Intersectionality queer studies and hybridity: methodological frameworks for social research

This article seeks to draw links between intersectionality and queer studies as epistemological strands by examining their common methodological tasks and by tracing some similar difficulties of translating theory into research methods. Intersectionality is the systematic study of the ways in which differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and other sociopolitical and cultural identities interrelate. Queer theory, when applied as a distinct methodological approach to the study of gender and sexuality, has sought to denaturalise categories of analysis and make normativity visible. By examining existing research projects framed as 'queer' alongside ones that use intersectionality, I consider the importance of positionality in research accounts. I revisit Judith Halberstam's (1998) 'Female Masculinity' and Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) 'Borderlands' and discuss the tension between the act of naming and the critical strategical adoption of categorical thinking. Finally, I suggest hybridity as one possible complementary methodological approach to those of intersectionality and queer studies. Hybridity can facilitate an understanding of shifting textual and material borders and can operate as a creative and political mode of destabilising not only complex social locations, but also research frameworks

Understanding Babinski's anosognosia : 100 years later

Non peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Unawareness of paralysis following stroke: an existential-phenomenological inquiry into the paradox of anosognosia

We inescapably experience the world through our body. Yet as our embodiment itself is the background of all our everyday experience, it appears to be experienced quietly. We tend to take for granted that our body is present in and contributing to all experience, as we also tend to take for granted the feeling that it belongs to us and it is under our control. However, certain neuropsychological disorders that arise after damage to the right hemisphere of the brain serve as a reminder that these feelings and intuitions cannot always be taken for granted. What is more ‘counter-intuitive’ than someone who is unaware of the fact that they can no longer move half their body? Or someone who cannot recognise their own arm or, leg as theirs? These disorders have troubled neurology, philosophy and psychology since the time of Charcot, Janet, Freud and Babinski and continue to represent frequent, largely unmet and poorly studied clinical challenges. The present thesis aims to explore from an interdisciplinary vantage point the way in which the body is experienced in people with such neuropsychological disorders following a stroke. More specifically, it aims to complement current scientific perspectives on these disorders with existential-phenomenological ideas regarding the experience of embodiment in these patients, with particular emphasis on the ‘pre-reflected’ dimensions of embodiment and their derivatives in mental life as highlighted by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty. The empirical part of the thesis involves behavioural and neuroimaging methodologies from the field of neuropsychology, including two case series and one single case study (total N = 14). Three hypotheses inspired by the early writings of Merleau-Ponty on embodiment were explored in these three studies, respectively: (a) whether patients with motor unawareness have a ‘pre-reflective’ awareness of their deficits; (b) whether such forms of pre-reflective awareness may paradoxically contribute to their explicit unawareness and (c) whether insights generated by the above two studies could be translated to a psychophysical intervention that can help a patient recover her explicit awareness of her paralysis. The results of these studies confirmed all three hypotheses, with some theoretical constraints that are discussed in each chapter. More generally, the results of these studies are discussed in relation to both scientific and philosophical theories of body awareness and most importantly in relation to clinical challenges and the scope of existential counselling psychology. I argue that these disorders allow a unique insight into how existential, counselling and psychotherapeutic psychology can position its practice in relation to some of these paradoxical ways of being-in-the-world that are not habitually so ‘visible’, unless revealed by brain damage. These considerations apply particularly to the more general paradox of psychotherapeutic clients who frequently come to therapy consciously hoping to change their habitual ways of being-in-the-world while implicitly, yet with almost equal force, they may hope not to change their commitment to the world

Definition: Asomatognosia

Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Interoceptive Ingredients of Body Ownership: Affective Touch and Cardiac Awareness in the Rubber Hand Illusion

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Laura Crucianelli, Charlotte Krahe, Paul M. Jenkinson, Aikaterini (Katerina) Fotopoulou, 'Interoceptive Ingredients of Body Ownership: Affective Touch and Cardiac Awareness in the Rubber Hand Illusion', Cortex, first published online 1 May 2017, available at doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.04.018. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The sense of body ownership represents a fundamental aspect of bodily self-consciousness. Using multisensory integration paradigms, recent studies have shown that both exteroceptive and interoceptive information contribute to our sense of body ownership. Interoception refers to the physiological sense of the condition of the body, including afferent signals that originate inside the body and outside the body. However, it remains unclear whether individual sensitivity to interoceptive modalities is unitary or differs between modalities. It is also unclear whether the effect of interoceptive information on body ownership is caused by exteroceptive ‘visual capture’ of these modalities, or by bottom-up processing of interoceptive information. This study aimed to test these questions in two separate samples. In the first experiment (N = 76), we examined the relationship between two different interoceptive modalities, namely cardiac awareness based on a heartbeat counting task, and affective touch perception based on stimulation of a specialized C tactile (CT) afferent system. This is an interoceptive modality of affective and social significance. In a second experiment (N = 63), we explored whether ‘off-line’ trait interoceptive sensitivity based on a heartbeat counting task would modulate the extent to which CT affective touch influences the multisensory process during the rubber hand illusion (RHI). We found that affective touch enhanced the subjective experience of body ownership during the RHI. Nevertheless, interoceptive sensitivity, as measured by a heartbeat counting task, did not modulate this effect, nor did it relate to the perception of ownership or of CT-optimal affective touch more generally. By contrast, this trait measure of interoceptive sensitivity appeared most relevant when the multisensory context of interoception was ambiguous, suggesting that the perception of interoceptive signals and their effects on body ownership may depend on individual abilities to regulate the balance of interoception and exteroception in given contexts.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The next steps in improving the outcomes of advanced ovarian cancer

Worldwide ovarian cancer affects over 200,000 women per year. Overall survival rates are poor due to two predominate reasons. First, the majority of patients present with advanced disease creating significant difficulty with effecting disease eradication. Second, acquisition of chemotherapy resistance results in untreatable progressive disease. Advances in treatment of advanced ovarian cancer involve a spectrum of interventions including improvements in frontline debulking surgery and combination chemotherapy. Anti-angiogenic factors have been shown to have activity in frontline and recurrent disease while novel chemotherapeutic agents and targeted treatments are in development particularly for disease that is resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy. These developments aim to improve the progression-free and overall survival of women with advanced ovarian cancer

The virtual bodily self: Mentalisation of the body as revealed in anosognosia for hemiplegia

AbstractDespite the coherence and seeming directness of our bodily experience, our perception of the world, including that of our own body, may constitute an inference based on ambiguous sensory data and prior expectations. In this article, I apply a ‘psychologised’ version of the recently proposed free energy framework to the understanding of certain disorders of neurological unawareness in order to examine how inferential processes may determine our body perception. I specifically consider three facets of body perception in such disorders: namely, the ‘external body’ as inferred on the basis of exteroceptive signals and related predictions; the ‘internal body’ as inferred on the basis of proprioceptive and interoceptive signals and related predictions; and lastly the ‘impersonalised body’ as inferred on the basis of signals from social and third-person perspectives on the body and related predictions. Several conclusions will be drawn from these considerations: (a) there is a deep interdependency of prior beliefs and sensory data; as the brain uses sensory data to update its virtual model of the world, lack or imprecision of sensory prediction errors may lead to aberrant inferences influenced disproportionally by outdated, premorbid predictions; (b) interoception and interoceptive salience have a unique role in our inferences about body awareness and (c) social, ‘objectified’ prior beliefs about the body may have a silent but potent role in our bodily self-awareness. Finally, the article emphasizes that our learned, virtual model of the body is depended on the nature and thus integrity of the very body that allowed the model to be formed in the first place