44 research outputs found
How we affect each other. Michel Henry's 'pathos-with' and the enactive approach to intersubjectivity
What makes it possible to affect one another, to move and be moved by another person? Why do some of our encounters transform us? The experience of moving one another points to the inter-affective in intersubjectivity. Inter-affection is hard to account for under a cognitivist banner, and has not received much attention in embodied work on intersubjectivity. I propose that understanding inter-affection needs a combination of insights into self-affection, embodiment, and interaction processes. I start from Michel Henry's radically immanent idea of self-affection, and bring it into a contrastive dialogue with the enactive concepts of autonomy and (participatory) sense-making. I suggest that the latter ideas can open up Henry's idea of self-affection to inter-affection (something he aimed to do, but did not quite manage) and that, in turn, Henry's work can provide insights into underexplored elements of intersubjectivity, such as its ineffable and mysterious aspects, and erotic encounters
Seeing and inviting participation in autistic interactions
What does it take to see how autistic people participate in social interactions? And what does it take to support and invite more participation? Western medicine and cognitive science tend to think of autism mainly in terms of social and communicative deficits. But research shows that autistic people can interact with a skill and sophistication that are hard to see when starting from a deficit idea. Research also shows that not only autistic people, but also their non-autistic interaction partners can have difficulties interacting with each other. To do justice to these findings, we need a different approach to autistic interactions—one that helps everyone see, invite, and support better participation.
I introduce such an approach, based on the enactive theory of participatory sense-making and supported by insights from indigenous epistemologies. This approach helps counteract the homogenising tendencies of the “global mental health” movement, which attempts to erase rather than recognise difference, and often precludes respectful engagements. Based in the lived experiences of people in their socio-cultural-material and interactive contexts, I put forward an engaged—even engaging—epistemology for understanding how we interact across difference. From this perspective, we see participatory sense-making at work across the scientific, diagnostic, therapeutic, and everyday interactions of autistic and non-autistic people, and how everyone can invite and support more of it
Love In-Between
In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation
Deixando a linguagem ser: reflexões sobre o método enativo
Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how.Impulsionados por nossos comentadores, consideramos esta resposta uma oportunidade para esclarecer as premissas, atitudes e mĂ©todos de nossa abordagem enativa da linguagem humana [human languaging]. Ressaltamos a necessidade de reconhecer que qualquer investigação, particularmente sobre a linguagem, Ă© sempre uma atividade concretamente situada e auto-fundamentada; nossa atitude como pesquisadores Ă© do saber como engajamento com nosso tĂłpico. Nossa tarefa, formular as categorias ausentes que podem unir a ciĂŞncia cognitiva incorporada Ă pesquisa sobre linguagem, requer evitar abstrações prematuras e esclarecer as mĂşltiplas circularidades em jogo. Nosso mĂ©todo escolhido Ă© dialĂ©tico, o que suscitou várias observações interessantes Ă s quais respondemos, particularmente com respeito ao que esse mĂ©todo significa para a epistemologia e ontologia enativas. TambĂ©m esclarecemos a importante questĂŁo de como melhor conceber as várias habilidades sociais que progressivamente identificamos com nosso mĂ©todo e que estĂŁo em jogo na linguagem humana [human languaging]. Essas habilidades sĂŁo socialmente constituĂdas ou apenas aprendidas socialmente? A diferença, novamente, leva a um esclarecimento de que atos, habilidades, atores e interações devem ser concebidos como categorias co-emergentes. Ilustramos alguns desses pontos com uma discussĂŁo de um exemplo de aspectos do modelo em jogo em um estudo sobre a entrega de presentes na China.Palavras-chave: Epistemologia enativa, Ontologia enativa, DialĂ©tica, Linguagem, Saber-como compartilhado
The precarity of patient participation - a qualitative interview study of experiences from the acute stroke and rehabilitation journey
Introduction: Active patient participation is an important factor in optimizing post-stroke recovery,
yet it is often low, regardless of stroke severity. The reasons behind this trend are unclear.
Purpose: To explore how people who have suffered a stroke, perceive the transition from independence to dependence and whether their role in post-stroke rehabilitation influences active participation
Methods: In-depth interviews with 17 people who have had a stroke. Data were analyzed using
systematic text condensation informed by the concept of autonomy from enactive theory.
Results: Two categories emerged. The first captures how the stroke and the resultant hospital
admission produces a shift from being an autonomous subject to “an object on an assembly line.”
Protocol-based investigations, inactivity, and a lack of patient involvement predominantly determine the hospital context. The second category illuminates how people who have survived a stroke
passively adapt to the hospital system, a behavior that stands in contrast to the participatory
enablement facilitated by community. Patients feel more prepared for the transition home after inpatient rehabilitation rather than following direct discharge from hospital.
Conclusion: Bodily changes, the traditional patient role, and the hospital context collectively
exacerbate a reduction of individual autonomy. Thus, an interactive partnership between people
who survived a stroke and multidisciplinary professionals may strengthen autonomy and promote
participation after a stroke
The co-creation of meaningful action: Bridging enaction and interactional sociology
Paid open access in a hybrid journal.What makes possible the co-creation of meaningful action? In this paper, we go in search of an answer to this question by combining insights from interactional sociology and enaction. Both research schools investigate social interactions as such, and conceptualise their organisation in terms of autonomy. We ask what it could mean for an interaction to be autonomous, and discuss the structures and processes that contribute to and are maintained in the so-called interaction order. We also discuss the role played by individual vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of social interaction processes in the co-creation of meaningful action. Finally, we outline some implications of this interdisciplinary fraternisation for the empirical study of social understanding, in particular in social neuroscience and psychology, pointing out the need for studies based on dynamic systems approaches on origins and references of coordination, and experimental designs to help understand human co-presence.Peer reviewe
Bodily Expression of Social Initiation Behaviors in ASC and non-ASC children: Mixed Reality vs. LEGO Game Play
This study is part of a larger project that showed the potential of our
mixed reality (MR) system in fostering social initiation behaviors
in children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). We compared
it to a typical social intervention strategy based on construction
tools, where both mediated a face-to-face dyadic play session between
an ASC child and a non-ASC child. In this study, our first
goal is to show that an MR platform can be utilized to alter the
nonverbal body behavior between ASC and non-ASC during social
interaction as much as a traditional therapy setting (LEGO). A second
goal is to show how these body cues differ between ASC and
non-ASC children during social initiation in these two platforms.
We present our first analysis of the body cues generated under two
conditions in a repeated-measures design. Body cue measurements
were obtained through skeleton information and characterized in
the form of spatio-temporal features from both subjects individually
(e.g. distances between joints and velocities of joints), and
interpersonally (e.g. proximity and visual focus of attention). We
used machine learning techniques to analyze the visual data of eighteen
trials of ASC and non-ASC dyads. Our experiments showed
that: (i) there were differences between ASC and non-ASC bodily
expressions, both at individual and interpersonal level, in LEGO
and in the MR system during social initiation; (ii) the number of features
indicating differences between ASC and non-ASC in terms of
nonverbal behavior during initiation were higher in the MR system
as compared to LEGO; and (iii) computational models evaluated
with combination of these different features enabled the recognition
of social initiation type (ASC or non-ASC) from body features in
LEGO and in MR settings. We did not observe significant differences
between the evaluated models in terms of performance for LEGO
and MR environments. This might be interpreted as the MR system
encouraging similar nonverbal behaviors in children, perhaps more
similar than the LEGO environment, as the performance scores in
the MR setting are lower as compared to the LEGO setting. These
results demonstrate the potential benefits of full body interaction
and MR settings for children with ASC.EPSR