Resonant Texts: Sounds of the American Public Library

ABSTRACT

Public libraries have long been associated with silence and order. Historians have argued that the architecture of library buildings has served in disciplining patrons into silent reading subjects. I argue that, in light of evolving, subjective definitions of and responses to noise, changing philosophies of librarianship and library design and the proliferation of media formats and the sounds they emit, we need to consider new ways of thinking about sound in the library, not as something to be eliminated or controlled, but as something to be orchestrated, and even designed for. In order to do so, I propose that we consider first what sounds people, buildings and media make, and then use architectural design to promote their cooperative interaction.     

LOUD silence: Turning Up the Volume on Deaf Voice

Abstract

From 2014 to 2015, I curated an exhibition entitled LOUD silence, which was held in two different venues in California: Grand Central Arts Center at California State University Fullerton, followed by gallery@Calit2 at the University of California, San Diego. The exhibition offered the opportunity for viewers to consider definitions of sound, voice, and notions of silence at the intersection of both deaf and hearing experiences. The exhibition displayed prints, drawings, sculptures, videos, and several film installations, and featured work by four artists who have different relationships to deafness and hearing, including Shary Boyle, Christine Sun Kim, Darrin Martin and Alison O’Daniel. These four artists explored how the binary of loudness and silence might be transformed in politicized ways through their own specificities, similarities and differences in relationship to communication and language. The stereotypical view of the deaf experience is that they live a life of total silence, where they retain little to no concept of sound. But on the contrary, deaf studies scholars Carol Padden and Tom Humphries state that deaf people actually know a lot about sound, and sound informs and inhabits their world just as much as the next person (Padden and Humphries 1998: 91).Through these artworks, the artists aimed to loudly explode the myth of a silent deaf world, and they troubled just how “inaudible” sound really is through their own visceral experiences of it. Ultimately, I argue that the work in LOUD silence offers an avenue for eradicating deaf oppression.     

Situational,Cultural and Societal Identities: Analysing Subject Positions as Classifications,Participant Roles,Viewpoints and Interactive Positions

In this article I develop tools for analyzing the identities that emerge in qualitative material. I approach identities as historically, socially and culturally produced subject positions, as processes that are in a constant state of becoming and that receive their temporary stability and meaning in concrete contexts and circumstances. I suggest that the identities and subject positions that materialize in qualitative material can be analyzed from four different perspectives. They can be approached by focusing on (1) classifications that define the boundary lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as (2) participant roles that refer to the temporal aspect of subject positions and outline their meaning for action, as (3) structures of viewpoint and focalization that frame meaning and order to opinions and experiences of the world, and as (4) interactive positions that articulate the roles and identities taken by the participants of communication.     

The Flesh and the World: Intercorporeal Body-selves,Ageing and Dancing

ABSTRACT

In this paper I address the role that embodiment, embodied consciousness and what can be termed “extradiscursive” experiences such as body memory and ekstasis as a form of ecstatic experience assume in understanding the body-self of mature dancers. I argue that the body-self of the dancer becomes increasingly intersubjective in maturity through her/his bodily practice, and that this can be understood in terms of the notions of intercorporeity, and of the “flesh” derived from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. I argue that ways of manifestation of intercorporeity in bodily experience are discursively elusive, drawing on two forms of bodily experience—body memory and ekstasis—and examining experiences narrated by mature dancers who were interviewed in my Ph. D. study on ageing, gender and dancers' bodies. I contend that the experience of ekstasis is the “glue” of a corporeal subjectivity that transforms itself through momentary identification with the world, that calls on the invisible as well as the visible. Body memory also challenges Western dualist conceptions of consciousness and bodily experience, and is more easily aligned with Eastern understandings of consciousness as embodied. Finally, I suggest that the concept of body memory is useful for imbuing the body-subject with a cohesion and authenticity through the body's capacity for nonconscious remembrance of movement through a proprioceptively stored “body history,” which enables the constitution of a coherent body-self in older age.     

Engaging the public in policy development: The national bioethics advisory commission report on research involving persons with mental disorders that may affect decisionmaking capacity

U.S. bioethics commissions have used a variety of methods to involve the public. All share a common requirement: as federal advisory committees they are required to comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the federal law established during the Nixon administration which provides the public with an assurance that groups established by the government to advise the government should be publicly accountable. This paper will describe some of the ways the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) sought to involve the public in its report on Research Involving Persons with Mental Disorders that May Affect Decisionmaking Capacity.     

Managing the science in the presence of financial conflict of interest

ABSTRACT

We consider the question of why (primarily) and how (secondarily) to perform scientific oversight of research performed by investigators with a financial conflict of interest (COI). One way to frame the trade-off of having investigators with financial COI participate in research is through a decision rule: “Our institution is willing for financially conflicted investigators to participate in research around their intellectual property if (a) the science is likely to be significantly better with their participation (or if other significant benefits accrue); and (b) the COI can be adequately managed”.

A key component of COI management is the demonstration that the underlying science is sufficiently rigorous and transparent, and in turn, a scientific oversight plan is a key element of that demonstration. Scientific oversight plans should be proactively generated, by individuals (i.e., scientific reviewers) who are independent and expert, and they should assess the rigor and transparency of the research, in a fashion which is fair and efficient.

Abbreviations: COI: conflict of interest; SOP: scientific oversight plan     

'She cried a very little': Death,grief and mourning in working-class culture,c . 1880-1914

Working-class attitudes towards death and bereavement in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain have overwhelmingly been discussed in terms of the respectable and the pauper funeral. Analyses of the culture of grief (that is, the emotional responses of the working classes to bereavement) have been reduced to an assumption that material insecurity blunted sensibility. This article argues that the reduction of working-class responses to death to a dichotomy between respectable and pauper funerals has overlooked the cathartic function of the funeral, negated the potential for individuals to invest burial rites with personal meaning, and failed to consider responses to death outside public mourning rites. I contend that languages of grief adopted many verbal and symbolic signs that were often ephemeral to the external observer. Moreover, material anxiety did not limit sensibility; it necessitated flexibility in the articulation of emotion. In conclusion, I argue that the emotional underpinnings of the working-class family need to be re-examined, using a definition of sensibility which acknowledges the mutability of feeling and the malleability of its expression.     

Commitment of Private and Public Agency Workers to Child Welfare: How Long Do They Plan to Stay?

ABSTRACT

Method: Child welfare professionals completing training to work in foster care were asked about reasons for taking their child welfare position, commitment to their agencies, and commitment to child welfare. Analyses compared responses from new public agency foster care workers (N = 100), public agency workers making lateral transfers to foster care (N = 64), and new private foster care workers (N = 105).

Results: Private agency foster care workers were less committed to their agencies and to child welfare and more likely to have taken the position because it was the only one available.

Conclusions: The practice by public child welfare of outsourcing foster care services to private agencies needs to be evaluated. This practice may not benefit children in care and may create organizational problems for agencies.     

Animated Spaces

ABSTRACT

Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum—to portray architecture as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of the material landscape that impacts people's everyday lives. Yet, again, the “white cube” complicates curators' and exhibition designers' efforts to go beyond traditional materials—blueprints, renderings, models, and photographs—to convey the dimensionality and material richness of built space. This article will examine how interaction design and architecture, both experiential fields, present unique challenges to the exhibition designer. It will also consider how these fields, by virtue of the distinctive qualities of their designed objects, offer unique opportunities for us to rethink the relationships between the contexts and contents of exhibition. It will conclude with specific recommendations for ascertaining the limitations and affordances of—and critically negotiating between—the exhibition space, the exhibition's publics, and exhibition modes and media.     

Seeing touch and touching sight: a reflection on the tactility of vision

ABSTRACT

The article explores the reciprocal relationship between images and viewers by considering the relationship between the senses of sight and touch. I argue that images touch viewers at the same time that viewers touch images. Taking Casilda Sánchez video work, As Inside as the Eye can See as a point of departure, this article explores the ways in which a viewer’s encounter with the work can be understood as tactile rather than merely visual. Precisely because the work is visibly obsessed with the sense of sight it provides an intriguing entry point into discussions around the tactility of visual experience. Even though a person does not physically interact with this video by means of actual touch, our relationship with it is fundamentally tactile. In order to make this argument, I draw on theoretical positions that deal with the embodiment of perception, phenomenology and haptic visuality. Finally, with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s theories on vision as touch, I show how a viewer’s embodied response to the video contributes to its critical potential which unfolds from this rich experiential and tactile encounter.     

Singing with Durham Cathedral: exploring the relationship between architecture and singing

ABSTRACT

Acoustically, cathedrals can be challenging spaces. The long reverberation lengths created make singing well without prior knowledge of the building an almost impossible task. It is necessary then to understand and work with the building to achieve the sounds expected during services. Taking influence from the question of whether architecture can be heard, the article explores how singers in Durham Cathedral maintain an embodied awareness of their relationship with the building. Furthermore, it argues that the music used in Durham Cathedral developed symbiotically, emerging from a material engagement between singers and the building. The article concludes that the sound of worship cannot simply be a performance in Durham Cathedral, but a performance with Durham Cathedral as the singers works through an embodied knowledge of the architecture and its unique traits.     

Strawberry feel forever: understanding metaphor as sensorimotor dynamics

ABSTRACT

Metaphor is a useful way of explaining how to do things. The literature on metaphor in the learning of physical skill has generally explicated its efficacy by examining its actionable directives for motor enactment. And yet from the perspectives of phenomenological philosophy, ecological psychology, and enactivism, action is immanently intertwined with perception, so that models of metaphor-based learning should foreground the role of sensory activity modulating motor behavior. As such, metaphor is retheorized as a sensorial constraint one imaginarily projects into one’s action–perception phenomenological landscape. I present two metaphors from an instructional video on cello technique. Whereas these metaphors are couched in action language (what one should do), their potential impact, I argue, lies in emergent goal sensations (what one should feel). These explorative sensorimotor accommodations may, in turn, bring forth yet new scopes of latent sensations coupled to unanticipated performance possibilities, which suggest further modifying and calibrating enactment in the target domain. Attending to, achieving, and maintaining emergent intermediary goal sensations regulates instrumented action by forging new affordances that bring forth new motor coordination. As teacher and student co-imagine images for action, they should attend to sensory perceptions. And the same goes for scholars of metaphor.     

Sensing Voice

ABSTRACT

Through a consideration of the underwater singing practiced by contemporary American soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper, this article addresses the inherent relation between materiality and the voice, the sensed and the embodied. I focus on the physical and sensory properties of singers' and listeners' bodies; the space within and the matter through which sound disperses; and how the relation between these aspects plays an integral part in what it feels like to sing, and what it is possible to hear. I aim to demonstrate that a sensory reading of singing and listening may capture dimensions of the voice that are difficult, if not impossible, to account for using conventional analyses of music or standard readings of vocal repertoire. However, a sensory approach to sound does not offer a stable explanation of what sound or music is. Instead each such account unveils a composite manifestation of our understanding of sound at a given moment in time and space.     

Urban art as platforms for bodily engagement and social encounters: the Modified Social Benches

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of the Modified Social Benches, a series of urban artworks, as platforms for bodily engagement and social encounters in open, outdoor urban spaces. Special attention is given to a couple of salient aspects involving both the design of the artworks and their social appropriation: (a) the different levels of sensory and kinesthetic engagement afforded by the benches, and (b) how these material qualities reflect in the urban space around the benches, lending the artworks a notorious social character. The social and the bodily dimensions are presented as intertwined characteristics of the Modified Social Benches. In order to explore these relationships, the paper highlights a set of key concepts, such as social encounters and affordances, as well as the notions of performance and engagement.     

Examining Cost Fulfillment: Child Care Policy and Strategies

ABSTRACT

Most advanced industrialized countries have established social support to aid families in balancing productive and reproductive labor during child-bearing years. Secondary data analysis was used to examine patterns of public support for low-income working families. Key findings highlight four types of policy strategies (Conservative, Limited, Average, and Universal) suggesting differentiated social citizenship opportunities based on place of residence. This research highlights how a complex policy environment contributes to unintended consequences as the working poor are exposed to child care and employment instability. Future research should consider how the policy environment contributes to material well-being in families during the life course.     

The influence of childhood personality and environment and onset of the psychosis on recovery from dementia praecox 1

Beyond Ego Psychology: Developmental Object Relations Theory. Rubin and Gertrude Blanck. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.)

The Perilous Bridge: Helping Clients Through Mid‐Life Transitions. Naomi Golan. (New York: The Free Press, 1986.)

Progress in Self Psychology (Vol. I). Arnold Goldberg (Ed.). (New York: Guilford Press, 1985.)     

Bridges

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body, and a city's industrial architecture. It takes as its fieldwork site the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges that dominate downtown New York, and uses this to present an ethnographic understanding of lived experience as a continuous sensory exchange between mind, body, and world. New York's bridges, towering 300 feet into the air and 7,000 feet across, established a new sense of scale against which citizens could compare their finite, organic bodies. The article draws upon a practice-based research project, New York Stories, for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers as they moved around the city. People's movement across bridges, reveals them to be complex sites of perception, sensation, and experience, which generate ongoing streams of interior dialogue ranging from the trivial to the tragic. For when walking across a bridge people are no longer attached to the land or part of the city but are instead partially in the sky above the water, “making strange” the sense of being on the ground, and subjecting people to various delirious effects including vertigo, flying, and falling, before reaching the other side. It is a story told through words and images in the form of a photo-essay with accompanying text that derives from the practice-based ethnography that is also available in video and audible form online.     

Empowering Battered Women by Validating Their Decision-Making Skills

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate levels of moral reasoning among a sample of battered women and compare them with a national normative sample.

Method: The study involved collecting Defining Issues Test (DIT) data from 50 women (age, M = 33, SD = 10) beginning their stay at a shelter for battered women. Unlike the original method of assessing moral reasoning involving a lengthy interview, the DIT is a multiple-choice test. Consequently, it is easy to administer and score and, over the last 20 years, it has become the most widely used instrument for assessing moral reasoning.

Results: Analysis indicated that the battered women comprising the sample were employing levels of moral reasoning comparable with the national normative sample.

Conclusion: Implications of the findings for countering arguments that battered women are morally immature in the way in which they approach the stay/leave decision were explored and discussed.