Lived body / lived world: phenomenological approach

International audienceLived world is a term of central importance for understanding human action, including the case of (computer) mediated action

Therapeutic Challenges Of Multi-Being

This paper emerges from an attempt to shift the locus of understanding human action from the individual to relationship. In doing so we come to see persons as multi-beings, that is, as constituted within multiple relationships from which they emerge with multiple, incoherent, and often conflicting potentials. Therapy, in this context, becomes a collaborative relationship with the aim of transforming the client\u27s broader relational network. In this view, schooling in a singular practice of therapy artificially limits the therapist\u27s potential, and thus the possible outcomes of the client–therapist relationship. Invited, then, is a reflective eclecticism, in which the myriad potentials of both the therapist and client are considered in tandem. This view is illustrated by contrasting three relational conditions in which clients find themselves, each of which invites a different form of self-expression from the therapist

‘Taking culture seriously’: implications for intercultural education and training

Albeit indispensable to understanding human action, the concept of culture has suffered from excessive enthusiasm in the fields of intercultural education as well as in intercultural teacher training, leading too often to culturalist stances. These excesses of intercultural education and training as well as their contradictory message (between praising and minimising – even ignoring – culture and cultural differences) have led some scholars to advocate for the abandonment of the concept of culture altogether. Rather than this radical and counterproductive approach, we propose a heuristic tool: the dialectical square of cultural difference, as well as three metaphors of culture, that should help teacher educators to foster a dynamic and complex understanding of culture and cultural difference among pre- and in-service teacher

A discursive psychology of institutions

Over the last decade or so discursive psychology has developed as a distinct perspective within social psychology, psychology and social science more generally (Edwards, 1997; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Edwards, 2001). One of the things that differentiates it from other approaches is its conceptualisation of psychology itself. Most social psychological takes as at least a central topic an inner representation or processing system of some kind. This is true of social cognition work, of social representations research, and of many strands of newer approaches to subjectivity. Inner representations and processes are seen as central to understanding human action. This paper is not intended to criticise this view; rather it will further develop a discursive psychological alternative

Deep Generative Modelling of Human Behaviour

Human action is naturally intelligible as a time-varying graph of connected joints constrained by locomotor anatomy and physiology. Its prediction allows the anticipation of actions with applications across healthcare, physical rehabilitation and training, robotics, navigation, manufacture, entertainment, and security. In this thesis we investigate deep generative approaches to the problem of understanding human action. We show that the learning of generative qualities of the distribution may render discriminative tasks more robust to distributional shift and real-world variations in data quality. We further build, from the bottom-up, a novel stochastically deep generative modelling model taylored to the problem of human motion and demonstrate many of it’s state-of-the-art properties such as anomaly detection, imputation in the face of incomplete examples, as well as synthesis—and conditional synthesis—of new samples on massive open source human motion datasets compared to multiple baselines derived from the most relevant pieces of literature

Popular culture and the meaning of feelings

In the human sciences at large, it is still the case that only literary criticism and psychoanalysis seek to theorize with any degree of generosity a place for the feelings in the practice of their discipline. Of late, indeed, the most weighty presences in both literary criticism and psycho-analysis have worked to expel mere subjectivity and the theoretically irrelevant but idiosyncratically incontestable feelings which are held to define subjectivity. The structures that are left become venerable in virtue of their scientific standing: the fierce induration of such Parisian worthies as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and (in his playful, dandyish way) Jacques Derrida has worked to reproach devout Gallophiles in England for ever countenancing 'sincere and vital emotion' and all the emotional vocabulary-baggage of the bourgeoisie. And even in philosophy, which has taken the place of the emotions seriously, the subject has come clearly down the list of both difficulty and prestige- epistemology first, then the theory of meaning, then (perhaps) metaphysics, and only then the emotions as the difficult adjunct of ethics.peer-reviewe

Human interaction in the Swedish biogas sector

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the role of human interaction in defining, shaping, and continuously re-shaping interpretations towards the biogas phenomenon in Sweden. This investigation was conducted via two forms of inquiry. First, a theoretical inquiry was conducted which was grounded in the principles of symbolic interactionism. The purpose of this inquiry was to create a theoretical framework that can be applied to better understand the phenomenon of human interaction. Second, an empirical inquiry was conducted based on participatory research that involved direct interaction with actors working within the Swedish biogas context. The empirical inquiry provided the opportunity to present concrete, tangible results regarding the role of human interaction in the biogas sector, and was based on my own direct participation in the Swedish biogas-context. This theoretical-empirical framework (created through the two forms of inquiry) was established through a somewhat interdependent process; that is, the underlying theoretical framework was used as a reference point from which to conduct the empirical inquiry, while the theory itself was derived with empirical results and observations in mind. As such, each form of inquiry served to support and complement the other. A main component of both inquiries was to investigate the role symbols play during interaction. Key symbols that were observed during biogas-related interaction were outlined and discussed. A discussion was also provided regarding the role these symbols played in facilitating shared meaning and cooperation amongst the actors, as well as their role in learning, perspective change and knowledge creation. To complement these empirical observations, a personal account of how direct interaction in the Swedish biogas sector has shifted my own perspective towards the biogas phenomenon was also provided