue that the need to express milk functions as a crucial moment because teachers cannot fulfill their role as professionals as mapped out by current expectations. I take up Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of misfits and Sarah Ahmed’s (2017) subsequent application of this concept to show how the onus is put on lactating teachers to navigate incompatibilities between their bodily needs and the school day regime and positions them as “misfits” in schools. I draw from the concepts of outlaw emotions (Jagger, 1989), pleasure activism (brown, 2019), and the uses of the erotic (Lorde, 1984) to highlight the how the emotional experiences of lactating teachers need to be considered when creating policies and practices about lactation. Findings illustrate how patriarchal, capitalist logic is at play in how time and space are organized in schools, and how lactating teachers’ bodies are positioned by this logic, while they also resist and transform the organization of schools. My study shows that a lack of structural support for lactating teachers contributes to an inequitable work environment in schools. Implications include that individuals, buildings, and districts can create more humane conditions for lactating teachers by enacting modest reforms like creating school lactation spaces and providing additional time, outside of existing break times, to pump. Yet while stop-gap reforms in schools such as creating lactation spaces are one step in the right direction, more sweeping change is necessary.
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    Language, Power and Art: Towards an Embodied Praxis for Language Reclamation in Language Teacher Education
    (2022-08) Schwedhelm, Maria Cecilia
    The longstanding history of schools and universities as central sites of linguicide and epistemicide (Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, 2009) underscores the need to foreground Indigenous languages, cultures and ways of knowing as a path towards language reclamation and the decolonization of teacher education. This study draws on the experience of a class I facilitated at a language teacher education program in Oaxaca, Mexico’s linguistically and culturally most diverse state. Embracing theory as praxis and the intersections between critical pedagogies (Boal, 2000; Freire, 2005; hooks, 2014), language reclamation (Leonard, 2012) and decolonizing methodologies (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Smith, 2012), this dissertation asks how a critical embodied pedagogy can foster language reclamation, approaching the question from three separate papers. The first paper, “Language,” examines the interrelated processes of remembering, reading, storytelling and revitalizing (Smith, 2012), making a case for broadening our conception of language reclamation beyond language teaching and learning to a process of knowledge production that contests hegemonic policies and linguistic ideologies. The second paper, “Power,” employs found poetry (Furman et al., 2007) to explore questions of identity as it relates to language reclamation in a diverse urban setting. The paper calls for scholars and educators involved in language revitalization/reclamation efforts to attend to the nuanced ways that people inhabit and negotiate identities in different settings and in interaction (Urrieta, 2017), and to think actively into how pedagogical practices can constrain or enable identity positions that encourage the (re)appropriation, (re)creation and (re)invention of indigeneity. Finally, “Art” looks at how performance operates as a mode of embodied analysis and critique, providing a space to critically question, feel and analyze the meanings ascribed to languages and bodies and a platform for struggle and rehearsal where empathetic reflection (Nagar, 2019), hartazgo and joy can generate ideological, implementational and actual spaces for Indigenous languages.
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    Performing Câmpia: Processes of Ethnic Identification in Transylvanian Folk Music
    (2019-12) Bertsch, Colleen
    Transylvanian folk music is marked by conflicting claims about ethnic belonging. While it is common to label the csárdás a Hungarian dance and the hora a Romanian dance, songs performed by Transylvanian Rroma (gypsy) musicians are regularly claimed by both Hungarians and Romanians as “theirs.” This dissertation examines various processes by which trio transilvan music, a string band tradition that has been popular in rural central Transylvania for well over a century, is ascribed various ethnic essences and how these contingent ascriptions have hardened into a durable, fixed set of categories. Using clear examples of various violin playing techniques, such as a straight or bent left wrist, bowing patterns, articulation, trills, and other ornaments that exemplify the trio transilvan style, I trace the physical practice of trio transilvan musicians and set these examples in relief upon the history of folk music institutions in Romania and Hungary, and Bartók’s ethnographic work and influence on scholars. Drawing from my intensive ethnographic fieldwork in câmpia, a subregion of Transylvania, Romania, I argue that violin playing techniques are social acts, the performances of a musician’s concept of essential melody and embellishment, which is formed by their explicit training and informed by their habitus. Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and hexis are useful in this context because he deals with the performance and recurrence of unconscious actions, those invisible guideposts that circulate among a community that shape our physical and intellectual stance in the world. My findings generally support a processual stance on ethnicity: ethnic labels of music do not reflect inherent sonic traits (a music “DNA”) that can be uncovered as being Hungarian, Romanian, or Rroma as an a priori fact deducible by musical analysis, as Bartók and his inheritors would have us believe. Instead, the apparent ethnicity of folk music emerges from various forms of contestation embodied in performance, in narrative, and institutional processes.
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    These Are Stories About Our Bodies: Collective Memory Work and the Pedagogical Imaginaries of Our Teacher Bodies
    (2016-06) Stutelberg, Erin
    Much of the current work on bodies in schools and classrooms is, appropriately, focused on a critical examination of the docile bodies (Foucault, 1995) of students and the violence inflicted on them. But teachers’ bodies are also subjected to surveillance, management, and control by larger systems of power, and thus get marked, erased, and constructed in precarious and oppressive ways. These systems harness teachers’ bodies to normalizing narratives of individualism, the hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, and the Cartesian mind/body binary. As a result, teachers are left feeling disembodied, and yet, our teacher bodies—discursively and materially—still “come up” in the classroom, often in unsettling, painful, or surprising ways. Our memories of our teacher bodies become stories that we use to tell ourselves into existence and they continually shape our pedagogies, practices, and relationships with students. In this study, eight beginning women English teachers and I took up a feminist post-structuralist methodology called collective memory work (Haug, 1987, 1999; Davies & Gannon, 2006) to access, analyze, theorize, and challenge our memories of our teacher bodies. Through our analyses of these memories we critically engaged with theories of teaching and learning and identified and (de)constructed narratives of race, gender, sexuality, and age that are reproduced in our classrooms every day. This study reveals how, if teachers are asked to engage in research that is collective, critical, and participatory, we build new pedagogical imaginaries through which we can learn from our own bodies and the bodies of our students.
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    Trauma-Informed Weight Lifting as an Adjunctive Intervention for Posttraumatic Stress Among Adolescents in Residential Treatment
    (2024-05) Lee, Elizabeth Kathleen
    There is little research on the effects of weightlifting as an adjunctive embodiment-based intervention on posttraumatic stress symptoms among adolescents with complex trauma histories. Therefore, the present study sought to explore how a newly developed adjunctive embodiment-based intervention, Trauma-Informed Weight Lifting (TIWL), influenced participants’ self-reported posttraumatic stress and associated mental health symptoms. Twelve adolescents from two residential facilities participated in the current study. Seven participants engaged in a weekly, eight-week TIWL intervention. Following a participant preference approach, participants without a preference for engaging in TIWL were assigned to the treatment as usual (TAU) comparison condition (n = 5). Those who engaged in TIWL were compared to those in the TAU group. Posttraumatic stress and associated symptoms were measured with six validated self-report measures. Symptoms were assessed before participants started TIWL, mid-way through the intervention, at the end, at 4-week post-intervention follow-up. Posttraumatic stress symptoms and interoception were assessed weekly. Overall, TIWL appeared feasible and acceptable in an adolescent residential treatment setting based on participants’ attendance rate (87.5%) and ratings of helpfulness (Ms = 75.71–94.71). Although effects were not maintained at follow-up and demonstrated some mixed findings between the weekly and monthly outcomes, the present study provided overall evidence for the efficacy of TIWL in lowered posttraumatic stress (Mi-j = -3.39, t = -2.08, p = .04, dRM, pooled = 3.20), depression (F(4, 5.25) = 6.73, p = .03, dRM, pooled = 0.59), and stress symptoms (F(4, 5.04) = 9.76, p = .01, dRM, pooled = 0.05) and higher levels of interoception (Mi-j = 0.45, t = 0.73, p = .47, dRM, pooled = 0.18) at the last TIWL session compared to baseline. There was also a large difference (~1.32 SD) in arousal and reactivity symptom levels between the TIWL condition and the comparison condition, with greater differences in Week 1 to Week 8 scores for the TIWL condition. From baseline to the four-week post-intervention follow-up self-reported avoidance (Mi-j = 0.67, t = -0.50, p = .25, dRM, pooled = -0.39), arousal and reactivity (Mi-j = 3.21, t = 1.16, p = .15, dRM, pooled = -0.27) and derealization (Mi-j = 0.69, t = 1.01, p = .15, dRM, pooled = -0.30) posttraumatic stress symptoms were higher in the TIWL condition. Given that two of the seven TIWL participants dropped out after two sessions, posthoc exploratory analyses were conducted with them removed. These analyses showed lower posttraumatic stress (Mi-j = -11.28, t = -1.39, p = .11, dRM, pooled = 0.94), depression (Mi-j = -3.88, t = -1.27, p = .13, dRM, pooled = 0.64), anxiety (Mi-j = -2.24, t = -1.26, p = .12, dRM, pooled = 1.17) and stress (Mi-j = -4.45, t = -1.68, p = .08, dRM, pooled = 0.63) symptoms from baseline to follow-up. Therefore, the participants who received a minimum of seven sessions of TIWL reported improvements in their posttraumatic stress and associated mental health symptoms from baseline to follow-up with large effects. Researching the effects of TIWL and extending beyond the present pilot study (e.g., multiple trials starting at different time points, larger sample sizes, different doses, comparing TIWL to a standard weightlifting group) are warranted given the potential confounds that could not be controlled for here.