Disrupted Bodies: Experiencing the Newly Limited Body in Stroke

This article explores the intersection of recovery and bodily practices among stroke survivors. Drawing on the extensive literature on the socially constructed body in general, on chronic illness, and on interactionist thought, we explore bodily experience as a mechanism that informs stroke survivors' understanding and practices of everyday life in recovery. We ask a central question: what practical mechanisms does the survivor employ to provide meaning to her or his newly disrupted body? Data gathered from in‐depth interviews with fifty‐one discharged stroke survivors show that they use three specific technologies of bodily management and meaning‐making. These are managing the body within a mind‐body dualism, testing the body in its everyday practices, and orienting to the body as a biographically informed phenomenon.     

Feeling Europe: political emotion,knowledge, and support for the European Union

Theories of political emotion suggest that feelings towards an issue or candidate are often better predictors for support than attitudes or preferences. We investigate whether this conjecture also holds for more abstract political entities, such as the European Union (EU), and test whether EU citizens’ feelings toward the EU are significant predictors of their EU support. We first review existing research and provide theory-driven propositions of how positive and negative emotion may influence EU-related attitudes. Second, using multilevel regression models fitted to Eurobarometer data, we estimate how feelings toward the EU are associated with support for the EU. In line with our hypotheses, analyses show that positive emotions are positively associated with EU-support, while negative affect is negatively associated with it. Contrary to some theoretical predictions, however, these effects are not mediated by individuals’ use of EU-related information.     

Training Bodies,Building Status: Negotiating Gender and Age Differences in the U.S. Fitness Industry

What role does the body play in facilitating interaction across status differences? Whereas previous scholarly work has focused on “roles” and “specialized knowledge,” I investigate how bodies, appearances, and physical abilities are also consequential in these exchanges through the concept of “bodily capital.” Coined by Bourdieu, bodily capital provides a way to understand why individuals invest time, energy, and resources into their bodies, and what they expect to receive in return. As a concept, bodily capital is necessarily broad as it encompasses a variety of forms, including athletic prowess, attractiveness, physique, muscle tone/strength, agility, and other modes of embodiment. Because the body is integral to a variety of status distinction-making processes, individuals invest in and exchange bodily capital to increase their relative status in specific fields. Drawing on interviews with 26 personal trainers and 25 clients, as well as more than one year of participant observation, I find that trainers and clients use bodily capital to negotiate gender and age differences, either by re-arranging interactional power dynamics or resisting stereotypes. The type of bodily capital that allows for such negotiations to take place, however, is the hegemonic thin-toned ideal—a classed and largely raced form of bodily capital that has purchase in the U.S. fitness industry. Although individuals in the study were able to use this form of capital to enable successful cross-status interactions, doing so reified the dominance of middle-class, white bodily aesthetics. Thus, while bodily capital may challenge some status hierarchies, it reinforces others.     

Integrated Emotion Processing in Infancy: Matching of Faces and Bodies

Accurate assessment of emotion requires the coordination of information from different sources such as faces, bodies, and voices. Adults readily integrate facial and bodily emotions. However, not much is known about the developmental origin of this capacity. Using a familiarization paired‐comparison procedure, 6.5‐month‐olds in the current experiments were familiarized to happy, angry, or sad emotions in faces or bodies and tested with the opposite image type portraying the familiar emotion paired with a novel emotion. Infants looked longer at the familiar emotion across faces and bodies (except when familiarized to angry images and tested on the happy/angry contrast). This matching occurred not only for emotions from different affective categories (happy, angry) but also within the negative affective category (angry, sad). Thus, 6.5‐month‐olds, like adults, integrate emotions from bodies and faces in a fairly sophisticated manner, suggesting rapid development of emotion processing early in life.     

Power Eliminates the Influence of Body Posture on Facial Emotion Recognition

We investigated how power priming affects facial emotion recognition in the context of body postures conveying the same or different emotion. Facial emotions are usually recognized better when the face is presented with a congruent body posture, and recognized worse when the body posture is incongruent. In our study, we primed participants to either low, high, or neutral power prior to their performance in a facial-emotion categorization task in which faces were presented together with a congruent or incongruent body posture. Facial emotion recognition in high-power participants was not affected by body posture. In contrast, low-power and neutral-power participants were significantly affected by the congruence of facial and body emotions. Specifically, these participants displayed better facial emotion recognition when the body posture was congruent, and worse performance when the body posture was incongruent. In a following task, we trained the same participants to categorize two sets of novel checkerboard stimuli and then engaged them in a recognition test involving compounds of these stimuli. High, low, and neutral-power participants all showed a strong congruence effect for compound checkerboard stimuli. We discuss our results with reference to the literature on power and social perception.     

Emotional streaming and transconnectivity: Skype and emotion practices in transnational families in Ireland

In this article I explore how transnational families, living in Ireland, use Skype to stay in touch with their loved ones. From 2010 to 2012, data were collected from a purposive, but broad sample of 36 qualitative ethnographic interviews with mixed couples (one partner identifies as Irish and one does not), throughout various parts of the Republic of Ireland. I outline how the use of Skype allows transnational families to create spaces of transconnectivity as they practise simultaneous and ongoing belonging across significant temporal and geographic distances. This affects how people ‘do’ emotions. These emotion practices often consist not only of ‘affect storage’ but also of what I call emotional streaming, promoting ongoing interaction over distance, which includes keeping Skype turned on for long periods of time. Through these attempts to try to recreate everyday practices via continuous use of Skype, transnational emotions of love and longing are deintensified.     

‘Do I Still Belong Here?’ The Body's Boundary Work in the Israeli Fat Acceptance Movement

Boundary work is important in all social movements, but the instability of bodily-based categories makes boundary work particularly complicated in movements where bodily attributes are key to identity formation. Many Anglo-American fat acceptance groups have attempted to draw boundaries on the basis of two ‘ideal fat subjects’: one with a stable, unitary ‘resisting’ consciousness and/or one based on excluding those who are not ‘really’ fat or fat ‘enough.’ The former excludes members who display ambiguity or ambivalence in relation to accepting their bodies, while the latter excludes members seen as not fat enough to participate. In contrast, the Israeli fat acceptance community establishes its boundaries based on shared negative social reactions to body size. This increases its ability to tolerate ambiguity and contradictions among members, and to accept members who do not fit into fixed bodily identity categories. Simultaneously, this collective identity poses other problems, like reducing members to their identity as fat and encouraging constant preoccupation with weight or social oppression based on body size.     

Robots and cyborgs: to be or to have a body?

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently "feel" and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology in order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body.     

The 'negotiated night': an embodied conceptual framework for the sociological study of sleep

Sleep is essential for our health and well‐being but it has, historically, been the subject of little sociological study. Yet sleep is not, as common sense would have us believe, ‘asocial inaction’. Like our waking lives, it is a time of interaction. The sociology of sleep presently exists in a state similar to the early stages of development of the sociology of the body, waiting for something like Frank's (1991 ) typology of body action, which served as a heuristic guide through which action and its multifaceted components could be understood. This paper argues that one productive analytical framework is to adapt Watson's (2000 ) ‘male body schema’ for the sociological investigation of sleep. This revolves around four interrelated forms of embodiment: normative (opinions and perceptions about healthy sleep behaviour); pragmatic (‘normal’ as related to social role); experiential (feelings related to sleep); and visceral (the biological body and sleep). The possibilities this model provides for the sociology of sleep is illustrated in the paper through the analysis of a case study of sleep negotiation between a couple.     

Eating Disorder Treatment as a Process of Mind–Body Integration: Special Challenges for Women

The concept of body image remains too focused on internal representation and not enough on internal experiencing. Body image is but one expression of the more foundational body self. When an eating disorder is conceptualized as an attempt to manage an impaired sense of body self (and associated disregulation), the ultimate goal of treatment becomes embodiment. The eating disordered body must be worked with as an actual as well as symbolic body and understood within its own developmental trajectory. The gender-specificity of eating disorders is explored by focusing on three particular bodily challenges for females in our society: (1) Women are more likely than men to unconsciously use their bodies as repositories for their dissociated need and desire, (2) girls’ bodies are mirrored in a more distorted and overstimulating manner than boys’ and (3) because girls are the same biological sex as their usual primary caretakers, they are more likely to be used as narcissistic extensions. A clinical example is presented, illustrating the influence of these female bodily challenges on the development of body self and eating disorders and how these issues play out in treatment. An intensive clinical focus on the patient’s and therapist’s body states allows for the desomatization and integration of dissociated affect, resulting in a more integrated body–mind self and a decreased need for an eating disorder.     

Working with emotion: Issues for the researcher in fieldwork and teamwork

This paper addresses the role of emotion in the qualitative research process and in particular, the effects of emotional experiences on the researcher. Drawing briefly on the literature, we show the importance of emotion for understanding the research process. Whilst this literature acknowledges the emotional risk for research respondents, there is little evidence providing in-depth understanding of the emotions of the researcher. We consider theoretically and empirically, the significance of emotion throughout the duration of a research project. Using our own personal experiences in the field, we present a range of emotional encounters that qualitative researchers may face. We offer suggestions for research teams who wish to develop strategies for 'managing' emotion and effectively utilizing 'emotionally-sensed knowledge'. We conclude that unless emotion in research is acknowledged, not only will researchers be left vulnerable, but also our understandings of the social world will remain impoverished. The challenge therefore is how to construct meaning and develop understanding and knowledge in an academic environment that, on the whole, trains researchers to be rational and objective, and 'extract out' emotion.     

The Anthropology of Empty Spaces

We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our reflections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-reflexive and self-reflective. This text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the field. The anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other, a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. The researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is just the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While anthropologically moving around different organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations.     

Translocality,Network Structure,and Music Worlds: Underground Metal in the United Kingdom

Translocal music worlds are often defined as networks of local music worlds. However, their networked character and more especially their network structure is generally assumed rather than concretely mapped and explored. Formal social network analysis (SNA) is beginning to attract interest in music sociology but it has not previously been used to explore a translocal music world. In this paper, drawing upon a survey of the participation of 474 enthusiasts in 148 live music events, spread across 6 localities, we use SNA to explore a significant “slice” of the network structure of the U.K.'s translocal underground heavy metal world. Translocality is generated in a number of ways, we suggest, but one way, the way we focus upon, involves audiences traveling between localities to attend gigs and festivals. Our analysis of this network uncovers a core‐periphery structure which, we further find, maps onto locality. Not all live events enjoy equal standing in our music world and some localities are better placed to capture more prestigious events, encouraging inward travel. The identification of such structures, and the inequality they point to, is, we believe, one of several benefits of using SNA to analyze translocal music worlds.     

Spiritual but not religious seek unrestricted connection to selves,others, and earth: Formative research on the explosive growth of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization

In the last half century, we have observed an explosive growth in individuals who identify as spiritual but not religious. Today, over one in four U.S. adults fall into this category. This phenomenon is an influential component of our modern and changing society, as spiritual beliefs are associated with health, well-being, goals, feelings, and attitudes. In this formative research study, we apply the public relations’ approach of Sense-Making of an ‘inactive public’ beyond the organization to explore how these individuals define themselves, how their beliefs influence their behaviors (such as political, environmental, communal) and how they feel they are perceived by those around them. Amongst others, our main findings reveal that the spiritual but not religious have disparate specific beliefs and often struggle or resist articulating who they are, yet more broadly share a common belief in connection to others, the natural environment, and one’s self. The majority emphasize acceptance, tolerance, compassion, and the importance of each individual embracing their own spiritual positions. The participants report feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, or ignored by others and media, and that their behaviors (perspective on the world, actions, political ideologies, etc) are influenced by their spiritual beliefs.     

Four-wheel drivescapes: Embodied understandings of the Kimberley

In this paper, we explore understandings of the Kimberley as wilderness through the embodied knowledge of sites encountered on the travels of four-wheel drivers. We critically review attempts to conceptualise the social role of automobiles in touring practices then turn to non-representational theory to develop our own conceptual framework of four-wheel drivescapes. Our use of this term acknowledges that understandings of the world are fashioned by our bodily situatedness in, and towards the world. Through the vantage point provided by four-wheel drive technologies, tourists are engaged in generating embodied understandings of tourism destinations through an ongoing process of defining, experiencing, interpreting and responding to human and non-human worlds. We trace the means by which the emobodied knowledge of tourists who travel through the Kimberley by four-wheel drive becomes integral to their understanding of this place as wilderness. Our results suggest how two separate, yet intersecting four-wheel drivescapes of luxury and hardship reconfigure normative ideas of the outback as wilderness.     

THE BODY AND CITIZENSHIP IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH: Embodied Performances and the Deracialized Self in the Black Civil Rights Movement 1961–1965

In political and cultural theory, the body has been central to our understandings of political power, yet, the body remains absent in social movement research. This article examines the role of the body in social movements, focusing on how social movements shape bodily postures and techniques of affective self-mastery to represent idealized citizenship. Based on archival data and the concepts of performativity and performance, I use the cases of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Citizenship Schools and Role-Playing Simulations and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Community Centers to show how the deracialized body was materialization of liberal civic culture that sought to: (1) severe identification with the racial group in favor of identifying with an idealized national identity; and (2) change what counts as good citizenship to change who counts as good citizens. I analyze the movement's pedagogy focusing on the ritualized repetition of embodied movements that deracialized the black political body by embedding idealized citizenship into bodily postures, which increased the probability for a successful performance. Although the deracialized body was vital to the passage of the national legislation, it served to hide geographical and economic differences within the black population, producing the false correlation of national policy change with local change.