This thesis investigates the intersection of physical and non-physical choreographic practices, culminating in a performed solo dance work titled Lilith. In a world increasingly consumed by virtual technology, the investigation is increasingly relevant to explore both in our personal lives and in the field of dance and choreography. This thesis examines the relationship between embodied and disembodied experiences while exploring the affect of these experiences on the mind cognitively and emotionally. In this thesis I investigate performances and written work about other choreographers’ investigations into computer-mediated methods of disembodying dance, laying the foundation for my own solo performance. Through experiential research into computer mediated-methods of altering choreography, I have explored the effect of non-physicalized ways of generating choreographic movement. I have equally investigated how a physically impulse driven movement has influenced the choreographic process. In the end, this work explores the tensional forces that lie between the physical and non-physical in a creative, choreographic process and attempts to find ways to create balance between the two. / text

Yes / Current dominant trends in the biological and psychological sciences tend to put emphasis on the role of the brain, cognition, and consciousness in realising emotional states and attempting to regulate them. In this article, I suggest an alternative approach with the idea that emotions emerge within social relations and give meaning and value to the situations in which we are located. Humans are understood as embodied emotional selves for who thought and emotion are intertwined. However, individuals can get caught in obsessive and compulsive thinking and feeling traps where the self loses touch with its emotions, and because of this also loses contact with the social situation and the ability to skilfully navigate it. In such circumstances, the self gets overwhelmed by emotion and loses its poise in the social setting. I consider Buddhist meditation as a technique through which people can develop a more reflexive emotional self, where reflexivity is not about control of emotion but owning one's feelings and being able to respond more sensitively and skilfully in various situations.

Embodied Cognition accounts propose that motor activation contributes to semantic representations in action language (Fischer & Zwaan, 2008). However, the nature of this activation remains largely unspecified: in particular, which processes result in relevant activation? Long-term motor experience (e.g., the comprehender’s dominant hand), short-term motor experience (e.g., the hand the comprehender has recently used), and action planning (e.g., the hand the comprehender is planning to use) are all potential candidates. This thesis uses a range of psycholinguistic methods (e.g., timed sentence-picture matching, two-alternative forced-choice sentence-picture matching, spoken sensibility judgements) to distinguish between these possibilities. A first set of experiments investigated how comprehenders’ handedness affects their interpretation of sentences describing manual actions (e.g., I am slicing the tomato). Participants matched sentences of actions to pictures of that action. The Body-Specificity Hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009; Willems, Hagoort, & Casasanto, 2010) predicts that right-handed and left-handed comprehenders will interpret manual action sentences differently, according to whether they would perform that action with their right or their left hand. However, we found that comprehenders appear to interpret manual action sentences according to the hand they use to respond to the task, and not the hand they would typically use to perform manual actions. In addition, this effect was stronger for first-person than third-person sentences, implying that the effect of motor activation is moderated by linguistic context. A second set of experiments used the same paradigm but manipulated at what point comprehenders knew which hand they would use to respond to the sentences: during sentence processing, or after sentence processing was complete. We replicated the finding that comprehenders interpret manual action sentences according to their response hand, and that this effect was stronger for first- than for third-person sentences; but only when comprehenders knew their response hand during sentence processing. In both sets of experiments, there was no effect of whether the picture of the action was presented from an egocentric or allocentric perspective, implying that action sentences are encoded for what effector (in this case, hand) will be used in the action, but not necessarily from what perspective the action will occur. A third set of experiments investigated the existence of a causal role of action planning-based activation on sentence processing. Many studies have shown an effect of language processing on action execution (e.g., Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Glenberg et al., 2008), but a fully embodied theory of language also predicts an effect of motor activation on language processing. Here, right-handed participants made spoken judgements about sentences while planning an action with their right or left hand that matched or did not match the action described in the sentence. An effect of response hand on accuracy was found when the task required participants to explicitly judge the congruency of sentence and the action they were preparing, but not otherwise. These results corroborate recent research suggesting that activation of embodied lexical representations may be goal-driven rather than an automatic aspect of language processing (Hoedemaker & Gordon, 2013). Overall, the experiments presented in this thesis suggest a possible role for planning-based motor activation in sentence processing, in line with embodied approaches; however, the results challenge strong accounts of embodiment by suggesting that the effect of planning-based activation is not automatic, and is moderated by linguistic context and task demands.

As a performer of firstly acoustic and latterly electronic and electro-instrumental music, I constantly seek to improve my mode of interaction with the digital realm: that is, to achieve a high level of sensitivity and expression. This thesis illustrates reasons why making use of haptic interfaces—which offer physical feedback and resistance to the performer—may be viewed as an important approach in addressing the shortcomings of some the standard systems used to mediate the performer’s engagement with various sorts of digital musical information. By examining the links between sound and touch, and the performer-instrument relationship, various new compositional and performance strategies start to emerge. I explore these through a portfolio of original musical works, which span the continuum of composition and improvisation, largely based around performance paradigms for piano and live electronics. I implement new haptic technologies, using vibrotactile feedback and resistant interfaces, as well as exploring more metaphorical connections between sound and touch. I demonstrate the impact that the research brings to the creative musical outcomes, along with the implications that these techniques have on the wider field of live electronic musical performance.

This dissertation critically explores the governance of disability, social marginalization, and spatial exclusion in highland Ecuador. Since the 1990s, disabled Ecuadorians have moved from a state of social neglect and physical isolation to wider societal participation, fueled in part by national campaigns aimed at promoting disability rights. Many have joined grassroots organizations through biosocial networks based on the collective identity of shared impairment. However, their incorporation into the labor market, educational systems, and public sphere has been uneven and impeded by underlying spatial and cultural barriers. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research I conducted among people with physical and visual disabilities in the city of Cuenca, this research analyzes narratives of disablement within the local disabled community. I focus on the consequences of living with embodied differences considered to be anomalous within environments designed for nondisabled citizens. The study extends current scholarship on the social context of disability to a Latin American country with significant ethnic and economic hierarchies, exploring disability as an important dimension of social stratification that is both produced and remedied by the state. In Ecuador, the social category of people with disabilities has emerged through historical processes and campaigns that emphasize the prevention of impairment and chronic disease, promotion of equal rights, and inclusive labor markets - all of which are part of a broader aspiration toward modernity. I argue that disability is often an overlooked but important, cross-cutting form of bodily and behavioral difference that creates multiple marginalities. Emphasizing social practices and structural dimensions of disability shifts the attention away from approaches that foreground individual, psychological, or medical aspects of disablement and instead contributes to wider anthropological understandings of disability as socially produced, constructed, managed and enacted. In analyzing disability as a cross-cutting category, this research reframes disability as contingent on local constructions of normativity, highlighting how bodies come to be recognized as "abled" or "disabled" within particular productions of space and systems of un/marked subjects.

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<p>Literary modernism followed a century during which philosophical speculations about the mechanistic basis of human life found experimental validation in the work of physiologists, who stressed the power of environment to shape and delimit thought and action. By the late 19th century, the hypothesis that humans were "automata," as Descartes had conjectured, began to seem much more than philosophical speculation, as statesmen and industrialists appropriated blueprints of the human machine originally mapped by the sciences. So dominant was the conjunction of politics and habit that, writing in 1890s, the American psychologist William James would call the automatic operations of body and mind the very engine of political life: "Habit," he declared, "is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor." But James was only anticipating the wide range of thinkers who would associate physiological automatism with politics in the coming years. By century's end, the belief that habit determined social action and circumscribed individual volition was to find wide currency in a variety of cultural fields, including literary modernism.</p><p>Situating literary modernism in relation to this emergent sense of political modernity, <italic>Automatic Modernism</italic> argues that modernists reconfigured the discourse of automatism for political and aesthetic ends. Wary of the new political environment in which government, political parties and industry exploited the science of conditioned reflex to ensure automatic responses from docile subjects, writers of this period turned to the resources of literature in order to both disrupt the clichés of thought and action enforced by environmental stimuli and to imagine forms of politics adapted to the physiologically automatic body. Looking in particular at the fiction and non-fiction work of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, this dissertation attempts to understand the recurrent equation of automatic behavior and twentieth-century modernity. Even as modernists vigorously rejected habitual behavior as the very element of twentieth century life that imperiled authentic art and social belonging, they forged alternative notions of bodily being, investing in the potentialities of human automatism as the basis of aesthetic possibility and social coherence. The formal experiments of these modernists emerge, then, as efforts to foreground, manipulate, rupture, and mimic the political habits of readers.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis is composed of an ethnography of the Women’s Running Network (WRN) – a non-elite women’s-only running group – and explores participant’s lived experiences of health and ageing (and the intersection of these) in this physical context. In-depth interviews (n = 25), inclusive of case studies (n = 3), with women between the ages of 29 and 66 allowed insight into the subjective contours of participant’s lives, and their particular biographical trajectories culminating in WRN participation. Several types of narrative analyses were applied to the emergent data, and results from these revealed insights into if, why, how, and when women engaged with health and ‘active ageing’ messages across the life course. Despite a prevalence of health knowledge, participants tended to report long periods of inactivity throughout their lives – citing the often documented barriers to physical activity such as a lack of time and caregiving responsibilities. However, a vast majority of participants also cited an utter lack of confidence with respect to physical activity, often stemming from highly influential poor early experiences. Embodying a perceived ‘non-sporting’ identity for as long as they had, they were foreclosed to the idea of physical activity despite simultaneously feeling pressure to participate. For many, it was particular life events - or ‘critical moments’ – that brought participation in physical activity to the forefront (i.e., birthdays, relationship issues, bereavement, and health scares). A consideration of these within this thesis explores the complex link that exists between health consciousness and action. In addition, alternative narratives about who could be a runner (within WRN advertising and by word of mouth) ‘hailed’ participants to reconsider their foreclosed narratives, by offering a ‘fun and non-competitive’ atmosphere for people ‘of all ages, sizes, and abilities’. Once pushed to action and within the WRN setting, participants described learning about themselves and their bodies, and thus developed the capacity to tell new stories. As such, through a narrative lens, this thesis introduces the stories that participants responded to (or not), and the stories that they used to tell, felt able to tell, and – in some cases – learned how to tell about health, about ageing, and about running/physical activity. Conclusions from this work have implications for both policy and practice, advocating for the necessity of comprehensive insight into people’s perceptions and lived experiences of (active) ageing within the context of life history, current life stage, and the everyday.

The aim of this thesis is to report on a transdisciplinary approach, regarding the complexity of thinking about human embodiment in relation to machine embodiment. A practical dimension of this thesis is to elicit some principles for the design and evaluation of virtual embodiment. The transdisciplinary approach suggests, firstly, that a single discipline or reality is, on its own, not sufficient to explain the complexity and dynamism of the embodied interaction between the human and machine. Secondly, the thesis argues for thinking of transdisciplinary research as a process of individuation, becoming or transduction, that is, as a process of mediation between heterogeneous approaches rather than perceiving research as a stabilized cognitive schema designed to accumulate new outcomes to the already-there reality. Arguing for going beyond the individualized approaches to embodiment, this thesis analyzes three cases where the problems that appear in one case are resolved through the analysis of the following one. Consisting of three phases, this research moves from objective scientific 'reality' to more phenomenological, subjective and complex realities. The first study employs a critical review of embodied conversational agents in human-computer interaction (HCI) in a learning context using a comparative meta-analysis. Meta-analysis was applied because most of the studies for evaluating embodiment are experimental. A learning context was selected because the number of studies is suitable for meta-analysis and the findings could be generalized to other contexts. The analysis reveals that there is no 'persona effect', that is, the expected positive effect of virtual embodiment on the participant's affective, perceptive and cognitive measures. On the contrary, it shows the reduction of virtual embodiment to image and a lack of consideration for the participant's embodiment and interaction, in addition to theoretical and methodological shortcomings. The second phase solves these problems by focusing on Mark Hansen's phenomenological account of embodiment in new media. The investigation shows that Hansen improves on the HCI account by focusing on the participant's dynamic interaction with new media. Nevertheless, his views of embodied perception and affection are underpinned by a subjective patriarchal account leading to object/subject and body/work polarizations. The final phase resolves this polarization by analyzing the controversial work of Alan Turing on intelligent machinery. The research provides a different reading of the Turing Machine based on Simondon's concept of individuation, repositioning its materiality from the abstract non-existent to the actual-virtual realm and investigating the reasons for its abstraction. It relates the emergence of multiple human-machine encounters in Turing's work to the complex counter-becoming of what it describes as 'the Turing Machine compound'.

This thesis explores the cultural meanings attached to the visible appearance of the body and its parts in eighteenth-century understanding. It is situated within historical scholarship concerned with the embodied display of ‘politeness’ and the relationship between the body and categories of social difference. The research draws upon a range of popular literature, including conduct books, popular medical advice books, midwifery manuals and advice guides. Chapter one reveals the way that contemporaries conceptualised the relationship between the individual body and society through investigation of various aspects of abdominal experience. Chapter two illustrates how the appearance of the skin was thought to convey identity information about an individual’s health, temperament, character, gender, class and race. Chapter three then continues by exploring similar themes with respect to the face. The next two chapters focus on the corporeal display of gender; while chapter four argues that changing male and female hairstyles reflected shifting gender mores, chapter five evidences how female breasts were seen as visible markers of sexual difference. Chapter six examines how class informed how the hands were employed and displayed by different social actors. Finally, chapter seven looks at how ‘politeness’ informed how the legs were trained to enact various cultural performances. In this thesis it is argued that in the eighteenth century popular authors sought to uncover how bodies worked by appropriating anatomical models of examining the body through scrutiny of its parts. Yet, it will be demonstrated that discussion of the body’s parts within popular literature was distinctive because it reflected readers’ growing preoccupation with how the body, as a social actor, conveyed information about individual identity. The thesis contributes to present scholarship by detailing a range of meanings which were attached to different parts of the body that have previously been elided by historians. Additionally, it demonstrates that discursive dismemberment, though located in eighteenth-century discourses on the body, represents a historically reflective and methodologically useful mode of examining the lived body in the eighteenth century.