Exploring Kinaesthetic and Body Self-Awareness in Professional Musicians

This research aimed to explore whether developing movement awareness in the playing of professional musicians could improve performance and assist in reducing tension. The issue was studied adopting a neurophenomenological perspective (Varela, 1996) which combines the traditions of continental phenomenology and neuroscientific studies related to cognitive processes. Musicians are often not aware of the importance of their body movements or gestures in playing (Holgersen, 2010). This research investigated whether movement awareness could be developed and if so what impact it would have on performance. Qualitative data were collected by applying phenomenological First-person mediator methods through semi-structured interviews, observation, and audiovisual materials. A range of professional instrumentalists participated. A quasi-repeated qualitative measurement research design was adopted. The musicians were asked to perform an easy, slow piece of music, which they had previously chosen, from memory three times. The first time the piece was performed with no intervention. In the first intervention they were asked to mentally rehearse the piece before playing it again, and in the second, they were asked to simulate the movements of playing without their instrument, before performing. The activities and performances were video recorded. The data were analysed in terms of verbal and non-verbal responses during the interviews and following performance. The performances were analysed by a panel of five experienced musicians and comparisons made in relation to the way the participants responded to the interventions. The findings showed that all of the musicians were affected by the simulation which aroused a range of feelings. The simulation seemed to generate kinaesthetic and sensory-motor feedback assisting the musicians in shaping their thoughts and developing body self-awareness even when they expressed negative feelings. The panellists noted a reduction in anxiety particularly following the third performance and an increase in concentration, musical communication, accuracy and fluidity of gestures

Cultural tourism development in Ngada, Flores, Indonesia

This thesis is an action ethnography of tourism development in two villages in Ngada, Flores. It examines the inter-relationship between culture and tourism. The thesis explores the villagers' attitudes, experiences values and priorities in tourism, and contrasts these with those of the tourists and mediators in tourism: guides and government, to reveal the 'conflicts of tourism'. The thesis compares two neighbouring villages and explores the micro level detail required to understand tourism development. Research for this thesis has been carried out over more than ten tears. Early research (1989-1994) was carried out as a tour operator. Numerous short visits and two periods of field research, one of eight months (1998-1999), followed. Credibility as a successful tour operator and long established relations meant a strong bond of trust existed when the researcher carried out fieldwork. Participant observation was used to derive a deep understanding of tourism in the villages. Focus groups were carried out with different sections of the population and local guides. Interviews were carried out with personnel from government departments. Tourists were observed and interviewed. The thesis contributes to knowledge by providing a detailed ethnography of emergent tourism development. The comparison of two villages reveals just how important local cultural details are in our understanding of cultural processes in tourism. While cultural tourism is developed to bring economic benefits, authenticity is associated with poverty and based on markers relating to the past. Tourism is working to fossilise the villages. However the villagers are not passive and the commodification process can also be regarded as a step on the ladder to empowerment. As an action ethnography, the explicit intention of the study was to aid the villagers. The focus groups started the process of knowledge sharing, and recommendations have been made on how to further the development of cultural tourism in the villages

The role of picture books in developing an empathic response towards cultural difference

This study explores the potential of picture books to elicit empathic responses to the issues of cultural difference. It integrates the theory of narrative empathy, empathic unsettlement and schema and scripts to construct the analytical framework for a selection of 17 Australian picture books about migration. The findings highlight that picture books draw on familiar schemas to challenge, affirm or disrupt preconceptions about migrants and refugees and thereby position readers to take up an empathic stance towards cultural difference

The Knowing: A Fantasy an epistemological enquiry into creative process, form, and genre

This creative writing PhD thesis consists of a novel and a critical reflective essay. Both articulate a distinctive approach to the challenges of writing genre fiction in the 21st Century that I define as ‘Goldendark’ – one that actively engages with the ethical and political implications of the field via the specific aesthetic choices made about methodology, content, and form. The Knowing: A Fantasy is a novel written in the High Mimetic style that, through the story of Janey McEttrick, a Scottish-Cherokee musician descended from the Reverend Robert Kirk, a 17th Century Episcopalian minister from Aberfoyle (author of the 1691 monograph, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies), fictionalises the diasporic translocation of song- and tale-cultures between the Scottish Lowlands and the Southern Appalachians, and is a dramatisation of the creative process. In the accompanying critical reflective essay, ‘An Epistemological Enquiry into Creative Process, Form and Genre’, I chart the development of my novel: its initial inspiration, my practice-based research, its composition and completion, all informed both by my practice as a storyteller/poet and by my archival discoveries. In the section ‘Walking Between Worlds’ I articulate my methodology and seek to defend experiential research as a multi-modal approach – one that included long-distance walking, illustration, spoken word performance, ballad-singing and learning an instrument. In ‘Framing the Narrative’ I discuss matters of form – how I engaged with hyperfictionality and digital technology in destabilising traditional conventions of linear narrative and generic expectation. Finally, in ‘Defining Goldendark’ I articulate in detail my approach to a new ethical aesthetics of the fantasy genre

Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio

The recent $3.4 billion purchase of Columbia Pictures by Sony Corporation focused attention on a studio that had survived one of Hollywood’s worst scandals under David Begelman, as well as ownership by Coca-Cola and David Puttnam’s misguided attempt to bring back the studio’s glory days. Columbia Pictures traces Columbia’s history from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company (nicknamed “Corned Beef and Cabbage”) through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and concludes with a vivid portrait of today’s corporate Hollywood, with its investment bankers, entertainment lawyers, agents, and financiers. Bernard F. Dick’s highly readable studio chronicle is followed by thirteen original essays by leading film scholars, writing about the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for Columbia’s emergence from Poverty Row status to world class. This is the first attempt to integrate film history with film criticism of a single studio. Both the historical introduction and the essays draw on previously untapped archival material—budgets that kept Columbia in the black during the 1930s and 1940s, letters that reveal the rapport between Depression audiences and director Frank Capra, and an interview with Oscar-winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash. The book also offers new perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia’s unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Anatomy of a Murder, Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, The Big Chill, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Last Emperor. Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures includes a brief chronology and a complete 1920-1991 filmography. Designed for both the film lover and the film scholar, the book is ideal for film history courses. For anyone seeking a frank, readable history of the movie business, this ‘Portrait of a Studio’ sheds light on one part of a frenzied, fractious industry. —New York Times Book Review An excellent reading experience for movie buffs and historians. —West Coast Review of Bookshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/1007/thumbnail.jp

Agency or structure? Nigerian university students' perspectives of influences on sexual risk taking.

This thesis is about influences on young people's sexual risk taking. It is situated within a complex context of young people's sustained structural/self-sexualisation, significant sexual activity, unwanted outcomes such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), intended benefits such as pleasure, and recurrent interventionists' promotion of abstinence-until-marriage sexual norm to young people. The above conceptualization is tested with a mixed-methodology that recruited fifty-six students with a snowball sampling technique. McCracken's long-interview and Stones' empirical research brackets for structuration theory facilitated narrative data collection, which were subjected to structural-hermeneutic analysis. Respondents identified four broad influences on their dominantly heterosexual behaviour. They include external influences (mass media), internal influences (positive pre-dispositions to premarital sex), agency (purposeful sexual action), and (un)intended outcome (STI and pleasure). Respondents emphasize that influences are non-hierarchical, differentially combine, and are dependent on individuals, contexts and seasons. They also infer the Nigerian context concurrently constrain and enable their sexual conducts via three normative sexual behaviour options. These are (1) the dominant Nigerian culture promoted abstinence-until-marriage. (2) Modernity sanctioned safer-sex with contraceptives. (3) Collective/individuated preference for unprotected premarital sex, periodic abstinence and contraceptive use. Respondents admit they practise the latter, which is a hybridization of option (1) and (2) and is illustrative of the co-influence of structure and agency on action. The conclusion is drawn that sexual risk taking is influenced by young people's concurrent structural/self sexualisation and their pursuit of contextual, personal and collectively meaningfial goals. Consequently, dominant linear conceptualizations of sexual risk taking, e.g. problem behaviour, will continue to be limited in effectiveness because they neglect these complex, recursive and interrelated influences. Thus, pragmatic efforts to manage risk-prone sexualities must concurrently engage their complex structural and agential sources, governed by safer-sex promotion, a recognition of multiple influences and individuated/collective value that both society and young people attach to sex

Teaching as Analogous Personalization: A pragmatic inquiry into expert teachers' process for fostering synchrony in educational dialogs, in post-secondary writing

Descriptive understandings of what human learning is, and so normative expectations of what teachers can and should do as educational leaders, has shifted greatly in society over the past century. The learning metaphors have moved from mechanical transfer to organic transformation; the educational approaches have moved from behavioral response-training to social-emotional facilitating: encouraging students not merely to repeat experts but to think like members in those knowledge-based communities, not merely to mimic disciplines' methods but to participate personally in the ongoing discourse of those fields. In an immediate sense, this shift is progress. Yet, in a larger sense, it is merely cycling back to acknowledge an old and persistent thread of practical wisdom among educators: that people learn complexly as emotional-social-intellectual creatures, and so that a teacher's work is to entice interest and effort, to foster a sense of belonging and trust, and to persuade students toward personally connecting with and valuing those same integral parts of a subject-matter that the teacher has already beneficially personalized for themselves. This longstanding rhetorical and pragmatic view of a teacher's educational role is now being supported directly by empirical research that shows the sense-bound, neurologically integrated, socially attuned, identity-and-meaning motivated character of human feelings, thoughts, and dispositions. I introduce the term “analogous personalization” to capture this synthetic (experience-based, scientifically supported) understanding of teaching as complexly social-emotional, intellectual, persuasive work. I then focus on educational dialogs—specifically within post-secondary writing-based courses—as a means of exploring how expert teachers foster synchrony between their own and their students' personal connections to (i.e., emotional inclination toward, social affiliation with, intellectual/practical understanding of) subject-matter. First, this dissertation offers a synthetic overview of some emergent mind-brain-body findings, and points out the fundamental educational realities that those findings substantiate. On that foundation, it next overviews insights from the field of rhetoric-and-writing about how teachers can usefully conceptualize the learner-knowledge-environment relationship from a dialogic perspective, to achieve effective (intentional, situated, synchronous) educational exchanges. Building from those scientific and practical literatures, it offers a flexible research method for studying the pragmatic arc of an educational exchange (from teacher intention to student take-away): by using the teacher's own personal, practical, principled framework of educational ideals and approaches; comparing their stated intentions with students' stated learning experiences, and tracing the arc of that educational dialog through actual classroom recordings. Finally, it enlists this radically situated research method to analyze three expert university writing teachers' practices: their idiosyncratic understandings of a teacher's role (from their own perspective); their experience-based manner of forming learning-centered relationships with students (from my observing perspective); and their apparent, persuasive self-investment in the course's subject-matter and the students' learning (from students' perspectives). It concludes with observations about the role of a teacher's sincerity (both practiced and perceived) in developing professional expertise and achieving synchrony with students in educational exchanges

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed