Understanding ethical concerns in social media privacy studies

There are myriad ethical considerations with conducting social media studies, in particular those investigating privacy concerns in such sites. We are interested in understanding how to address these concerns, and in particular wish to discuss our empirical work at this workshop and how to progress further in this space.Postprin

Framing Wrongs and Performing Rights in Northern Ireland: Towards a Butlerian Approach to Life in Abortion Strategising

Feminist strategising on abortion has been dominated by a “pro-choice” frame. Increasingly, however, pro-choice discourse is being viewed as inadequate to meet contemporary and complex feminist aims and analyses, in particular due to the individualising ontological framework upon which it appears to be based. The work of Judith Butler is one location where such concerns have been explored and an alternative approach based upon a renewed analysis of the concept of “life” has been asserted. Foregrounding the fundamental precariousness of intersubjective life and opening the socio-political conditions sustaining precarious life to democratic public engagement carries significant implications for feminist strategising for Butler, and envisages a reconceptualisation of debate on abortion. In this article Butler’s work on life will be combined with her theoretical tool of the frame to explore space which may exist within pro-choice strategising to potentially work towards such a renewed approach to life in social debate on abortion. This space may be used to rethink feminist strategising on abortion beyond pro-choice discourse, and presents an accessible starting point from which to do so. In carrying out this analysis insights will be drawn from feminist advocacy and activism in the contingent location of Northern Ireland where recent employment of a health frame and a rights frame demonstrate instances of pro-choice strategising which may be reiterated to shift feminist activism towards more radical engagement with life as a precarious social process demanding critical attention

Disrupting cisnormativity: Decentering gender in families

Within the last decade, emerging research and activism in the sphere of transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB) persons has necessitated new vocabulary and perspectives. Families of TGNB are often challenged to reevaluate understandings of gender, of sexuality, and the family unit itself. Gender binaries are perpetuated and reinforced in Western culture through our gender “performances” (Butler, 2004), and children are judged on their performances (Wahlig, 2015). The conceptual model of decentering cisnormativity allows researchers to analyze when tensions grow taut when society members are confronted with gender nonconformity. Parents often undergo transformation when they choose to explore these tensions, deconstruct their assumptions about gender, and critically reflect on their underlying biases, belief systems, values, and understandings. In this way, it is not only TGNB children who transition, but those around them (Malpas, 2017) as their belief systems and social constructions of gender are called into question

Poetics of Reception: a phenomenological aesthetics of bodies and technology in performance

This study examines the provocative claim by Performance Studies theorist Philip Auslander (1999) that there is no ontological distinction between live and mediatised forms because they participate in the same cultural economy. This claim has led to something of a stagnation of debate between, on the one hand, scholars who privilege the live over the mediatised and on the other those who extinguish the live in favour of mediatisation. Moving beyond the limitations of ontology, this project proposes and develops a phenomenological aesthetics in order to investigate the essential structures and modes of experienced phenomena from within audience. The phenomenological approach understands the complexity and dynamism of the relationship between bodies and technologies in performance, reorienting the investigation away from a rehearsal of established and unhelpful ontological positions. The methodology for the project draws primarily upon methods from the N orth-American tradition of practical phenomenology (Herbert Spiegelberg, Edward S. Casey, Don Ihde, and Anthony Steinbock), and the transcendental philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Through a series of specially designed workshops, in which audience participants are trained in phenomenological techniques of bracketing and attention, A Poetics of Reception tests the potential of practical phenomenology to break the ontological impasse set up by Auslander. The method elicits the grasping of experiences of embodiment, kinesthetic empathy, temporality, orientation, imagination and poetic language. Participants were trained and required to write their experiences of the interaction between bodies and performance technologies, creating texts that then underwent hermeneutic analysis. The results of this interpretation yielded six interactive encounters, and revealed the constituted structures and modes of the relational phenomena experienced in performance by the participants. This study’s methodology has both practical and philoso! phical i mplications, including its proposed use as an audience-based dramaturgy for digital performance, and a method of inquiry into the kinesthetic dimensions of aesthetic experience

The effect of massed and spaced presentation and practice on repetition priming

This review examines the current literature with regard to repetition priming and practice. The empirical research and theoretical accounts of repetition priming reviewed indicate that repetition priming increases with practice. The review also indicates that an effect for the type of presentation of the stimuli during an experiment exists and that this effect may moderate the influence of practice on repetition priming. The variations in experimental design between studies are discussed, providing a possible explanation for contrasting findings within repetition priming research. Further research is identified and discussed. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Massed and Spaced presentation and practice on repetition priming. To facilitate this, a lexical decision task was used. Sixty participants comprising 30 university students and 30 members of the general public were asked to decide whether a letter string was a word or nonword. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Massed presentation, Spaced presentation and Superspaced presentation. A total of 630 trials were presented to each participant comprising 300 new words, 270 nonwords and 20 old words which were repeated 3 times during the testing phase. The results indicated that the amount of priming increased with practice thus supporting the hypothesis that the amount of repetition priming would increase with increasing repetitions. It was also found that the Massed-Spaced effect may not be an issue. This finding was not congruent with the hypothesis that as spacing increases, the amount of increase in repetition priming would be reduced. Future research was recommended to clarify any advantage of the type of presentation on an implicit memory task

Bodily Schemata and Sartre's I and Me: Reflection and Awareness in Movement

Philosophers have faced the problem of self or inner awareness since the self, itself, became something to be known and/or understood. Once dancers ‘let go of the mirror’ (Emily Claid 2006) they too began to face the problem and limits to bodily awareness, developing specific reflective practices to obtain access to their inner bodily selves. But for the phenomenologist, reflection requires an active process of perception, which problematises our grasping of the so-called hidden, organising structures of movement that are unable to be perceived (bodily schemata). For the dancer, then, how is it possible to access and have a deeper understanding of these nonconscious bodily structures? What are the limits to inner bodily awareness?In this article, I draw upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s challenge to Edmund Husserl’s pure ego with his notion of object transcendence in his essay of 1937, Transcendence of The Ego: An existentialist theory of consciousness. I do this as a possible means for understanding bodily schemata and its expression through interactive dance technologies. Using examples from dance, I suggest how bodily schemata can be accounted for if our attention is not directed towards an inner sensing of the body, but towards a site of interaction where objects or materials extend or supraextend our bodies in the form of clothing, costume and digital representations, and where the dancer becomes audience to these distally extended bodily reflections