Learning (to) taste: food,aesthetics, and education in early modern France

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersection between taste and education in the early modern period. The first part investigates the close connection between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony, highlighting taste’s close association with food disorders in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Silencing taste was by then a key aspect of the education of the body, which needed to be learned from the earliest age, at home as well as at school. The second part charts the rise of a moderate and honest gourmandise from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, accompanied by the invention of the polite bon goût and later the aesthetic taste of beauty, which contributed to a new social valorization of taste, while also complicating contemporary practices of learning (to) taste. Using a wide variety of early modern printed sources, including conduct books, religious and moral treatises, books of emblems, and treatises on the senses and on taste in particular, as well as aesthetic works, this paper sheds light on the multiple ways in which taste – of the body as much as of the mind – was used, learned, and displayed, hence revealing a transformation of the experience and understanding of taste throughout the early modern period, as well as its impact on educational practices.     

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.     

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.     

Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

Pictures of you: God images,gun ownership,and empowerment in the United States

Objective

In the current study, we seek to shed new light on the role of religion in American gun culture by considering whether images people hold of God affect the probability of gun ownership and the experience of empowerment through guns for religious Americans (i.e., the extent to which owners derive security, identity, and status from their guns).

Methods

We analyze nationally representative data from the 2021 Baylor Religion Survey in the United States. Binary logistic and ordinary least squares regression models were used.

Results

We failed to observe any associations between God images and gun ownership. However, among gun owners (n = 430), belief in an engaged God was associated with lower levels of gun empowerment, while belief in a judgmental God was associated with higher levels.

Conclusion

God images may contribute to the experience of empowerment through guns by representing spiritual connection and intimacy or divine anger and retribution. We suggest that future research delve deeper into the intersection of God images and gun-related beliefs and behaviors.     

Enhancing the experience of food and drink via neuroscience-inspired olfactory design

Abstract

Olfactory cues, both orthonasal (when we inhale) and retronasal (when we swallow/breathe out from the back of the nose), play a crucial role in the experience, and enjoyment, of food and drink. However, the design of product packaging glassware, and even plateware has typically not been optimized to deliver the ideal orthonasal hit. This review highlights a number of recent attempts by packaging manufacturers to improve the orthonasal experience for the consumer. The various ways in which modernist chefs, molecular mixologists, culinary artists, and designers have been playing with the delivery of both foreground and background aromas and scents in order to complement the dishes and drinks they serve is also examined. Finally, I highlight some of the ways that technology may be used to deliver food aromas in the future, and stress the need for more research in order to determine whether enhanced olfactory design (e.g. in scent-enabled cutlery and packaging) may one day be used to help nudge consumers toward healthier eating behaviours. The important distinction between natural and synthetic (or better said, between perceived natural vs. perceived synthetic) aromas is also discussed, as this will likely play an important role in determining the future uptake of such innovative olfactory delivery solutions.     

Forensic Examination of Questioned Scientific Images

This paper discusses the Office of Research Integrity's (ORI) experience from its oversight review of institutional scientific misconduct cases involving questioned images, provides illustrative examples of computer image processing techniques with an explanation of how the image analysis contributed to the final misconduct determination in specific cases, and reports a compilation of some generic features of 35 ORI cases (1989-2001). The absolute and the relative incidence of cases with questioned images has increased over the last decade, as has the use of computers for presentation of the questioned image data. To date, ORI has seen no cases of de novo fabrication of images, and fortunately, in most cases the appearance of the questioned image has been quite secondary to the original basis for challenging its authenticity. The survey of cases indicates that good laboratory practices and, notably, attention to mentoring could have minimized the scope of the scientific misconduct when the act of falsification occurred.     

Making sense of HIV/AIDS: Pascal de Duve and the sensitive historian of education1

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s historians, in general, have increasingly engaged in critical analyses of the emergence and development of what has come to be known as ‘the HIV/AIDS pandemic’. Historians of education have also become interested in the role-played by education in the history of HIV/AIDS. Although the existing educational histories have successfully examined the multiple and far-reaching power structures that helped shape the educational responses to the disease, I will argue that their focus on ideological and geopolitical power structures runs the risk of losing sight of the crucial and often sensorial responses of individuals who have played a part in the educational history of HIV/AIDS. One such individual is the Flemish philosopher Pascal de Duve, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1989. De Duve’s particular approach to the disease clearly illustrate the importance of the senses in how people attributed particular meanings to HIV/AIDS. Knowing that this approach would prove surprising to both his readership and to his wider television audience, de Duve employed sensory experiences and modes of communication (for instance, gesture) to educative ends. I conclude that an intersensorial approach to the past will render historians of education more sensitive to unexpected personal responses towards HIV/AIDS to unexpected personal responses towards HIV/AIDS.     

The Understanding and Use of Reflection in Family Support Social Work

ABSTRACT

Previous research emphasizes the need for reflection in complex, dynamic practices, like social work. However, increased governance of the public sector and welfare state has caused a reform, which in turn has affected the layout and conditions of work. Private sector control ideals and ideas from the auditing system have led to a new focus. It is argued that we should subordinate practice approaches – characterized by reflection, proven experience, and tacit knowledge – to manual-based treatment, evaluations, and assessments. This study aims at understanding the role of reflection in social work by investigating its use and valuation by family support social workers. Opportunities and resources for reflection are another focus. Focus group interviews (n = 40) were used to produce data. The need for reflection to conduct highly qualitative social work became evident. The question is not whether to reflect or not, rather how this best can be done, given current time constraints. Reflection was considered a coping mechanism, offering a sense of professional legitimacy. Organizational changes seem to impact on time for reflection. However, when enabling process, learning, and development, it can be argued that reflection is beneficial for several parties. Therefore, reflection requires continued emphasis, highlighting its potential benefits.     

Spiritual Histories and Native Americans: A Mixed Method Validation Study

ABSTRACT

Although spirituality plays a central role in health and wellness for many Native Americans, surprisingly few spiritual assessment tools have been validated with this population. This mixed-method study modifies an existing spiritual assessment tool—spiritual histories—that may be particularly congruent with Native American culture. Using a sample of recognized experts in Native culture (N = 50), the study identifies: (a) the degree of cultural consistency, strengths, and limitations of the tool, conceptually, and (b) a culturally valid question protocol to operationalize the concept for use with Native clients. The findings are discussed in light of recent accrediting requirements mandating the administration of spiritual assessments in numerous settings and suggestions are provided to administer the assessment in a culturally competent manner.     

New Zealand’s engagement with the Five Ways to Wellbeing: evidence from a large cross-sectional survey

ABSTRACT

The Five Ways to Wellbeing were developed in 2008 as a set of simple daily practices for individuals to improve their wellbeing. While there is some evidence to support the association between individual practices and wellbeing, it is unknown whether engaging in multiple practices – and in certain combinations – is associated with higher levels of wellbeing. A survey was undertaken with 10,012 adults throughout Aotearoa, New Zealand, to assess individual wellbeing and participation in the Five Ways to Wellbeing (Connect, Give, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Be Active). Wellbeing was assessed with the Flourishing Scale (Md?=?46, IQR 39–49). Three objectives explored the cross-sectional association between the Five ways to Wellbeing and wellbeing: (1) multiple wellbeing practices and wellbeing, (2) clustering of multiple wellbeing practices, and (3) wellbeing practices as predictors of wellbeing. Results show that levels of wellbeing increased with each additional practice (rho?=?.53, p?<?.001), regardless of the combination. However, the most important predictors of wellbeing were Keep Learning (β?=?.23, p?<?.001) and Take Notice (β?=?.22, p?<?.001). Studies investigating ways to increase participation in the Five Ways to Wellbeing are warranted to promote wellbeing in Aotearoa.     

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.     

Feeling the unseen: imagined touch perceptions in paranormal reality television

ABSTRACT

In paranormal reality television, the medial evidence of senses adding to the visual and auditory may produce the most compelling intermedial experience. When little can be seen or heard, the lasting impact of a ghost hunting show may rely on what it makes the audience feel through the sense of touch. Even if the touch perceptions were imagined – or precisely because they were imagined – the experience can be all the more powerful. Intermediality research supplies the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and hypotyposis as tools for a study of the television show Ghost Adventures. A definition of senses as media is advanced in conjunction with a three-tier model of mediality to lay open the intermedial experience involved in imagined touch perceptions as medium-specific instances of rhetorical figuration.     

Ethical Beliefs of Social Work Researchers

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the beliefs of social work researchers about ethical practices. Surveys were mailed to a random sample of 240 members of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) to elicit their views about ethical practices in social work research. Responses from 160 members (67% response rate) yielded information regarding the appropriateness of dual relationships, authorship practices, informed consent procedures, and other conduct in social work research. Age, gender, educational level, years of social work research experience, and current teaching of social work research were related to respondents' ethical views about practices with students and sexual relationships with research subjects. The need for additional resources on ethics in social work research is highlighted.     

“Precedent” in the Narrative of Chinese Legal History

中国法律史叙事中，以西方概念体系为基本框架的填充式方法，值得深入反思。中外学者关注的“判例”堪为典型。这一近代概念很可能来自日文汉字，用以迻译西文。回顾西欧英、法两国的历史和现实，判例作为以个案方式凝聚法律群体共识、指引未来案件裁决的形式，始终具有重要作用。这一功能，与中国古代法中的相关制度有部分共通之处，可以成为构建普适理论体系的基础之一；同时，中国的相关制度具有特定的体制背景和功能。将普适功能与特定功能相结合，“双向功能主义”可能可以避免西方中心和概念纠结，转向功能性问题的探讨和解释，以逐步构建中国法律史叙事的新框架。

关键词: 法律史学方法论?判例?功能主义

The traditional way of describing the history of Chinese law, i.e., fitting Chinese historical materials into the basic framework of the Western conceptual system needs to be thoroughly reconsidered. “Precedent” or “判例” (panli), which has attracted academic attention both in China and abroad, can serve as an example in this regard. The concept “判例,” which may have originated from Japanese kanji in the nineteenth century, was used to translate its Western counterpart. A review of the historical and modern practice of the Western European countries of England and France shows that precedent has always played an important role in achieving consensus in the legal community and guiding future rulings by means of case law. This function, which has something in common with the relevant portions of ancient Chinese legal institutions, can serve as a foundation for constructing a universal theoretical system. At the same time, the relevant Chinese institutions had specific institutional contexts and functions. By combining universal and specific functional analysis, “two‐way functionalism” may be able to avoid the Western‐centric approach and futile conceptual discrimination and turn towards the exploration and elucidation of functional issues, so as to eventually establish a new framework for the narrative of Chinese legal history.     

Caregiver's Spirituality and Its Influence on Maintaining the Elderly and Disabled in a Home Environment

ABSTRACT

This study examined the role that faith-based organizations play for caregivers in maintaining the elderly and disabled in their homes. The study explored if persons who use religious beliefs and practices cope with caregiver stress better than those who do not use religious beliefs and practices. The study also explored the role of religious coping as a factor affecting decisions to institutionalize, and the role that faith-based practices and organizations play in helping caregivers maintain the elderly and disabled in their homes.     

Cash-Flow and Savings Practices of Low-Income Households: Evidence From a Follow-Up Study of IDA Participants

ABSTRACT

Understanding how low-income households manage their finances is critical to designing effective antipoverty interventions. This study used data from a 2008 follow-up survey of 326 low-income households in Hawaii who participated in an Individual Development Account (IDA) intervention from 1999 to 2005. Self-reported cash flow (five items) and savings (four items) practices were explored using latent class analysis. Three latent classes were produced: Class 3 managed cash flows and saved (n = 166; 51%); Class 2 managed cash flows but did not save (n = 73; 22%); and Class 1 struggled to manage cash flows and save (n = 89; 27%). Using ordinal regression, psychological sense of mastery was positively and significantly (p < .01) related to being in a higher class membership (b = .14; OR = 1.15). IDA participation had no association with latent classification. The key finding is the heterogeneity among low-income financial management practices and the importance of providing individualized services. Future longitudinal research is needed to understand how IDA participation affects financial practices in the short term and long term.     

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.     

Contemplative Methods Meet Social Sciences: Back to Human Experience as It Is

The aim of this paper is to trace a pathway connecting contemplative knowledge and practices with the social sciences. Contemplative knowledge and practices offer material for reflection in social science even concerning their very foundation. I'll found an opportunity for meshing our disciplinary tools with this knowledge as I introduced it in a health promotion program. The result will be a transdisciplinary confluence of different lines of inquiry contributing to a new perspective of self and social action. First of all I will give a definition of contemplative knowledge and practices. Then, I will make a bridge between the contemplative approach and the social sciences, showing the contribution that symbolic interactionism can play. I will illustrate the perspective drawing on an action research program called Auriga aimed at smoking cessation and reduction among health professionals. The aim of this paper is focused on the specification of the conceptual background in which such kind of program has been developed. Finally, I outline some implications it could represent for what might be called transformative sociology. I believe that contemplative knowledge could contribute to disentangle some of the unanswered questions and concerns in the social sciences, once they dismiss for a while their scientistic perspective. The secular redefinition of tools mainly belonging to the wisdom traditions represents an innovation that can reshape what we intend by the self and experience, contributing to what is called the “social transformation from within,” a pragmatic and wise approach to change at any level.