Pins & Needles: Towards Limb Disownership in Augmented Reality

The seemingly stable construct of our bodily self depends on the continued, successful integration of multisensory feedback about our body, rather than its purely physical composition. Accordingly, pathological disruption of such neural processing is linked to striking alterations of the bodily self, ranging from limb misidentification to disownership, and even the desire to amputate a healthy limb. While previous embodiment research has relied on experimental setups using supernumerary limbs in variants of the Rubber Hand Illusion, we here used Augmented Reality to directly manipulate the feeling of ownership for one's own, biological limb. Using a Head-Mounted Display, participants received visual feedback about their own arm, from an embodied first-person perspective. In a series of three studies, in independent cohorts, we altered embodiment by providing visuotactile feedback that could be synchronous (control condition) or asynchronous (400ms delay, Real Hand Illusion). During the illusion, participants reported a significant decrease in ownership of their own limb, along with a lowered sense of agency. Supporting the right-parietal body network, we found an increased illusion strength for the left upper limb as well as a modulation of the feeling of ownership during anodal transcranial direct current stimulation. Extending previous research, these findings demonstrate that a controlled, visuotactile conflict about one's own limb can be used to directly and systematically modulate ownership - without a proxy. This not only corroborates the malleability of body representation but questions its permanence. These findings warrant further exploration of combined VR and neuromodulation therapies for disorders of the bodily self

Divisions Within the Posterior Parietal Cortex Help Touch Meet Vision

The parietal cortex is divided into two major functional regions: the anterior parietal cortex that includes primary somatosensory cortex, and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) that includes the rest of the parietal lobe. The PPC contains multiple representations of space. In Dijkerman and de Haan’s (see record 2007-13802-022) model, higher spatial representations are separate from PPC functions. This model should be developed further so that the functions of the somatosensory system are integrated with specific functions within the PPC and higher spatial representations. Through this further specification of the model, one can make better predictions regarding functional interactions between somatosensory and visual systems

Central role of somatosensory processes in sexual arousal as identified by neuroimaging techniques

Research on the neural correlates of sexual arousal is a growing field of research in affective neuroscience. A new approach studying the correlation between the hemodynamic cerebral response and autonomic genital response has enabled distinct brain areas to be identified according to their role in inducing penile erection, on the one hand, and in representing penile sensation, on the othe

Worlding the south

This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a latitudinal challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by proposing a new literary history of the region that is predicated less on metropolitan turning points and more on southern cultural perspectives in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. With a focus on southern orientations, southern audiences, and southern modes of addressivity, Worlding the south foregrounds marginal, minor, and neglected writers and texts across a hemispheric complex of southern oceans and terrains. Drawing on an ontological tradition that tests the dominance of networked theories of globalisation, the collection also asks how we can better understand the dialectical relationship between the ‘real’ world in which a literary text or art object exists and the symbolic or conceptual world it shows or creates. By examining the literary processes of ‘worlding’, it demonstrates how art objects make legible homogenising imperial and colonial narratives, inequalities of linguistic power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. With contributions from leading scholars in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, the collection revises literary histories of the ‘British world’ by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, settler, and other southern perspectives

Cognitive and anatomical correlates of neglect for peripersonal and extrapersonal space

Spatial neglect is a neurological disorder where patients typically fail to orient or respond to events on their left side. Moreover, recent studies suggest that the severity of neglect may depend specifically on whether stimuli are presented within or beyond arm's reach. However, the evidence for such a general functional dissociation between near and far space processing in the brain remains conflicting: The majority of research has been focussed on line bisection errors which reflect only one small aspect of neglect behaviour. In addition, some behavioural findings suggest a functional dissociation only if a motor response is required. Finally, to date, the critical areas involved in distance related space processing have not been identified.Thus, it remains not only unclear whether neglect in near and far space is a task- and response independent phenomenon but also which damaged brain areas impair distance related space processing. In order to answer these questions the present study compared line bisection and visual search performance and its anatomical correlates in near and far space by using a combined single case- and group study approach.The results showed that neglect restricted to near or far space can vary not only depending on the type of task but also on the type of response required. Visual search tasks were particularly sensitive in detecting the dissociation between those two space sectors. Anatomically, neglect for near space was mainly associated with occipito-parietal lesions and medio-temporal structures, including the posterior cingulate. Neglect for far space was found to result from focal damage of medial, ventro-temporal structures and the prefrontal cortex. In conclusion, neglect for near and far space does not seem to result from a general impairment in distance related processing but from a combination of factors related to specific task demands as well as the location and extent of the brain damage

The Terms of Our Connection: Affiliation and Difference in the Post-1960 North American Novel

This dissertation considers a neglected legacy of the long 1960s (1959-1975): the struggle to form lasting connections across seemingly irreparable social divides. Through a comparative analysis of North American novels by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Linda Hogan, Tim O'Brien and Susan Choi, I identify a common story their works all share: the narrative of affiliation. These novels of affiliation, I argue, represent the creation of lateral bonds of attachment among individuals of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities and classes. As a transgressive and unruly form of interpersonal relationship, affiliation works to bridge divisions by joining together the contradictory feelings of erotic desire and friendship. Defining an overlooked sub-genre of the post-1960 North American novel of development, this project illuminates the heterogeneous bonds of solidarity that undoubtedly arose during the sixties, yet have been continually silenced by national discourses of identity and multiculturalism. In the wake of neo-liberalism, 1960s collective projects for social change, including the New Left, the civil rights movement, Black Nationalism, feminism, and the Asian American movement, among others, appear historically and ideologically separate, and even antagonistic. In stark contrast, this dissertation illuminates the common ethics of affiliation that aligned these disparate movements and was built from collaborative, immanent and provisional attempts at repairing suffering and disparity. Positioned not within, but alongside the fraught history of the sixties, this project offers a new portrait of the subterranean modes of experimental living that animated the era

RACE, DISABILITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RADICAL AGENCY: TOWARD A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF DECOLONIAL CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS IN LATINX DISCRIT

The present dissertation is a non-empirical methodology project grounded in political philosophy. As a practical exercise, it bridges knowledge workers (e.g., educators, action researchers and other engaged scholars) with activists to explore the situated emancipation possibilities of radical agency at the intersection of blindness and Latinidad. It does so in line with DisCrit and other bodies of literature within critical disability studies, works centered on trans-Latinidades and border-crossing, intersectional decoloniality theorizing, critical hermeneutics, critical race theory and blackness/ whiteness studies. It interrogates performative and movement building spaces for teaching and learning that foster radical exteriority trajectories of decolonial solidarity and emancipation-centered reflexivity. The driving questions that articulate the project are tackled metatheoretically and through a hermeneutic method quite common in critical race theory, the method of counter storytelling. This gets enacted in reflexive counter stories distributed throughout each of the five chapters of the dissertation. Some of the emerging practical lessons from the analysis include: (1) a need to fight lovelessness and ossified modes of movement organizing; (2) the realization that trans-Latinidades often have difficulties conciliating their master ideologies and competing utopias; (3) the understanding that in the current context, LatDisCrit is a proto-utopia, one that remains within the power of the unnamed; (4) the conviction that LatDisCrit will only have meaning if it gets traction as a mutually edifying sphere between knowledge workers and activists in the trenches; (5) the need to avoid the framing of decolonial solidarity as a process circumscribed to communities of sameness; (6) the importance of empowering activists as true experts of their sense of situated emancipation and undoing disciplinary layers of hierarchy between knowledge workers and activists; and (7) a practical imperative for LatDisCrit’s alliance building and organizing to flow through multiple trans-Latinx and pandisability relational links, being mindful to work especially along with those collectivities that generate more tension for the comfort zones of blind Latinx

'My brain will be your occult convolutions' : toward a critical theory of the biological body

This project forms part of a growing engagement with biology by critical psychology and, more broadly, body studies. The specific focus is on the neurological body whose dogmatic exclusion from critical endeavours is challenged by arguing that neuroscience offers a vital resource for emancipatory agendas. Rather than conversely treating biology as a site for the factual supplementation of social theory the aim is to engage (negotiate) with neuroscience more directly and critically. In this process a discursive reductionism and attempted escape from complicity associated with critical psychology are addressed. Similarly a naïve and apolitical empiricism claimed by neuroscience is disrupted. The primary objective is however to demonstrate the utility of neuroscience in developing critical theory. These objectives are pursued through the ‘method’ of deconstruction, (mis)reading several highly regarded neuroscience texts written by prominent neuroscientists, working within the convolutions of these texts so as develop openings for critical conceptualisations of (neural) corporeality. In this manner the various spectres associated with neurology, including essentialism, determinism, individualism, reductionism and dualism, are displaced. This includes, amongst others, the omnipresent mind/body and body/society binaries. The (mis)readings address a number of prominent themes associated with contemporary neuroscience: Attempts at specifying an identity for (part of) the brain are shown to rely on a necessary relationship with the excluded other (such as the body, the socio-cultural, and the environment). Similarly, attempts at articulating a centre, a point from which agency can proceed, which finds existing identity in the functions of the prefrontal cortices, are also undone by the (multiple, affective, and unconscious) other which decentres the centre by being the essential supplement for any such claims. The causal metaphysic must likewise proceed within the play of différance, a logic of difference and deferral that undermines causal routes, innate origins and autocratic centres. Finally, reductionism must advance as a necessary strategy through which to engage with complexity, its ambitions always impossible as the aneconomic is forever in excess of any economy. The emancipatory viability of such (mis)readings is discussed within a context where the open and malleable body has been co-opted by contemporary neo-liberal geoculture.PsychologyD.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology

Land, Water, and Stars: Relationality in Anishinaabe and Diasporic Literature

Land, Water, and Stars: Relationality in Anishinaabe and Diasporic Literatureexamines how relationality is encoded and portrayed in poetry, short stories, and novels by Anishinaabe and diasporic authors, Elizabeth Acevedo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gerald Vizenor, and Mohsin Hamid. Through engagement with select works by these writers, the thesis contributes to critical discussion about relationality, a concept that posits that all existence is relational and asserts that no human being is outside this state of being. A generative, complex concept for analyzing responses to displacement and dispossession, critiques of power, and visions of just and balanced co-existence, relationality provides a useful analytic lens through which to consider and assess literary frameworks for imagining connections between Indigenous and racialized diasporic communities. Through close readings of Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths(Acevedo), “nogojiwanong” (Simpson), Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57(Vizenor), and Exit West(Hamid), I analyze the significance of two pivotal themes for unfolding relationality’s potential: (i) the concept of decolonial love and (ii) the concept of constellations, as conveyed in the representation of land and stars. The first section examines the relational aspects of decolonial love as taken up in works by Black Dominican-American poet Elizabeth Acevedo and Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Through engagement with these works, the thesis demonstrates how decolonial love might conjure attraction, intimacy and care, which colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism have damaged. The second section explores the significance of stars and constellations for unfolding relationality in novels by Anishinaabe theorist, Gerald Vizenor and Pakistani-British writer, Mohsin Hamid. This section illuminates the innovative ways that these writers draw on star knowledge to produce cross-hemispheric novels and reveals their insightful strategies for grappling with rootedness, migration, conquest, and displacement. Taken together, the thesis provides a critical description of the ways that literature might imagine, express, and enact relationality

TransArea

The future of area studies lies in opening out into TransArea studies, which tie together area-connected competencies with transdisciplinary research practices. It is one of the loftiest and most urgent duties of philology to lift up this treasure in the awareness of the special relevance of literature, and to make it democratically available to the broadest possible sections of the population